Theresa may

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The May manifesto has gone – and the era of Cabinet politics begins

When Theresa May launched what she called ‘my manifesto’ just over a month ago, she batted away questions about whether it was a Mayite document. But this was faux-modesty. The manifesto was a deliberate move away from traditional Tory thinking. May and her team believed that her own standing with the public meant that she could pull off this shift without proper consultation with her Cabinet. But now, with her authority shot, May cannot try and do this. The Queen’s Speech didn’t include many of the Mayite policies that she had stood on in the general election. If it was not for the Brexit legislation, this would have been a

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The Queen’s Speech was diluted – but Theresa May’s strategy hasn’t changed

Brexit will dominate political and parliamentary life for years to come. The weight of EU exit legislation announced in the Queen’s Speech could, as someone once said, stun a team of oxen in its tracks.  Not too long ago, a cabinet minister involved in these things told me that the ‘Great Repeal Bill’ alone could consume most of a standard parliamentary session. There are now seven more bills, covering such trifles as Britain’s immigration system, trade policy, customs arrangements, farms and fisheries. Parliamentarians will be wading through Brexit legislation for years to come, and every line of every bill could have real impact on British companies and people. Remember that when

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Queen’s Speech: the full guide to what’s been scrapped

Today’s Queen Speech was supposed to be a moment of crowning glory for Theresa May. Instead, it’s a muted affair, with the Tories’ plans for Government left in tatters as a result of their blown majority. ‘Strong and stable’ is out; in comes ‘humility’ and ‘resolve’ – and the party’s manifesto has been largely binned. Here’s what didn’t make the cut: Donald Trump’s state visit: The Queen’s Speech made no mention of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK. Downing Street was insisting recently that there was no change to the schedule following Theresa May’s invitation which she offered to the President back in January. It’s clear this isn’t the case and the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Queen’s Speech: Theresa May bins her manifesto

Today’s Queen’s Speech is notable not for what’s in it, but for what’s been left out. With no Tory majority and no agreement with the DUP, Theresa May has had to gut her 2017 Conservative Manifesto. The fact that the legislation ‘trailed’ on the eve of the speech included plans to tackle nuisance whiplash compensation claims and a ban on letting fees that was first announced last year, just demonstrates how sparse it is on new legislation. In terms of what has been put in the dustbin, the list is lengthy. The plan to cut free school lunches has been scrapped, along with May’s plans for more grammar schools. There

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The Queen’s Speech is the Tories’ last chance

Today’s Queen Speech will be a muted affair, with Her Majesty dressing down for the opening of a Parliament which will stretch the Conservative Government to the limit. Theresa May heads into the new session with no majority, precious little political clout and the huge task of Brexit looming. Can the Tories somehow make it work? It’s now been nearly two weeks since the general election – yet the ‘cloud of uncertainty’ still hangs in the air, says the Daily Telegraph. There’s no reason why this should be so, argues the paper, which says the Government messed up by claiming last week that a deal with the DUP was imminent. This

Tuesday

Henry Newman

The Euro’s badly-needed reform could finally be on the cards

Has Germany finally started to shift its position on the future of the Eurozone? Speaking today, at a conference for the German equivalent of the CBI, Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to open the door to a new form of governance for the 19-country bloc. Since the financial crisis, the common currency zone has bounced from crisis to crisis, surviving by kicking the can down the road at each critical moment. It has long been obvious that major institutional changes were required to ensure the currency’s long-term viability. During the recent French presidential election campaign, the euro was an important political issue: Marine Le Pen proposed restoring the French franc (albeit in parallel

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

DUP pushes a hard bargain as talks with Tories stall

Tomorrow Theresa May will present a Queen’s Speech that doesn’t have the formal support of a majority of the House of Commons. Her negotiations with the DUP still haven’t concluded, with party sources this afternoon warning the Conservatives that they won’t be ‘taken for granted’ and criticising the way May and her team have conducted the negotiations. It’s almost as though the DUP know a thing or two about how to negotiate: certainly a thing or two more than Theresa May and her team. Party sources even dropped hints about the implications of these negotiations for May’s success in Brussels, hitting one of the most sensitive spots for the Tory

Ed West Ed West

Labour is now the party of the middle class

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so pessimistic about this country’s future, and I’m not usually a barrel of laughs to start with. Aside from the terrorism, and the recent tragedy in North Kensington, there are real black clouds in the distance. Investors are being put off Britain, a problem that pre-dates Brexit but is surely aggravated by it. There seems little hope that the Tories will follow Philip Hammond in pursuing a more moderate line in Europe. (Would the catchphrase ‘Stop, Hammondtime’, galvanise the public, I wonder? Kids still like MC Hammer right?). Meanwhile the opposition – even moderate members – are now calling for people’s private property to

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Will Theresa May become Brexit’s scapegoat?

Normally in the run-up to a Queen’s Speech, Westminster watchers wonder how radical the Prime Minister feels like being – and how much political capital they have available to spend. But of course this year’s Speech is rather different, because the Prime Minister has no political capital and the negotiations with the DUP haven’t concluded. Moreover, Theresa May has never given the impression that she wants to be particularly radical, even in her honeymoon days as the Prime Minister who gets things done. Her pitch in the election was to get a bigger majority so she could have a quiet life while carrying out the Brexit negotiations. She certainly hasn’t

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories desperately need new ideas to keep Corbyn out of power

Every discussion with a Tory Minister or MP now ends up with a go through of the runners and riders for the leadership. But just as important as the personality is the policies. One of the major problems for the Tories at the last election was that they had almost no positive offer; what did they offer a thirty something on fifty thousand a year who didn’t stand to inherit anything? Tories can’t expect young people to be capitalists, when they have no capital. This makes the need for new ideas on the centre-right a matter of some urgency. Without them, Jeremy Corbyn—or someone very like him—will be Prime Minister

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Please can the bullying of Theresa May stop?

We all remember it from school, whether as perpetrator, or assistant of perpetrator, or victim: the moment when everyone turns against another pupil and it becomes legitimate to be vile to her. When she is ‘down’, it becomes more and more enjoyable to torture her and to find endless new aspects of her to be woundingly vicious about, every hour of every day. It has been like this for Theresa May in the last week. She’s the outcast in the playground, knowing that if she so much as opens her mouth to say something, she’ll receive a torrent of withering sarcasm. Please can it stop? It leaves a nasty taste

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is the British government about to be held hostage by head-banging biblical fundamentalists?

Forgive the inflammatory headline, but that’s the conclusion that millions of Britons have drawn from media descriptions of the DUP. Mainland commentators seem unable to make any distinction between the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the late Ian Paisley, and his small Free Presbyterian sect, which is indeed influenced by American fundamentalism. We know the DUP is against abortion and gay marriage. But are its members also creationists who think the world was created 6,000 years ago? In this week’s Holy Smoke podcast, Cristina Odone and I talk to Jon Anderson, a Northern Irish writer specialising in religious and political sectarianism. He lays some myths to rest. For example, the

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Hammond undermines May over Brexit ‘no deal’

Philip Hammond – No deal would be ‘a very, very bad outcome’ One day before Brexit negotiations get underway, Philip Hammond took to the Andrew Marr Show and announced that if the UK achieved no deal with the EU it would be a ‘very very bad outcome’. This appears to be somewhat at odds with Theresa May’s repeated assertion that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’… Marr: Do you think no deal is better than a bad deal? Hammond: Let me be clear that no deal would be a very, very bad outcome for Britain. But there is a possible worse outcome, and that is a deal that

Saturday

Ross Clark

Theresa May’s problem is that she is far too British for her own good

While I was rummaging through data on what Treasury officials had spent on their credit cards, back in George Osborne’s day, I came across a series of curious payments. The Treasury had been paying RADA for coaching sessions. Ministers – I presume it was them rather than civil servants – were being trained by actors. Maybe they should have done the same at the Home Office, because the failure of the then Home Secretary to perform in public could very rapidly turn out to be her undoing.   Her failure to express empathy during the election campaign was already being dragged up in election post-mortems.  But what has happened since the

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s White House needs Theresa May to save it

If Theresa May is ousted, or simply tires of her job as Prime Minister, might she consider emigrating to the United States and joining the Trump administration? For my part, I very much hope she does contemplate it. As big a challenge as Brexit may be, it likely pales in comparison to instilling a sense of purpose in the Trump White House. So far, Donald Trump has been unable to find anyone capable of imposing order on his chaotic administration, let alone taming his recidivist twitter binges. Just today, the old boy, unprompted, delivered an avalanche of tweets, including the extraordinary announcement that he is under investigation for obstruction of

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Yes, Grenfell is a scandal. No, Theresa May does not have blood on her hands

“Burn neoliberalism, not people” said Clive Lewis in a tweet showing the skeleton of Grenfell Tower. Odd words from a Labour MP. When asked just what he meant, he explained that his ‘agenda’ is to ‘end not just the current government but Thatcherite economic dogma’. In this way the grief and anger after the Grenfell Tower disaster has been moulded into a march on No10 with chants of ‘May must go’ and ‘blood, blood, blood on your hands’. Just a few days ago, John McDonnell was calling for a protest march in Westminster. Now, he has got one. "Blood on their hands." Posters at the #GrenfellTowerprotest pic.twitter.com/qp9ec8acJz — Damien Gayle

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Trying to turn Grenfell Tower into a morality tale about the rich and poor stinks

Who would want to be a political leader in the wake of a disaster such as that of Grenfell Tower? If you show up and hug the victims you run the risk of being accused of opportunism and obstructing the emergency services in their work; if you stay away from the site you will be accused of callousness – even if you are spending your time working on the practical issues relating to the event. But there is a very strong emerging narrative: that Jeremy Corbyn got it right by turning up and sharing the grief of the victims, and that Theresa May got it horribly wrong by restricting her

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Independence is the SNP’s day job. Everything else is a distraction

‘Get back to the day job.’ The six magic words that delivered the Scottish Tories their best election night in decades. Ruth Davidson recited this incantation endlessly during the campaign and Labour and the Liberal Democrats quickly joined in. As messages go, it was blunt but effective, capturing the public mood that Nicola Sturgeon has allowed herself to be distracted by the independence issue.  After the UK chose to leave the EU despite Scotland’s Remain vote, the First Minister planned to parlay opposition to Brexit into support for independence. But her scheme went from no-brainer to harebrained in a breathtakingly short period of time. Like Theresa May’s snap election gamble,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Those who died at Grenfell Tower were the victims of bad government

Had the Grenfell Tower tragedy befallen one of the millionaire high-rises built along the Thames recently, it would still be a catastrophe that shocked the country and the world. But what makes this disaster so numbing and sickening is to see, in the faces of the dead, some of the most vulnerable people in our society. People who were, in effect, in the care of the state – that is to say, in our collective care. If we pay taxes and vote, we’re part of a system that’s supposed to devote the greatest attention to those in greatest need of government help. And on Tuesday night, dozens of them were

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Theresa May is failing to learn from Gordon Brown’s mistakes

One of the truisms that has emerged from this election is that maybe Gordon Brown was right to veer away from calling an early election after all. Pursuing a snap election turned out to be a grave error for Theresa May, and so perhaps the Labour Prime Minister was wiser than everyone gave him credit for at the time. But while this may seem obviously true, what has actually happened is that May has confirmed her similarity to Brown. The latest YouGov polling on May’s personal ratings reminds us that both reaped a severe punishment for going anywhere near an early poll, regardless of whether they followed through and held