uk politics Archives

Monday

9 Oct 2017

Nick Cohen

Does the rule of law cover the poor?

Belatedly, the disastrous rollout of Universal Credit has become a media ‘talking point’. I could do with less praise for Iain Duncan Smith in the debate. He is the man the Tories decided was unfit to lead them, but still fit to manage and, as we are seeing, wreck the lives of the poorest people in the country. He deserves no special indulgence. ‘His intentions were good,’ everyone feels obliged to say. As if motives mattered more than deeds, and what politicians hoped for matters more than what they achieved. Duncan Smith’s achievement was to preside over disastrous and expensive experiments with IT systems that did not work, and then

Ross Clark

The Bombardier dispute could actually bring down May’s government

When governments fall it often comes from an unexpected quarter. Thirty eight years ago, James Callaghan’s government fell not as a direct result of the Winter of Discontent but from the fallout over a failed referendum on Scottish devolution. Over the past week we have heard plenty of speculation about Theresa May losing her job thanks to her cough at Manchester or through Brexit-induced civil war in her cabinet. But could we be missing something more obscure but at the same time more ominous? The more I think about it, the gravest danger to the government comes not from its handling of Brexit, universal credit, inflation or any of the

Steerpike

Culture Secretary investigated for not having a TV licence

Oh dear. As Culture Secretary, Karen Bradley is expected to foster and maintain good relations with both the media and broadcast industries. So, Mr S was alarmed to hear that Bradley recently found herself on the wrong side of the TV licensing company. Writing on the infamous Tory MP WhatsApp group, Bradley complained to her fellow MPs she was being hounded by TV Licensing for not having a TV license for her constituency office. The MP for Staffordshire Moorlands asked if she was the only one having this bother – only to be greeted by silence. A DCMS spokesman says Bradley has since explained to TV Licensing that she doesn’t have

Sunday

8 Oct 2017

Katy Balls

Cabinet reshuffle: who can Theresa May sack?

Good news in Downing Street: Theresa May has survived the weekend. After the Shapps plot failed to take off, the new consensus is that the beleaguered Prime Minister should re-assert her authority on an increasingly unruly Tory party by reshuffling her Cabinet. Had the speech gone better, there was talk that she could have done this last week. The Sunday Times reports that a shuffle is now likely to occur after the European Council meeting in two weeks’ time. If May does oblige, there are calls from within the party for her to use a reshuffle to promote younger talent – and to sack the Foreign Secretary. The latter still

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Scottish independence scotched (again)

Sturgeon – It is ‘premature’ to set a date for second independence referendum The SNP are rounding off this year’s party conference season in Glasgow, and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is eager to keep the dream of independence alive. Recent weeks have seen votes in Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, but the chances are that any ‘indyref2’ in Scotland will take place later rather than sooner. ITV’s Robert Peston asked Sturgeon about whether she had made a mistake in pushing for a second referendum so soon after the first: RP: There are some in your party who do believe that one of the reasons you did rather badly or worse

George Trefgarne

The rules of the Tory leadership contest make it a wild card to play

The moment Philip May helped his wife from the stage after her conference speech, it became clear that it is only a matter of when, not if, her leadership of the Conservative Party and occupancy of No.10 comes to an end. What happens next? Who knows, but if you understand the rules, it is just possible a sequence of events has started which will ultimately lead to hundreds of thousands of people participating in a three month election process for a new leader. It might even result in a surprising outcome. In other words, a relatively unknown newer MP, such as Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden); or Bim Afolami (Hitchin and

Toby Young

What is Boris Johnson up to?

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference where I can report that Boris Johnson, who has just wowed the blue rinses with a barn-storming speech, isn’t preparing a leadership bid. At least, that’s the line from all those closest to him. Without exception, they say if he was planning something they’d know about it and they don’t. It’s a media concoction. He’s a man without a plan. I know, I know. That’s exactly what Boris’s team would say if they had just press-ganged the last of 48 MPs to sign a letter to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, which is the magic number needed to trigger a leadership

James Delingpole

If only the Tories understood how free market economics works

‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And I knew then that the party is doomed. It wasn’t what he said so much as the way that he said it: in the fond, amused, each-to-his-own tone you might use to dismiss a friend’s enthusiasm for Morris dancing or Napoleonic re-enactment or dogging… But personally, I think free market economics (of the Austrian or any other classical liberal school) is far too important to be left to wonks, think-tankers and out-there right-wing commentators. So did Margaret Thatcher. ‘Hayek’s powerful Road to Serfdom left a permanent mark on my own

Saturday

7 Oct 2017

James Forsyth

The three things Theresa May must do

Even loyal Cabinet Minister admit that the Tories can’t go on like this for another 18 months. As I say in The Sun this morning, Theresa May needs to show that the situation is going to improve. I think there are three things that May needs to do. First, she needs to show that she is enjoying the job. Tory MPs are, genuinely, beginning to worry that May’s sense of duty is such that she’ll stay on even if she is being crushed by the burdens of office. Now, those who work for the Prime Minister in Number 10 are adamant that she is relishing the job and wants to

Friday

6 Oct 2017

Richard Ekins & Graham Gee

Will the UK’s new senior judge change the Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court is changing. Three new Justices are taking office, including Lady Black, who is only the second woman to serve on the UK’s highest court. The first, Lady Hale, was this week officially sworn in as President of the Supreme Court, making her the UK’s most senior judge. Lady Hale was appointed a member of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords – then the UK’s top court – in January 2004, which became the Supreme Court in October 2009. She is by any measure not only an extremely experienced judge, but also a legal trailblazer. What will her appointment as President mean for the law? One

Isabel Hardman & Katy Balls

Has the Shapps plot changed anything for Theresa May?

The Tory party is in a furious mood following Theresa May’s conference speech. MPs are swearing, ranting, and muttering dire threats about the object of their anger. Helpfully for the Prime Minister, though, the bulk of the anger has little to do with her and everything to do with the two men MPs suspect are trying to destabilise her: Grant Shapps and Boris Johnson. After extensive conversations with MPs from across the intakes, senior backbenchers and Cabinet Ministers, the Spectator understands that these two men will find it far more difficult to walk back into Parliament when it returns on Monday than the Prime Minister will. She was the one

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell to speak at plotter Grant Shapps’ dinner tonight

Grant Shapps isn’t the most popular man in the Tory party at the moment, but at least he has a friend to keep him company this evening. By sheer coincidence, Andrew Mitchell has long been booked to speak at the Welwyn Hatfield MP’s Conservative Association annual dinner tonight. But Mitchell is very keen not to appear to be a fellow plotter, having given a speech at the Cambridge Union last night in which he praised the Prime Minister’s ‘courage of high order’ for completing ‘what was an important and interesting speech in impossible circumstances, and I think all of us in politics should recognise that’. Speaking to Coffee House, Mitchell

Philip Collins

Theresa May’s speech was a dud because Tories can’t do rhetoric

There are many ways to make a conference speech memorable and Theresa May managed most of them. A prankster with a P45, a constant cough and a set that fell to bits as she spoke, the speech was a riot of metaphors in waiting. It may yet be pointed to as a decisive moment in her premiership but it was certainly notable. The only forgettable aspect was the content. When Mrs May tries to inject passion into her voice it is not just the frog that catches in her throat. It is her conservatism. Conservative politician can ascend to the rhetorical heights at time of peril. Winston Churchill, was, as

Charles Moore

Is Jeremy Corbyn following the Ian Paisley playbook?

By the simple expedients of being cheerful and attacking Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson scored a deserved hit at the Tory conference on Tuesday. It is right not to be shy about questioning Mr Corbyn’s record. But while it is true that Mr Corbyn has never wavered, over 40 years, in his extreme socialist views, it is also worth noting that he has recently changed his tone a lot. It reminds me of how Ian Paisley, without ever recanting his anti-Popery, dropped his noisy and lurid 1970s expressions of it, and adopted a more modern political voice. In his speech in Brighton last week, Mr Corbyn almost completely left out one

Steerpike

Listen: Baroness Warsi tells Grant Shapps to shut up

Grant Shapps’ attempt to topple Theresa May is not going quite to plan. Tory MPs are busy tweeting their support for the Prime Minister. While others are turning their fire on Shapps himself. Nadine Dorries said the plot was ‘pathetic’ – and Baroness Warsi was even more outspoken on the subject of Shapps’ bungled bid to oust the PM. On the World at One this afternoon, she was asked for her message to the former Tory party chairman: ‘My message to Grant Shapps is really shut up.’ But Warsi did, however, admit that some good had come from Shapps’ intervention: ‘If there’s one thing that Grant has done, if there’s

James Kirkup

Does the Tory party really want to decapitate itself?

It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve got my head around this now. Grant Shapps is proposing that the Conservative Party should hold a protracted contest to select a new chief, and thus render itself and the Government of Britain leaderless for several weeks, at a time when the UK economy and public finances are worsening and Brexit talks are going horribly. And he’s doing this because he says the Conservatives need to demonstrate leadership. When you think of it that way, you start to understand the (really rather unkind) things Tory MPs are saying about Mr Shapps today. Not that anyone is saying he’s wrong about Theresa

Tom Goodenough

Full list: Which Tory MPs have backed May – and who wants her gone?

Grant Shapps’ bid to stir up a rebellion against Theresa May has almost certainly failed. Instead, his decision to publicly call on the PM to go has shown that even after the Tories’ lacklustre conference May still retains a wide degree of support among the party’s MPs. Here is the full list of Conservative MPs, showing who has thrown their weight behind the PM, who hasn’t and who thinks it’s time for May to go: MPs who have publicly backed Theresa May: Michael Gove, Damian Green, Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Patrick McLoughlin, Priti Patel, David Gauke, Brandon Lewis, David Mundell, Chris Grayling, Elizabeth Truss, Andrea Leadsom, Damian Hinds, Justine Greening, David Lidington, Nigel Evans, Liam Fox, Greg Clark, Michael Fallon, Boris Johnson, Greg Hands, Vicky Ford, Jeremy Wright, Steve Baker, James

The Conservatives have lost the ability to defend freedom

The Conservatives now have a real fight on their hands. After 1979, as champions of free-market capitalism, they seemed to embody the ruling ideology of the age. One best-selling book even called Labour leaders Blair and Brown the ‘sons of Thatcher’. Now the Labour party speaks openly of socialism and has a shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who lists his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. It’s no idle threat; in his conference speech he advocated a ‘strategic investment board’ comprising the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Business and the Governor of the Bank of England to ‘co-ordinate the promotion of investment, employment and real wages’.

Steerpike

Grant Shapps left out in the cold on Tory WhatsApp

It’s safe to say that Grant Shapps’ plot to oust Theresa May is not going to plan. After being outed by The Times, the former party chairman has been turned on by many of his parliamentary colleagues. Now Mr S understands the ultimate humiliation has been handed to him. It turns out that Shapps was never added by his colleagues to the infamous Tory MP WhatsApp group due to a lack of – call it – demand for his presence. The good news is that he has been added this morning. The reason? ‘So he can read all the abuse we’re giving him,’ explains one miffed MP. Currently doing the

Fraser Nelson

Who will join the Grant Shapps and Ed Vaizey rebellion?

A move against Theresa May led by someone with their career in front of them might be seen as a bold attempt to shake the Cabinet into action for the good of the party. But a plot led by Grant Shapps, party chairman under David Cameron, is a rather different proposition. He doesn’t seem to have much of a strategy – it looks like he’s readying the freezer bags and coming after the PM, as per George Osborne’s instructions. He blames the Tory whips for leaking his name to the press, and says it will only accelerate things. I’m not so sure. Shapps claims that about 30 MPs are behind him, although