Uk politics

‘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,

Enda Kenny stepped down as Ireland’s Taoiseach yesterday, and his farewell speech, at the National Gallery of Ireland, was an object lesson for British Conservative politicians. Amid the splendour of this palatial building, he delivered a speech which was warm and affable, enlivened with personal revelations and underpinned by heartfelt sincerity. If only our Prime Minister had a smidgeon of his public speaking skills. Kenny was here to re-open Dublin’s newly renovated National Gallery, which has been under wraps these last six years – the entire duration of his time as Taoiseach. Naturally, it was an easy gig. Yet Kenny didn’t get polite applause. He brought the house down, and he

Nick Timothy has penned an honest and reflective piece about the Tory election boorach. It can’t have been easy to write less than a week on from defeat and his departure from Downing Street. The most important point he makes is substantive. Theresa May abandoned the One Nation vision she sketched out on the doorstep of Number 10 upon becoming Prime Minister. It was a blueprint for a modern conservatism that believed in markets but didn’t worship them, that championed liberty but also the freedom to take advantage of its opportunities. It was a communitarian Toryism halfway between Burke and Berlin — the kind of politics advocated by Robert Halfon, sacked

Well, this is going well. As the Tories pretend that all will be well under a reprogrammed Maybot, the expectations outside SW1 are rather different. Let’s say someone moves against her, the other candidates start to move too – and before you can say Boris the party has formed another circular firing squad. What happens? What if the Tories can’t keep it together and there’s another general election? The bookies have decided: Jeremy Corbyn is more likely than anyone else to succeed Theresa May. Now the bookies get things wrong almost as regularly as pollsters, but expectation matters a lot in politics – and business. If most Tories think Corbyn is close

The reshuffle might be over, but the government is still changing shape. It has emerged that George Bridges has quit as a Brexit minister. He was highly rated by David Davis, his erstwhile boss, and had established himself as one of the most able ministers in the government – precisely the sort of person they can’t really afford to lose at this time. So why has he walked out now? We are only given a diplomatic answer: he’d been contemplating moving on for some time, and it seemed like a good time. If this rationale sounds familiar it’s precisely the formula that Katie Perrior deployed when she quit as Theresa May’s communications chief

Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has all but confirmed that the party is committed to leaving the single market. Here’s the full transcript of his interview with Robert Peston this morning: RP: I’m joined by the shadow chancellor, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest confidants. Very good to see you, John McDonnell. John, first of all, if I could just start with where you go in parliament now. On Friday morning, you were talking in pretty explicit terms about how you thought you could end up in power even without a general election. How would that work? JM: Well, we put forward the proposal which was nothing special. It was forming

When I heard the Tories were cutting a deal with a party of bigots and terrorist-sympathisers, I thought, ‘would a national unity government really work?’ It turns out Theresa May is tapping up the DUP rather than the Labour Party. PMQs is accused of ‘yah-boo politics’ as it is; wait till the questions are asked and answered from behind balaclavas. Arlene Foster’s party doesn’t have the extensive paramilitary history of the Progressive Unionist Party, or Sinn Fein/IRA for that matter, but while Mrs Foster has forcefully rejected violence (she and her family were victims of terrorism during the Troubles) the DUP’s past is murky to say the least. Still, Labour

One more quick observation on Labour. I was hanging around polling stations in my constituency on Thursday, somewhat in the manner of a wonk-nonce. The constituency is Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. The enthusiasm of the voters and of the Labour activists was genuinely startling (and in truth a little uplifting). They were absolutely avid to vote. Labour had a canvasser on every station and loads more handing out flyers. I’d had three leaflets from Labour through my door in the previous three days. None from the Tories. No Conservative placards anywhere – although a nice Labour activist told me she’d seen one on the road to Marske. But it