Uk politics

When I was a reporter in the Scottish Parliament 15 years ago, the Tories had stopped being hated. They were pitied, which was worse. Voting Tory was not seen as a giant evil but a harmless English perversion – roughly in the same bracket as cross dressing, or cricket. The party looked dead, a joke even to its own staff members (to whom its support seemed to be confined). There were discussions about renaming it; Jamie McGrigor, a Tory MSP, suggested “the effing Tories” because that was how the party had become known. How different things look today. The Scottish Conservatives have more than doubled their number of council seats,

What a curious election this is proving to be. It is hard to think of another general election in which the two largest political parties indulged in so much nonsense, nor did their best to persuade you that what is evidently true cannot possibly be true.  In the first place, the Conservative party asks you to believe the Labour party could yet finagle its way into Downing Street. You can’t afford to take a risk on Jeremy Corbyn, the Tories tell a public that has not the slightest intention of taking a risk, or anything else, on Jeremy Corbyn. Undaunted, the Tories warn: Look, there remains the prospect of a

  So far, the Tory candidate selection has been a predictable process: the regurgitation of old names rather than the recruitment of new talent. But tonight, this changed. Kemi Badenoch, former head of digital at The Spectator, has been selected for Saffron Walden in Essex– a seat with a Tory majority of almost 25,000. I suspect that we’ll soon be hearing a lot more about, and from, Kemi. Originally from Nigeria, she moved here as a teenager, worked her way up in the City and was an associate director at Coutts before she joined us at The Spectator. She is currently deputy leader of the Tory group at the London Assembly, and

Theresa May spent the weekend in Scotland and not even the civilised bit. The Prime Minister was posted to the wilds of Aberdeenshire, which are handsome and underpopulated but not exactly a commuter hub. Journalists grumbled about the remoteness of the location, well aware that inaccessibility was the point. May has not been campaigning in this election so much as touring the nation’s emptiest rooms, occasionally bringing along another borough councillor who will be elected to Parliament in five weeks’ time. The punters have been kept far away from the Prime Minister for reasons of security — political security. Party strategists have long memories. They remember the name Sharon Storer.

Theresa May has perfected the art of saying nothing in interviews. The most any journalist can hope for is a subtle shift in position, or an absence where a position once stood. She seems to think that, if you refuse to give the press anything, the public won’t care. Worse, she seems to be right – for now, at least. So it would have been with a heavy heart that Andrew Marr set off to see if he could try to draw blood out of the Prime Ministerial granite. Same for Robert Peston afterwards. A Theresa May interview means the recital or verbal formulae: ‘strong and stable’ here, ‘working families’

Trust Boris to dominate the headlines by reopening that most famous of books, Johnson’s Dictionary. Writing in the Sun, our effortlessly provocative Foreign Secretary swiped at Jeremy Corbyn with this colourful barb: ‘He may be a mutton-headed old mugwump, but he is probably harmless.’ Couched rather incongruously as the reflections of ‘the people’, this comment has left many laughing, but more still scratching their heads. In fact, there’s more to being a ‘mugwump’ than a throw-away jibe. The word comes from the original New Englanders, the Algonquians, for whom mugquomp meant ‘great chief’. It was a term of respect laden with connotations of nobility. But that presumably wasn’t what Boris

Journalists have hunted down Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, about Christian views of homosexuality. Originally, they asked him the wrong question, doctrinally, by inquiring whether he thought ‘homosexuality’ was a sin. This was an easy one for him to repudiate, since an involuntary disposition is not a sin. I forbore to point this out, since I didn’t want to make their persecution of poor Mr Farron any easier, but by the beginning of this week, they had realised their mistake and began pressing him to state whether gay sex was a sin. (The Times covered this with the surprising headline: ‘Farron shrugs off gay sex row to target veteran’s

Here they come, Tony Blair and his tragic chattering-class army. The former PM, whose rictus grin and glottal stops still haunt the nation’s dreams (well, mine anyway), is on the march with his pleb-allergic mates in business and the media. Blair and the Twitterati, linking arms, united in their horror at the incalculable stupidity of northerners and Welsh people and Essex men and women and other Brexiteers, their aim as clear as it is foul. They’re here to save us from ourselves. ‘Tony Blair is trying to save Britain from itself’, as one report put it. Excuse me while I pop an anti-nausea pill. Yes, Blair, the political version of

Corbyn – Labour may scrap Trident nuclear deterrent Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn occupied the prime slot on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, and he told Marr that he wants to see ‘a very different country’. But how different? He was asked what he would say to the captains of the Trident submarines about whether to use their missiles in the event of a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. ‘What I will be saying is that I want us to achieve a nuclear free world. What I want us to do is adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and take part in negotiations surrounding that, and crucially… immediately promote the