Uk politics

Sleaford wasn’t terribly good for Labour, was it? Nor indeed Richmond Park. Sleaford was never very Labour friendly – although, even given that, the party’s performance was staggeringly abject. Richmond has not been historically Labour-friendly – but given its current trajectory, towards the achingly liberal and affluent London upper class, you might have expected a better performance than the one they turned in (with an excellent candidate, incidentally, in Christian Wolmar). It has long been a given that Labour will lose vast numbers of seats in the north of England (and the midlands), in a similar fashion to its capitulation, north of the border, to the SNP. But now the

In the chaos after the Brexit vote, no one really noticed when Theresa May adopted an odd position on EU nationals*. Throughout the campaign, everyone – from Ukip to the Lib Dems, Boris Johnson to Andy Burnham – had been clear that the Brexit debate was not about deporting anyone. Those EU nationals who were in Britain should stay here. In a fractious debate, it was a note of rare consensus: no one’s status was in question. But days after the referendum, the then Home Secretary sat down on Robert Peston’s sofa and suggested that EU nationals might not be safe after all, and that she might use them as bargaining chips in her

Want proof of how bad things are for Labour? Jeremy Corbyn and his disastrous leadership is not even its biggest problem anymore. I write in The Sun that Labour’s biggest problem, and it is potentially an existential one, is that its reaction to the Brexit vote is threatening to make it a political irrelevance More than 60 percent of Labour seats voted to leave the EU. In these constituencies, being the party that is trying to block Brexit would be electoral suicide. That’s why the Labour leadership felt compelled to accept the government’s amendment this week saying Theresa May should start the formal, two-year process for leaving the EU by

461 MPs have just voted for Theresa May to invoke Article 50 by the end of March. The Tory amendment to Labour’s opposition day motion passed comfortably with only 89 MPs opposing it—and Ken Clarke the only Tory amongst them with 20-odd Labour Mps joining the SNP and the Lib Dems in voting against. Now, this vote is not binding and if the government loses its appeal to the Supreme Court will not be sufficient to satisfy the courts. But it does indicate that the government will be able to get an Article 50 bill through the Commons without too much trouble. It does make you wonder why Theresa May

Even I can’t say I’m upset that Zac Goldsmith has lost his seat. For the last few days, now, my journey into work has been an assault course created by cheery Liberal Democrat activists campaigning in Richmond – they earned their victory. Not once did I see anyone campaigning for Zac Goldsmith. Not that I wanted to see any of them:  this whole by-election was an elaborate hissy fit by Zac. Voters were being used as political props, to add extra theatricality to his flouncing out of the Tory Party. If he wanted to resign the whip to fight Heathrow, he should have done so. But to resign his seat

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war. Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration

The news that Theresa May offered to do a deal on expats – only to be rebuffed by Angela Merkel – is unsurprising. The Prime Minister has ended up in a pretty bad, unbecoming position on EU nationals using them as bargaining chips in a way that has appalled her critics (and even some of her supporters). So it’s not surprising that she wanted to get this awful business over with in her recent meeting with Merkel. She suggested: let’s just agree an EU-wide deal whereby everyone’s expats can stay where there are. But, again unsurprisingly, Merkel rebuffed her. Before their meeting, Merkel said publicly that they would not and could

When the pound plunged a few weeks ago, Andrew Marr opened his Sunday show by saying that this might be a good thing because ‘it had been too high for too long’. It was a minority opinion, and one not seen much in the hysterical reporting of the pound’s plunge. At the Spectator’s post-Autumn Statement briefing last week, kindly sponsored by Old Mutual Global Investors, we raised this a bit. The pound’s fall might make overseas holidays more expensive for Britons, but it also makes our goods far cheaper for the rest of the world. We worry about a worst-case WTO scenario of 10 per cent tariff on cars, for example, but a 13 per

In the autumn statement, Philip Hammond chose to mock Boris’ failed leadership bid. This wasn’t the first time that one of the Foreign Secretary Cabinet’s colleagues had had a laugh at his expense. At our parliamentarian of the year awards, Theresa May joked that Boris would be put down when he was no longer useful. But Boris and his circle are getting rather fed up with him being the butt of the joke, as I say in The Sun today. Those close to Boris feel that these gibes undercut him on the world stage. ‘If they want the UK to be taken seriously, they need to back him not mock

‘Theresa May and I have made it clear that we are very committed to returning the public finances to balance,’ said Philip Hammond on the Today programme this morning. But his Autumn Statement did the reverse. It abolished the deadline for balancing the books, and talks instead about keeping the overspend to about 2pc of GDP. It’s a significant change, and a move away from austerity. The massive shift in debt, towards 90pc of GDP, is something he is choosing with his £23bn discretionary infrastructure splurge. To govern is to choose and as Nick Robinson rightly said, the Chancellor has chosen infrastructure over extra support for the ‘just about managing’.