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This week: The Farage factor. Our cover piece looks at the biggest news from this week of the general election campaign, Nigel Farage’s decision to stand again for Parliament. Farage appealed to voters in the seaside town of Clacton to send him to Westminster to be a ‘nuisance’. Indeed, how much of a nuisance will
Lee Anderson, who has defected from the Tories to Reform, is about to find out that switching parties is not an easy thing to do. Politics is so tribal that most politicians are inclined to stick with ‘their side’ no matter what. When they change sides, it’s worth asking why. Having once been a Conservative
It wasn’t Liz Truss’s failure to make big changes we should worry about. It was her inability to deliver even the most modest pro-market reforms after a decade in high office that ought to alarm us. As Prime Minister for six weeks, Truss tried and failed reduce Britain’s tax burden to about the level it
If he had lived in a less meretricious age, Stuart Wheeler would be a household name. An extraordinarily successfully entrepreneur, Stuart made his fortune founding the spread betting firm, IG Index. He then proceeded to spend a great deal of it restoring Chilham Castle in Kent and supporting the Conservative party during its nadir at
The only person ever elected for the Brexit party’s predecessor, Ukip, at a General Election, I really can’t see the point in voting for them now. Why? If you want Brexit done, Boris needs to be returned as Prime Minister on 12 December with a working majority. Backing him is the only way to beat the
As the only person ever to have been elected for Ukip in a General Election, if I was in the House of Commons today I would not just vote in favour of Boris Johnson’s deal. I would do so cheerfully in the knowledge that this is pretty much what I have spent much of my
Exhilarating, isn’t it? A referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union is at hand. For the first time in a generation, there’s a real possibility that Britain might leave. With that prospect so tantalisingly close, it’s tempting to want to rush ahead. ‘Bring it on!’ many regular readers will say. Hold on. Let’s
Here is a graph that shows the four economic downturns Britain has been through (red lines) over the past forty years. What I find strking is that each downturn was preceded by the same thing: a surge in the growth of money (blue line). In other words, the bust followed an unsustainable credit-induced boom. The motives
Remember Ted Heath’s greatest hits of the 70s? Riding high in the charts was his ‘prices and incomes policy’. Followed by ‘state subsidies’ and ‘picking the winners’. And who can forget the smash hit ‘Barber boom’ – with the bust on the B side. Far from being a distant memory, too many Tories today are
The Conservative party is a bit like HMV, the bankrupt music business. For years, just like HMV, we were market leaders. We won 44 per cent of the vote in 1979, 42 per cent in 1983 and 44 per cent again in 1987. But like the old music retailer, we have been losing touch with
Ed Miliband got it right. Faced with a fiasco in Falkirk, where the trade union, Unite, attempted to fix the Parliamentary selection process, the Labour leader has come out on the right side of the argument about political reform. In our eagerness to attack him, we Conservatives are in danger of putting itself on the
‘Crazy Italians!’ you might think. Offered the choice between Bunga Bunga Berlusconi, an ex-Communist and a Brussels stooge, one in four of them went and voted for a stand up comedian. Ever since Beppe Grillo’s shock success in the Italian elections, serious pundits in the mainstream media have been inviting us to disapprove. We are
What if we win office, but nothing changes? What if, instead of running a new government, triumphant Tory ministers discover that the machinery of government runs them? Making sure that does not happen requires a strategy. Opposition may be a time for tactics, but how we fare in office will hinge on having a robust,
