Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
Civil servants in the Home Office, even the senior ones, always felt a little nervous when walking towards Theresa May’s office. It wasn’t so much the meeting with the Home Secretary that they dreaded as the characters who lurked in the room directly outside hers. One senior official describes a typical scene: Fiona Hill, one
It was a rather cruel pathetic fallacy that the Prime Minister who had to resign early after creating a political storm by accidentally taking Britain out of the European Union gave his final speech from Downing Street under rumbling, rolling storm clouds. At one point, the wind whooshed back David Cameron’s hair and rain began
Theresa May takes over as Prime Minister this afternoon much sooner than she expected at the start of the week. First on her agenda is to appoint her Cabinet, which we are expecting to happen later today, but then the new Tory leader will have a great number of gaps to fill in when it
Labour MPs are becoming increasingly agitated about the amount of abuse and intimidation they are receiving, to the extent that the party’s chief whip has complained to Jeremy Corbyn and written to the head of Corbynite group Momentum to seek assurances that it is cracking down on bad behaviour in its ranks. Rosie Winterton has
David Cameron has chaired his last ever, emotional, Cabinet meeting this morning, with just a final Prime Minister’s Questions lying between him and freedom. He may want to follow the example of Tony Blair and have a memorable sign off such as ‘and that is that, the end’, though it’s not clear whether he’ll find
As well as all the other things that Labour MPs are anxious about at the moment, there is genuine anxiety in the party today that some MPs are considering splitting off to join a new, moderate group in politics. Certainly Labour MPs are pretty miserable about the state of their party – and about the
Chris Grayling has given this very brief statement on behalf of Theresa May in the past few minutes: ‘Can I start by thanking on behalf of Theresa May and on behalf of everyone involved in Theresa’s campaign team by thanking and paying a warm tribute to Andrea Leadsom. Her actions this morning have shown what
Andrea Leadsom has withdrawn from the Tory leadership race, saying ‘the best interests of our country are best served by the immediate appointment of a strong and well-supported Prime Minister’ and that she did not have sufficient support to lead a strong and stable government. She said Theresa May was ‘ideally placed’ to implement Brexit
Jeremy Corbyn was insistent this morning on the Andrew Marr Show that he isn’t going anywhere. More than that: he insisted that Labour is ‘changing the way politics is done’. His opponents in the party would agree, as it happens. Corbyn is going nowhere, certainly not anywhere near to Number 10, but also nowhere near
Finally, the Labour coup is about to begin. Or at least, Labour MPs are talking about the fact that the Labour coup is about to begin, after weeks of threatening it. After talks between the party’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson and Labour’s trade union backers broke up today, Angela Eagle has said she will launch
One of the rules of modern leadership contests is that at some point there is an almighty row about whether one of the candidates is just better than the other because she happens to have had children of her own. Labour reached that stage on 6 July 2015 when Helen Goodman wrote a piece saying
Things have gone mysteriously quiet in the Labour party. Every so often, Len McCluskey and Tom Watson emerge from a meeting, asking their comrades to give them a little bit more time before any of them move against Jeremy Corbyn. And nothing seems to happen. How much more time do the plotters need to give
This afternoon we will find out which two Tory MPs will face the Conservative party members in the leadership contest. Theresa May is the favourite and is far out in front of her closest rival, Andrea Leadsom, who has a decent lead over the third candidate, Michael Gove. But neither have had a very good
Tony Blair appeared emotional, sounded hoarse, and constantly fixated upon his belief that he acted in ‘good faith’ over Iraq when he responded to the Chilcot report this afternoon. The former Prime Minister spoke or took questions for two hours, and started by saying that he accepted ‘full responsibility, without exception and without excuse’. But
Normally whenever someone mentions Iraq in the House of Commons, the Chamber descends into a grouchy scrap. But today’s statement on the Chilcot report from David Cameron and the questions that followed it were surprisingly measured and thoughtful. As James notes, Jeremy Corbyn didn’t mention Tony Blair, and he didn’t give a furious response to
The Iraq Inquiry report is utterly scathing about Tony Blair. It paints a critical picture of his sofa government, in particular the way in which that government approached planning and preparation for Iraq without Saddam Hussein, and his ‘certainty that was not justified’ in presenting the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
Should the UK have gone to war in Iraq? Did it have the necessary legal basis and intelligence to do so? And did it mess up once involved militarily in the country? Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry finally published its report this morning, and these are the key conclusions that he reached in his statement:
The Iraq Inquiry dismisses claims that the aftermath of the invasion could not have been foreseen. It describes the planning and preparations for the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein were ‘wholly inadequate’. In his statement, Sir John said that ‘despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated’. The report details both
Graham Brady has announced the results of the first round of the Tory leadership contest as follows: Stephen Crabb 34, Liam Fox 16, Michael Gove 48, Andrea Leadsom 66, Theresa May 165. So as expected, Theresa May is out on top by a considerable margin, but what is striking is how close Michael Gove has come
Last week’s announcement that Oliver Letwin would be charged with putting together different models of Brexit for whoever takes over as Prime Minister to adopt didn’t necessarily reassure that many Tory MPs. Today the head of that Brexit unit came under sustained fire from MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee who seemed staggered not just