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.
Was Tim Farron’s resignation as Liberal Democrat leader inevitable? He seems to suggest so, saying in his striking resignation statement that it felt ‘impossible’ to be a political leader and live as a committed Christian. He spent much of the election campaign stuck in a strange political special of the Moral Maze, endlessly cross-examined about
‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment. It wasn’t just the pollsters and the
Normally after an election, the leader of the party that came second comes to the first meeting of their parliamentary party and promises an inquiry into what went wrong. As Katy reported from the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting last night, no such thing happened when Jeremy Corbyn spoke to MPs. He received a standing ovation
What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? No one has ever really known the answer to this question, and it doesn’t seem to be any closer to being resolved now that the election is out of the way, either. Sir Keir Starmer yesterday attacked the government for ‘simply sweeping options off the table before they even
When he was Prime Minister, John Major found his predecessor Margaret Thatcher to be an ‘intolerable’ backseat driver. Yet no matter how polite he has been to his successors as Conservative leaders, he hasn’t been all that helpful to the two who’ve ended up, by hook or by crook, becoming Prime Minister. Previously he has
The reshuffle announcements keep rolling miserably on, with Theresa May congratulating herself on people bothering to answer the phone to her. One of the new appointments is rather odd. Anne Milton has had a promotion from the whips’ office to the Education Department, which must be flattering for the sharp Guildford MP. But it’s not
Labour’s elections team expects the party to be left with just 140 seats after the election, The Spectator has learned. I understand from two very good sources that this working assumption developed by Patrick Heneghan, the party’s elections director, is based on the party’s private data. This could mean that 89 sitting Labour MPs lose their
That the Tories would enjoy this general election campaign and Labour would spend it alternating between abject misery and total panic was a given from the moment Theresa May announced she wanted to go to the polls. More of a surprise has been how uncomfortable the Liberal Democrats have looked so far. Tim Farron has
Mental health only made it into all three main party manifestos for the first time in 2015. Two years later, and it would be impossible to imagine any serious political party missing it out. In fact, the first line on the ‘mental health gap’ in the Conservative manifesto suggests that they’ve already accomplished their aims:
By the standards of a ‘normal’ election, the ITV televised leaders’ debate might have seemed like a bit of a waste of time. The most prominent politician present was Nicola Sturgeon, who is not standing in the General Election. But she does have some claim to opposition, given that her party is the most disciplined and effective
One of the complaints that allies of Jeremy Corbyn often issue is that his critics – whether in his own party, the media, the Tory party or the general electorate – tend to focus on the man, not his policies. His policies are, those allies argue, actually very popular with voters — when you test
Why do Conservative politicians love Ronseal so much? Theresa May tells today’s Sunday Times that the Ronseal slogan – ‘it does what it says on the tin’ – is her ‘political philosophy’. David Cameron spent years talking about Britain’s yearning for ‘a kind of Ronseal politics’, before describing the Coalition government as operating according to the
It’s that time of the year when politicians start posting pictures of groups of people smiling eerily while holding party placards and claiming that they’ve just had a ‘great response’ on the doorstep. For the uninitiated, this sounds as though the people opening their doors in each street are just thrilled to see said eerily
What a very boring election this is. The Tories are trying to keep their Prime Minister away from anyone who isn’t an android programmed to wave a placard about ‘strong and stable leadership’. Journalists from local papers are being kept in rooms to prevent them from – gasp – filming an interview with the Prime
At midnight, we won’t have any MPs. The dissolution of Parliament means that no-one who has sat on the green benches of the Commons for the past two years has any official status above their fellow candidates in the General Election. Some will return victorious for another five years (or until another advantageously early election).
The election debate so far has included a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing over whether religion has a place in politics and whether religious politicians have to spend significant portions of interviews talking about their views on what other people get up to in bed. But one striking feature of all political debate is
Jeremy Corbyn has given a speech today contrasting his more collegiate approach to leadership with that of the ‘bunker mentality’, as he describes it, of Theresa May’s leadership: ‘Barely nine months into Theresa May’s premiership, there are clear warning signs that she and her closest advisers are slipping into that presidential bunker mentality.Whereas it is
Why is it so striking that Tony Blair has said that Theresa May will be Prime Minister ‘if the polls are right’? On the surface, this appears to be a statement of the bleeding obvious, given the Tory party national poll lead isn’t exactly within the margin of error. Of course, around election time, politicians do
One of the favourite tenets of Jeremy Corbyn supporters is that their movement is persecuted by the ‘mainstream media’ and that if only there were a fair, left-wing-friendly press in this country, then the public would be flocking to JC’s hugely popular policies. This debate has trudged its way through many acres of print already,
We are coming to the end of the first week of an election campaign that few were expecting when this week began. The parties are drawing their battle lines: the Tories are warning of a happy Vladimir Putin and a ‘coalition of chaos’ involving the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems, while Labour is making
