James Kirkup

In private moments of exasperation with rebellious Tory MPs, prime minister David Cameron used to complain that “too many of my colleagues think they’re here as tribunes of the people”. For him, as for Conservatives since the days of Edmund Burke, MPs should be representatives autonomously exercising judgment, not delegates meekly obeying instructions. Well congratulations

Revolutions, once started, are hard to stop. The fire that David Cameron so casually lit in 2016 has burned through many things that seemed like fixtures of British national life. Judicial independence; the Civil Service and the Bank of England; the Union; the Conservative party’s faith in institutions; basic standards of journalism; and parliament itself:

Some thoughts on the arrival in office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, based on his first speech, his first appointments and some conversations with people in different parts of the Conservative party and Whitehall today.  These are not all my own predictions; some belong to others. But they’re under my name, so I’ll be happy

Westminster is, naturally, fixated on Boris Johnson and his first speech since his Conservative leadership victory. But it’s just possible that the most interesting and important speech of the day took place in Scunthorpe. That’s where Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England was delivering a speech called ‘Climbing the Jobs Ladder’. His

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure

It’s said that when Iain Dale, overseeing last night’s Conservative hustings in Manchester, announced the news that Oliver Robbins, the senior civil servant in Theresa May’s Brexit team, was leaving his post and the Civil Service, many of the Tory audience cheered. I’m told Iain Dale just read this tweet out at the Tory hustings

Everyone knows the story of how a small number of Conservatives will cast a vote that decides something of great and lasting importance. But the group of Tories is much smaller than you think, and they vote much sooner than you imagine: on Friday, in fact. I am not referring to the 160,000 members of

It’s not hard to work out the ‘lines to take’ that are being handed out from Boris Johnson’s team to his surrogates in politics and the media after the police were called to the flat he’s been living in. ‘It’s a private matter. It’s an invasion of privacy. The neighbour who taped the incident, called

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to look at recent media coverage of the Tory leadership race and conclude that Bois Johnson is a bit scared of Rory Stewart. Johnson’s fiends and surrogates have been training their fire on Stewart since the weekend, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. This started when Matt Hancock

In less than a month, Theresa May’s premiership will be history. If she is remembered at all, it will mainly be for Brexit. She took on a near-impossible task, made it harder (her misjudged ‘red lines’ from autumn 2016 will always haunt her), and finally failed at it. That had many consequences, not least the

Britain is not quite in the grip of Rorymania. He gave a properly impressive speech this week and he has spoken with honesty and clarity about politics and policy. But Rory Stewart isn’t going to be our next prime minister and it’s hard to see him remaining in Cabinet for much longer. He’s a hit

“Everything with a trade deal is on the table…so NHS or anything else, a lot more than that”. That was Donald Trump talking about a possible UK-US trade deal after Britain leaves the EU’s common trade policy. Cue political drama, headlines and Conservative leadership contenders trying to work out what to say when someone asks

Matt Hancock is the youngest of the candidates running to be Conservative leader but he’s starting to look like the grown-up in the room. At the weekend he published the outline of a Brexit plan that might just prove the basis for a way ahead that averts either economic or political disaster. The plan, as

The fact that the Confederation of British Industry is directly intervening in the Conservative Party leadership contest – to warn against a no-deal Brexit – should be remarkable, not least for what it says about how some business leaders now doubt the Conservative party’s instincts and sympathies. The fact that this isn’t bigger news says

Nigel Farage has been on the radio this morning, almost plaintively offering to be part of a Government team renegotiating the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. Maybe it’s a genuine offer in good faith. Maybe it’s a political wheeze, meant to make him and his Brexit Party sound like a proper, grownup organisation. And maybe it’s revealing

Pretty much all the bad things that people are saying today about Theresa May are true. She’s bad at politics, bad at communicating, bad at dealing with colleagues. She created the conditions that made her job as prime minister handling Brexit almost impossible. Her ‘red lines’ in the autumn of 2016 gave Britain almost no

The current Westminster consensus that Boris Johnson is the next Tory leader and prime minister raises all sorts of thoughts. Among them is to speculate about the sheer terror this consensus should strike in the man himself, given that Westminster consensus has been wrong about basically everything in the last three years.  For what it’s