John Connolly is News Editor of The Spectator
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The government today announced that schools will be closed come this Friday. Boris Johnson wasn’t able to answer when they will resume, but James Forsyth says in today’s Coffee House Shots podcast that this is only the beginning of stricter social measures, some of which could become compulsory in the not distant future. Rumours abound
It’s hard to think of a place more deserving of a post-Brexit boom than Grimsby. In the 1950s it had the largest trawler fleet in the world, brought in hundreds of tonnes of cod a day, and you could cross its harbour by walking over ships in the dock. But the Cod Wars were lost
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At the beginning of the year Lisa Nandy became the first Labour leadership candidate to subject herself to a grilling by Andrew Neil. It took almost two months, but this evening the two other candidates left in the race, Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, finally appeared on the show as well. And while both survived
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When the general election was called by Boris Johnson over a month ago, one truly unpredictable factor in the race was the Brexit party. Would Nigel Farage’s movement end up splitting the Leave vote across the country, thereby denying the Tories a majority? Or would the party mainly damage Labour’s chances, and manage to scoop
It’s been a remarkable election night. The Tories have won a big majority in the House of Commons and stormed the so-called ‘Red Wall’ of Labour seats in the North and Midlands, which have voted red for decades. As expected after such a tumultuous election, there have been some high-profile casualties along the way. Here
It’s easy to imagine prime ministers on election night, either nervously grinning or groaning in despair when the results for Dartford are announced. In every election since 1964, the London constituency has voted for the party which went on to win nationwide. It, along with nine other constituencies (such as Watford, Reading West and Worcester)
At around 3am on election night in 1997, the Conservative leading-light Michael Portillo suffered at shock defeat when he was ousted from his seat in Enfield Southgate by Stephen Twigg. Ever since, the surprising departure of a high-profile politician on election night – and their disbelieving face as the result is declared – has been dubbed a ‘Portillo
The former Tory MP Dominic Grieve may have voted against the parliamentary recess for Conservative party conference, but that certainly hasn’t kept him away from the action this week. The now independent MP showed up in Manchester yesterday, and this afternoon attended a ‘Conservatives for a People’s Vote’ event at the aptly named (for a man with
The Liberal Democrats have cemented their credentials as a fully-fledged Remain party this afternoon, after members at their conference in Bournemouth voted to make revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit their official party policy. The overwhelming majority of Lib Dem members at the conference voted to pass a motion, which called for the party to
The former Labour MP Luciana Berger has announced today that she is no longer an independent in parliament and has joined the Liberal Democrats. Berger becomes the party’s sixteenth MP in parliament, and is the second former Labour defector to join the Lib Dems, after Chuka Umunna made the jump this summer. In an interview
Boris Johnson has two big advantages: the ability to drive his opponents quite mad, and strikingly low expectations. Pick up a newspaper recently and you might have read that Britain is ‘mortified’ to have such a bozo foisted upon the nation by a handful of retired Tories. If that were the case, the opinion polls
As a lifelong diplomat, it was probably the closest Sir Simon McDonald, the head of the UK diplomatic service, has ever come to publicly showing a sliver of emotion, when speaking to MPs today about the resignation of the Sir Kim Darroch. The head of the diplomatic service had been summoned by the Foreign Affairs
Number 10 has confirmed that Mark Field has been suspended from his position as a Foreign Office minister, after he used force to remove a climate protestor from a banking event at Mansion House last night. Video footage of the incident showed Field grabbing a female Greenpeace protestor before escorting her from the building. The
The incoming prime minister will have a lot on his plate when he finally strolls into Number 10 in July – with a looming Brexit deadline on the horizon and only a threadbare majority in the Commons to deliver a deal or no-deal Brexit. But he will have even less time to relax than first
