Madeline Grant

Robert Jenrick has been walking a tightrope. Over the course of the Conservative party conference he has been having to navigate the tricky situation of playing both the prince over the water and the loyal lieutenant to Kemi Badenoch. Mr Jenrick so far has played his cards very well. He is successfully channelling both Bonnie

What is the purpose of Mel Stride? I don’t ask this to be personal I just genuinely don’t know. In some ways it’s a problem for all shadow chancellors: the Treasury is the most practical of departments, the opposition can only theorise about it. The economy ought to be the only trump card the Tories

The voice of Keir Starmer echoed round the Conservative party’s conference hall. ‘Free of charge digital ID’ chanted the disembodied Dalek. If people had come hoping to escape the Grand Adenoid then hard luck. Kemi Badenoch’s welcome address to the Tory faithful began with a dystopian video compilation of some of the Labour government’s ‘greatest

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. So wrote Dr Johnson. Sadly for the good Doctor he was an avowed Tory and so, according to the rules of Labour conference, a de facto evil and probably racist monster. Alas, if only the Labour party had heeded the great moralist’s words, we might have avoided the

In German they have a concept whose equivalent is sorely needed in discussion of British politics: ‘anti-talent’. It means exactly what it sounds like – the opposite of talent, something any given person is uniquely ill-suited to doing.  The Chancellor criticised ‘the nagging voices of decline’, which, when you’re standing a matter of inches away

Day one of the Labour conference – oh frabjous day! The annual gathering of people who hate each other just a little bit more than they hate themselves was underway. You really do wonder where they find some of these characters.  Sir Keir arrives in Liverpool as the least popular PM in history. Worse than

‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for

Ed Davey’s speech at the Lib Dem conference began with a darkened stage on which you could just about make out outlines of people and quotes by and about him booming over the sound system. Like most things the Lib Dems do, it felt a bit like a self-consciously modern re-interpretation of Shakespeare by a

How do you solve a problem like B Johnson? It has troubled the Conservative party since his departure, not least as they presumably do not relish the idea of him going down in history as the last person ever to win them a majority. Interestingly, Labour rarely mentions him, preferring to resurrect Liz Truss again and

We’re back again in the House of Peers this week as they once again give a leaden beating to Leadbeater’s suicide bill. Even when discussing matters of life and death, there is something very reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan about the place. The most famous G&S operetta set in the House of Lords is, of

There is just something innately funny about seeing Keir Starmer and Donald Trump together. Two men so obviously different; in character, interests, ability and shape, forced together by circumstance. Watching them at the press conference today was no exception. They put me in mind of Bialystock and Bloom from The Producers: the bombastic Broadway shyster

Despite the Prime Minister presumably going to bed each night, trotters crossed, eyes screwed up and wishing hard as if trying to reanimate Tinkerbell, the Mandelson scandal is not magically going to go away. Indeed, today MPs were granted an extensive chunk of parliamentary time to discuss it. Unsurprisingly, the PM swerved this particular treat.

In fairness, I suspect plenty of Tory MPs are looking for reasons to get out of party conference this year. East Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger – who this afternoon appeared at the Faragean elbow to defect to Reform – has probably found the single best, if drastic, get-out-clause available.  Kruger isn’t the first MP to

‘This was Parliament at its best’, so went the inane and factually incorrect mantra of Kim Leadbeater as her Assisted Dying Bill made its way through the House of Commons. It did so on the back of intense duplicity about its safeguards by its sponsors and by the simple fact that the vast majority of