Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express
Sometimes a single act changes the entire course of events for years to come. For instance, many Manchester United football fans fondly recall the moment in 1990 that a young striker called Mark Robins scored a crucial goal in an FA Cup tie that saved the job of Alex Ferguson, who had at that stage
It is quite some achievement to launch an attack on Keir Starmer’s contortions over trans rights versus women’s rights and come off worse. Yet that is what has happened to Rishi Sunak this week thanks to an increasingly visible flaw in his make-up: Sunak simply lacks political nous. While he may have been a fluent
It came as quite a shock when we learned that many of our universities had moved into the lucrative trade of selling visas to foreign nationals, with a bit of higher education attached as a legacy sideline. Now there is a new question hanging in the air: is nothing sacred? For we are having to
Rishi Sunak is a drab technocrat mired in a failed political paradigm and with a tin ear for public opinion. And yet to blame him for the current dreadful state of the Conservative party is largely to miss the point. The Tory party is facing an extinction-level general election result, not primarily because of Sunak
It was ‘the knife of the long knight’, joked one social media wag about the bid by the unfeasibly tall Sir Simon Clarke to oust Rishi Sunak from 10 Downing Street. So lanky was he as a youth that Clarke was nicknamed ‘stilts’ in his schooldays. Conventional wisdom at Westminster will tell you this morning
There is a scene in the film Reservoir Dogs where three gangsters are pointing guns at each other and one suggests they should put down their weapons and ‘settle this with a conversation’. Instead the trio create the ultimate bloodbath by all pulling their triggers. The absence of trust can do that to people. Just
The debate about whether Rishi Sunak’s Tories are heading for a 1992-style against-the-odds narrow election win or a 1997-style landslide defeat is pretty much settled now: it’s the latter. A terrible few months for Sunak had been pointing that way in any case, but now a huge political data-dump has confirmed it. YouGov’s giant opinion
There is a modern country music standard called ‘When You Say Nothing At All’. The song, taken to the top of the UK pop charts by the Irish singer Ronan Keating a quarter of a century ago, is a treatise on the power of non-verbal communication. The central ‘hook’ line involves someone telling their lover:
Let the trumpeters trumpet and church bells across this land peal away in celebration: the Home Office has an administrative achievement to its name. According to ministers, a ‘legacy’ backlog of almost 92,000 asylum claims made before the end of June 2022 has been cleared, just as Rishi Sunak pledged that it would be. It is
How is the idea that Nigel Farage might join the ‘broad church’ Conservative party going then? Given that he floated the notion mainly to troll the party’s high-ups and then they breathed life into it mainly to try and keep right-leaning voters on board, it’s going about as well as one might expect. Which is
In the old days, when the Conservatives were chalking up opinion poll ratings in the forties, their strategists knew they needed robust offers on four key subjects in order to secure their electoral base. These were Europe, law and order, immigration and taxation. Brexit has largely removed the need for the first, on the second
That best-selling 1970s toy Action Man proved the power of evolution. First, the painted hair on the initial models was superseded by ‘realistic’ flock hair and then came an ‘eagle eyes enhancement’ that allowed the eyeballs to be moved back and forth via a lever at the back of the head. One is put in
Do not let the relatively comfortable margin of victory for the Rwanda Bill’s second reading fool you: we have now moved squarely into the ‘third Brexit’ stage of British politics. The first British exit from looming European control over key policy levers came when eurosceptics beat off a plot to take the country into the
When he found out that a career-minded MP called Rishi Sunak had come out in favour of leaving the EU, David Cameron turned to George Osborne and declared: ‘We’ve lost the future of the party.’ Almost eight years later, Sunak should be turning to his own wing man – Oliver Dowden perhaps or even Cameron
While it would be unfair to suggest that Tory MPs only care about holding onto their seats at the next election, equally it would be wrong to say that it isn’t a very important consideration for many. So when Suella Braverman declared in her personal statement in the Commons today that the Conservative party is
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As James Cleverly meets leaders in Rwanda to sign a new asylum treaty, the government has laid out a series of plans to bring down legal migration. Some Tories on the right would like the measures to go further, but are these policies too little too late? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Spectator writer, Patrick
Conventional wisdom about politics isn’t quite always wrong: it is merely shown by the passage of events to have been in error in the vast majority of cases. Consider the unhappy relationship between Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman over immigration policy. The Westminster Village – media and political practitioners alike – generally accepted that Sunak
Whither Newsnight? Or do I mean wither, Newsnight – shortly to be reduced to a 30-minute debate show shorn of more than half its staff. As a teenage news and politics junkie, I grew up on this programme, watching it from its 1979 inception and through its 1980s heyday when that broadcasting giant Sir John
As they headed into the autumn, Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives needed a gamechanger. Their gradual recovery in the polls from the dog days of Liz Truss had stalled not very far from base camp and began sliding into reverse. Destroying what was left of the party’s reputation on the most important issue to its
The rise of Ukip and the highway to Brexit was greatly smoothed by the widespread perception that British governments had lost control of immigration. For many years, we purists in matters of nation-state independence struggled to articulate a stand-alone ‘sovereigntist’ argument that would catch fire with the wider public. But then Tony Blair threw open
