Tom Goodenough is online editor of The Spectator.
The Tories are up 540 seats, have gained control of 11 councils and enjoyed success in the Tees Valley, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England mayoral races. Conservative candidate Andy Street has won the West Midlands mayoral contest. Labour’s vote has plummeted, with the party losing 360 seats as well as control of six councils. Labour’s Steve Rotherham won
Theresa May’s missive to Brussels delivered on the steps of Downing Street had a simple message: keep out of our election. The PM’s speech was her most direct attack yet against the EU and showed that she was intent on living up to her moniker of being a ‘bloody difficult woman’. Her words might have
Ukip is a party searching for a purpose. In recent weeks, its focus has been on Islam. Now, it has hit on a new ruse to try and win over voters: going after Britain’s foreign aid budget. The party has said it will scrap the 0.7 per cent spending commitment put into law by David
Even David Davis’s loudest critics would concede one thing about the Brexit secretary: he is nothing if not breezily confident. His performance on the media rounds this morning was no exception; and his message following Theresa May’s now-famously frosty Downing Street dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker could not have been clearer: keep calm and carry on
Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker were pictured on the steps of Downing Street greeting each other warmly ahead of their working dinner on Brexit last week. The next time Juncker comes for tea, the reception is likely to be somewhat frostier. An account of the meeting suggesting the PM was ‘on another galaxy’ has found
Paul Nuttall has just confirmed he will be standing in the upcoming election. The Ukip leader promised to be ‘leading the party into battle’ on June 8th. Where he stands, we’ll have to wait and see. Nuttall said that he would announce in the next 48 hours which seat he planned to target. In a statement,
Boris Johnson has entered the election campaign with a bang. The Foreign Secretary was being squirrelled away, some were saying, after a number of ministers apparently suggested to Theresa May that she should sideline Boris to avoid alienating voters. It’s clear that’s not going to be happening. Today, Boris is front and centre calling the leader
Is Keir Starmer Labour’s great hope? That’s what some longing for the day that Jeremy Corbyn calls it a day have said. The shadow Brexit secretary was centre stage yesterday as he spelled out the party’s plan for leaving the EU. But for those pinning their hopes on Starmer, today’s newspaper editorials make miserable reading. Labour’s
Brexit comes in all shapes and sizes: hard, soft, clean. Today, Labour added a new type: a ‘reckless Tory Brexit’. That’s what Keir Starmer accused the Government of trying to drive through as he detailed Labour’s plan for waving goodbye to the EU. The main purpose of Starmer’s tour of the airwaves was to clear
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the first round of the French presidential election is the good news the EU was waiting for. After Brexit and Trump, Brussels is delighted – so much so in fact that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker ditched the convention of staying out of ongoing elections by calling Macron a ‘pretty obvious choice’. But
Britain’s universities are finding it hard to look on the bright side of Brexit. One of their big gripes is that they feel that foreign students could be put off from coming to the UK. This fits into the narrative that Brexit is an exercise in hauling up the drawbridge. But in reality, the result of
Len McCluskey has been re-elected as General Secretary of Unite. It was something of a messy fight: his rival Gerard Coyne was suspended yesterday – we still don’t know why – and the contest was much narrower than had been expected, with McCluskey winning by just 5,000 votes. The dismal turnout of 12 per cent also
Theresa May is riding high in the polls and there’s much talk of a Tory landslide – but that doesn’t mean the Government should rest on its laurels, says the Daily Telegraph. It’s vital, the paper says, that the PM does her best to ‘create a sense of urgency among the voters’; ‘They have to
Douglas Carswell has just announced that he will not stand for re-election as the MP for Clacton. The independent MP, who quit Ukip last month, said that he was planning ‘to move on to other things’ and was looking ‘forward to being able to read newspapers without appearing in them’. In a statement on his website,
What does it mean to be rich? That’s the question already getting the Labour party into a tangle as it struggles to get its act together ahead of the snap general election. Yesterday, John McDonnell said a Labour government would send a higher tax bill the way of all workers earning over £70,000. The shadow
The General Election campaign is officially underway – and the newspapers have wasted no time in compiling their wish lists. Here are the policies the papers want to see put into practise: Theresa May’s plan for Brexit – leaving the single market and being ‘free from EU courts’ – gets the wholehearted backing from the Sun. But
Who’d be a Labour MP? Despite the best efforts of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn is going nowhere and, if the polls are to be believed, he’s leading Labour to electoral oblivion. A general election landslide is on the cards for the Tories, with some estimates suggesting the Government could boost its majority by more
Exactly a year ago today, George Osborne was busy unveiling the Treasury’s famously doom-laden analysis about Brexit. Now with his six jobs and bulging bank balance the former chancellor is busier than ever. But the worries he spoke of about economic uncertainty have failed to materialise, and the prophecies of misery foretold by Project Fear
What does a spike in hate crime, a slump in sterling, supermarket price hikes, rising inflation and a squeeze on living standards have in common? The answer is simple, according to some: Brexit is to blame. But it’s time to stop pointing the finger at Brexit, says the Sun, which argues in its editorial that
Boris Johnson fell flat on his face at yesterday’s G7 summit. Having called for tougher sanctions against Russia to punish the Kremlin for its support for the Assad regime in Syria, Boris laid the ground for the G7 to announce a firm crackdown. In the end, the G7 steered clear of any new sanctions, saying
