Tories

The recent report of the commission on race and ethnic disparities has given the clearest indication yet of the guiding philosophy animating the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. It is rooted in the traditional commitment of conservatives to national unity. The calculative political positioning of the Cameron and May regimes seems to be long gone. Since the nineteenth century the platforms of political parties can be understood by measuring the relative weight they attach to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Labour puts equality above the other two ideals and, when we had a Liberal party, it put liberty above everything else.  Today’s Liberal Democrats are closer to Labour than

The London Mayoral election is more of a procession than a race. The only real question is whether Sadiq Khan can manage to win on the first round or not. Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, is struggling badly. As I say in The Times today, there are a slew of reasons why the Tories are doing poorly in London: the capital was heavily for Remain and its demographics skew against the Tories. But perhaps the single most important factor is housing.  At the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, in 1990, the home ownership rate for London households headed by someone aged 35 to 44 was 69 per cent. At the time,

Sir Keir Starmer will want to forget today’s PMQs. And fast. The Labour leader began with a strategic error. Instead of hounding the Prime Minister on a single issue he chose three unrelated topics: Covid, army numbers and steel production. Typical Sir Keir. Why use effective tactics when useless ones are available? To be fair, he had a trump card up his sleeve. The Tory manifesto in 2019 specifically ruled out cuts to the size of the military. And in a newspaper interview, Boris said that the number of 82,000 personnel would be maintained. But 10,000 are about to go. So the PM fibbed. The game was up. And what

Were Keir Starmer more like Gordon Brown in temperament then by now he’d be throwing his mobile phone at a wall and ranting about the bigotry of the electorate. Instead, he plods on. Or perhaps we should confine ourselves to saying merely that he plods given the lack of any discernible sign of progress. YouGov produced more terrible numbers for Starmer this week when its monthly tracker poll on public views of his performance emerged. A month ago, it showed him in net negative territory for the first time, at -6 in the split between those saying he was doing well compared to those saying he was doing badly.  Now that

Is it racist to wonder what skin colour a baby might have? The reaction to Harry and Meghan’s bombshell interview appears to suggest some people think it is. Even attempting to weigh up whether claims of racism within the Royal Family hold water or not is deemed to be unconscionable.  ‘It’s not any of our places to pick apart claims of racism in order to make us feel more comfortable,’ according to GMB presenter and slayer of Piers Morgan, Alex Beresford. Labour leader Keir Starmer seemed to agree, setting aside his previous penchant for forensically picking over evidence to declare that Meghan’s experiences were a reminder of the racism that is all around us.

Shaun Bailey pulled off an amazing trick this week: he managed to unite Twitter. Left and right, Tory and Labour, Remainer and Brexiteer, all piled into a wondrously crass post by the Tory London mayoral candidate: ‘As a father and husband it breaks me to think that my wife and daughter have to live in fear in their own city. It doesn’t have to be this way. As Mayor, I‘ll ensure that we are working to deliver for the safety of women and girls in London.’ The message would have been in poor taste no matter what the timing. After all, why make crime in London about himself and his family? But

Bill Clinton’s declaration that ‘the era of big government is over’ summed up the late 1990s political zeitgeist. Centre-left political parties could win if they accepted the small state model bequeathed by the Thatcher-Reagan consensus. Now things feel very different, as I say in the Times today. The stimulus Joe Biden signed into law is huge, $1.9 trillion (£1.4 trillion): three times larger than the financial hole created by Covid. Here there has been nothing as dramatic. But it is still telling that Boris Johnson is insistent that the public finances won’t be brought back into order by ‘austerity cuts’. Big government appears to be back. Politics is going to become

Last week Rishi Sunak presented his second Budget to the House of Commons. Today, three former Chancellors weighed in. Speaking at an online event hosted by the Institute for Government, Norman Lamont, Alistair Darling and George Osborne joined the Institute’s director Bronwen Maddox to discuss the state of the UK economy, and how their past experiences lead them to reflect on recent events. There was a surprising amount of consensus from the panel – not on the best way to handle or manage the economy, but about what is politically possible. Fuel duty came up multiple times as an area of policy that doesn’t gel with the government’s stated commitments

Keir Starmer has caught a lot of flak this week for his response to the Budget. The complaints are that he wasn’t strong enough, his opposition to corporation tax rises was a mistake and that he had nothing to really say that managed to stick with the public. It has added to a sense of Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party being on a downward spiral. Yet Starmer has probably done as well in his opening year as Labour leader as anyone could have. He isn’t the problem – it’s his party. The reality is that Labour couldn’t win the next election with anyone in charge. The problem goes well beyond

Lots of self-promotion. An avalanche of leaks. Fiddly tax changes that always somehow turn out to be an increase, plenty of creative double counting, and heavy spending on marginal seats, all wrapped up in a package designed to effortlessly transport its author into Number 10. Remind you of anyone? It is of course Gordon Brown, and one of his interminable Budget speeches, in his pomp. But it is also a pretty good description of Rishi Sunak.  The Tory Chancellor is quickly turning into the political equivalent of one of those bands hamming up Abba covers on a Saturday night: a Gordon Brown tribute act. The trouble is that the country could

It is always a pleasure to see a first-rate mind in action, as we did during today’s Budget. Equally, when a Chancellor gives such an assured performance, especially if his Prime Minister is, shall we say, controversial, it makes people think. The bubble reputation is a fickle business, especially when Tory MPs are the umpires. In recent weeks, Rishi Sunak’s share price wobbled. Bears came into the market. Was this youngster as good as people had been saying?  There were grumblings on the backbenches – admittedly not an unusual sound in the modern Tory party – about the prospect of tax increases. By the time the Chancellor sat down, the

Boris Johnson’s political recovery in the last couple of months has been nothing short of remarkable. Not that he was ever down and out, of course, but having got a Brexit deal that both Farage and Starmer backed, followed by the success of the vaccine rollout, the Prime Minister once again looks unassailable.  As for the Labour leader, things look much less rosy. But what hasn’t been said in the criticism of Starmer is that what has mostly caused the leader of the opposition’s dip is not his own incompetence but the Prime Minister’s recent good form. This has made me realise something about Boris: he bears a lot of comparison with one former prime

The announcement of the Brexit deal at the end of 2020 alleviated concerns over food supplies to the relief of many, not least the government. But while it is clear that food will continue to appear on shop shelves, what has been less clear, however, is how we want to feed ourselves now that we are no longer confined by European Union membership. It has been three years since Michael Gove brought Henry Dimbleby into the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to work on food policy. His report in July 2020 urged action on food poverty. But it was sidelined until footballer Marcus Rashford said the same

Most of the Conservative MPs who responded to Robert Jenrick’s statement this afternoon about an extra £3.5 billion to help with the cladding crisis sounded relieved that the government is finally doing something. But if ministers think that the response in the Chamber means they can relax, they are in for a bit of a shock. The two most active Conservative MPs on this issue are Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith, and neither spoke in the Commons after the announcement. But both have been critical elsewhere. McPartland called the policy – which will only offer loans to leaseholders in blocks between 11 and 18 metres high – a ‘betrayal’ and

You won’t be surprised to learn that Philip Hammond was no big fan of Brexit. But Mr S was still somewhat taken aback by just how little the former chancellor made of Theresa May’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’ strategy: ‘My assessment of Theresa May’s Prime Ministership, in terms of Brexit, is that she dug a 20-foot-deep hole in October 2016 in making that speech’ Hammond was, of course, referring to the speech May made to Tory party conference in her first year as prime minister. But Hammond’s interview, released this week by UK in a changing Europe, has opened up something of a riddle. The Eeyore-ish ex-Chancellor said he had not seen May’s

Nicola Sturgeon has laid down the gauntlet to Boris Johnson over Scottish independence: if the SNP wins, as it inevitably will, in May’s Scottish parliamentary elections, a ‘legal referendum’ should be held. How should the PM respond to the First Minister? The uncomfortable truth for Boris and the Tories is that there may be no good way out of this situation. Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has so far offered his riposte: the Scottish Tories will boycott the whole thing. As counterattacks go, it’s not without its strategic merits. However, one thing looks set to completely undermine this plan: the weakness of Scottish Labour and the other opposition parties

Exactly 40 years ago tomorrow, four Labour party grandees issued the Limehouse Declaration, signalling ‘the re-emergence of social democracy in Great Britain’. The declaration, made on a windswept bridge near the east London home of Dr David Owen, marked the formation of a Council for Social Democracy, that soon became a fully-fledged political party, the SDP. The ‘gang of four’ very nearly succeeded in breaking the mould of British politics, as their moderation hit the spot with millions of voters who opposed Thatcherism but also recoiled from Labour’s radical socialist agenda of the time. But they were thwarted, first by Britain’s first past the post electoral system that made gaining

Boris Johnson used today’s press conference to issue sobering news: warning that the new Covid strain may be more deadly. The better news? The vaccines that have been approved are likely to be as effective against the new strain as the original. There were also figures to suggest things are slowly improving: the R number has fallen to a rate of between 0.8 and 1. And 5.4 million people, around one in ten of the adult population, have now received their first dose of the vaccine. Yet despite the good news on the vaccine rollout, there is little in the way of optimism in 10 Downing Street this week. Instead, advisers and