Zac goldsmith

Friday

Charlotte Henry

Could the Richmond by-election kick start the Lib Dem fightback?

After Zac Goldsmith’s decision to step down as an MP and trigger a by-election in Richmond Park, the Liberal Democrats are excited. They’re getting hot under their collars because they think they can snatch back a seat they lost to the Tories in 2010 and add to their lowly tally of eight MPs. A new poll out today suggests their chances don’t look good: the BMG phone survey puts Zac 27 points ahead of his Lib Dem rival Sarah Olney in the upcoming election. But is it really safe to write off the Lib Dems’ chances so easily? The party is, against all the odds, enjoying something of a resurgence of late: membership is

Thursday

Toby Young

In defence of Zac Goldsmith

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people seem willing to entertain the idea that he might be acting on principle. Exhibit A in the case for Zac’s defence is the fact that he’s the MP for Richmond Park in the first place. Zac could have applied to be the candidate in any number of safe Conservative seats in 2010 and, given his

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The LibDems will make the Richmond Park by-election into a referendum on Brexit

Zac Goldsmith has announced this evening that he’ll be standing as an independent in the Richmond Park by-election he has triggered over Heathrow expansion. The Tories don’t seem too alarmed and will not be fielding a candidate against him. This means that the by-election will turn into a fight between Goldsmith and the Liberal Democrats (who held the seat until 2010). Goldsmith says he is asking his constituents to give him a mandate to continue his fight against Heathrow and that he wants the by-election to be a referendum on a third runway. But the Liberal Democrats will try and turn it into a vote on Brexit. Lib Dems can point

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

If Zac Goldsmith is standing again, what is the point of his resignation?

Quite a few MPs are driven by a strange need for validation, but Zac Goldsmith might be the first politician in history to ask his constituents to vote for him three times in two years. Once as Mayor (the less said about that tawdry campaign the better) and, it seems, twice as MP for Richmond Park. He always said he’d resign and trigger a by-election if the Government approved Heathrow, as it did this morning. Originally his threat had force because Richmond was a Tory-Lib Dem marginal and his resignation would mean that the Tories would probably lose a seat. It was Richmond’s way of saying to the Tories: ‘Yes,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the Lib Dems profit from Zac Goldsmith’s resignation?

The political fallout is now coming from Theresa May’s decision to approve a third runway at Heathrow. Boris Johnson and Justine Greening have been granted the right to oppose the decision by Number 10. West London Tories are making clear that they are unhappy and Zac Goldsmith has already told his local constituency party that he’ll resign and trigger a by-election. For his part, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has made it clear he is looking at how he can be part of any legal challenge to Heathrow expansion.  A Richmond Park by-election will be interesting, because although Goldsmith backed Brexit, the area voted heavily to Remain and was a Lib

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Will the Tories manage an upset in today’s forgotten by-election in Tooting?

Amidst the fanfare surrounding the EU referendum, today’s Tooting by-election has come around virtually unnoticed. Triggered by Sadiq Khan stepping down after being elected Mayor of London, the contest does not look like it will herald much in the way of surprises. Barring a big upset, Labour’s Rosena Allin-Khan is set to win. Labour have held onto the seat since 1974, and it seems likely we won’t see a Tory win this time around either. But today’s by-election will be a closer race than it might have been a few years ago. At the last election, Labour’s majority was slashed from 15,000 in 1997 to 2,800. And Allin-Khan will be

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Sadiq Khan’s victory has caused a Great Smug to settle over London

London is going through one of its periodic fits of smugness right now, for which the only real parallel is the US after the election of Barack Obama first time round. I refer, obviously, to the election of Sadiq Khan as the first Muslim mayor of a major European capital. ‘Doesn’t it do us proud?’ one of my friends observed. A nice young colleague told us she had wept – wept – twice in the course of the weekend. ‘He took a bus to City Hall,’ she marvelled. ‘It was a victory over bigotry,’ another friend observed, the bigotry obviously being Zac Goldsmith’s campaign, for raising the whole Islamic extremism

Friday

Steerpike

Jemima Khan distances herself from her brother’s mayoral bid: ‘sad that Zac’s campaign did not reflect who I know him to be’

Following Thursday’s elections, Sadiq Khan is on course to be the new mayor of London, with his rival Zac Goldsmith trailing a distant second. With Goldsmith’s campaign billed as ‘racist’ and ‘divisive’ by critics, the Tories will now need to work out who is at fault for his disastrous mayoral bid. However, while Goldsmith could do with all the friends he can get right now, even his own sister is unimpressed with his efforts. As Khan was crowned mayor, Jemima Khan took to Twitter to congratulate the Labour MP: Congratulations to @sadiqkhan-1st Muslim Mayor of London- a city for all cultures, backgrounds & religions. A great example to young Muslims — Jemima Goldsmith (@Jemima_Khan) May 6, 2016

Stephen Robinson

I’m not surprised Zac Goldsmith lost – his campaign was a catastrophe

Zac Goldsmith has spent much of the past few weeks telling us that the London mayoral vote ‘will be very close’. But it wasn’t, in the end: he lost by a fairly large margin. Some political campaigns are failures; others are simply tragedies, and Zac Goldsmith’s falls into the latter category. As I found out when I spent some time on the campaign trail with him. The candidate himself is an amiable enough soul, though his thin CV and past business failures scarcely qualify him to stand up as the candidate of enterprise against what he classes as the ‘divisive’ figure of Sadiq Khan. Khan seems dim and slippery and could have been beaten

Toby Young Toby Young

Zac Goldsmith has nothing to be ashamed of

It’s disappointing to see how many Tories are buying into Labour’s spin about Zac Goldsmith having fought a ‘dog whistle’ campaign and – even more ludicrously – blaming that for his defeat. Any Conservative candidate faced an uphill struggle getting elected in London, one of the only areas in the country where Labour did better in 2015 than it did in 2010. Even Boris, who has a rare ability to appeal to Labour voters, only beat Ken Livingstone in 2012 by 62,538 votes. The first prominent Conservative to peddle this theory was London Assembly member Andrew Boff, who appeared on Newsnight to accuse Goldsmith of equating ‘people of conservative religious

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Sadiq Khan wins the London mayoral race

Sadiq Khan is the new Mayor of London. After what seemed like an eternal wait, withs second preferences counted, he claimed 57pc of the vote to Zac Goldsmith’s 43pc – a comfortable margin of 14pc. So after eight years of Tory control, Labour has retaken City Hall.  Khan’s result is Labour’s best of this election cycle. He has won a decisive victory in a contest which has seen turnout go up, and by a wider margin than Boris’s 2012 victory. There’ll be much criticism of Goldsmith’s campaign in the next few days, but it is worth noting just how relentless Khan was. He hit his key messages endlessly, never missing an opportunity

The Spectator

Election results: what you need to know

Summary: Sadiq Khan becomes Mayor of London. SNP fail to win a majority. Scottish Tories become second largest party in Scottish parliament; Scottish Labour in meltdown. Little change in England, Ukip gained seven seats in Wales. Scotland:  SNP fails to win majority; Scottish Labour in meltdown The SNP won 63 of the 129 seats at the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Tories are now the second largest party. They gained 16 MSPs to reach 31 in total. Labour had its worst result since devolution with 24 MSPs, a loss of 13. Scottish Labour is in meltdown. Its new leader, Kezia Dugdale, failed to take Edinburgh East constituency from the SNP – while Ruth Davidson unexpectedly took Edinburgh Central. This is the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Erdogan’s Europe

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Has Erdogan brought Europe to heel? In his Spectator cover piece, Douglas Murray argues that the Turkish President has used a mixture of intimidation, threats and blackmail to do just that and throw open the doors of Europe to Turkey. Douglas says Erdogan is a ‘wretched Islamist bully’ who has shown just how the EU works. But in pushing Europe around, is Erdogan now more powerful than Merkel, Juncker and Cameron? And how does the Turkish PM’s resignation this week changed the country’s

Thursday

Steerpike

Asian Awards founder hits out at Zac Goldsmith over car-crash Bollywood interview: ‘it felt like a slap in the face’

Oh dear. This week an awkward interview of Zac Goldsmith attending the Asian Awards has been doing the rounds on social media. In this, the Tory mayoral hopeful tells an interviewer at the event that he is a big Bollywood fan. Alas when pressed, he isn’t able to name a single Bollywood film or actor. While Goldsmith has since been ridiculed for his insincere answer, Paul Sagoo — the founder of the Asian Awards — has just published a blog post on why the incident demonstrates that Goldsmith ought not to be mayor. In this, Sagoo says that he had told both Khan and Goldsmith’s campaign teams that their candidate could attend on two conditions: ‘I said

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Forget Zac — the Women’s Equality Party are the real fearmongers

Imagine using the politics of fear to try to get elected in a city as buzzing and optimistic as London. Imagine if the only way you felt you could appeal to Londoners was by making them feel petrified and promising that you, a decent, caring, saviour-style politician, would keep them safe from the myriad harms that surround them. That’s lame politics, isn’t it? It’s sad, downbeat, depressing politics. Oh, and I’m not talking about Zac Goldsmith, by the way. I’m talking about the Women’s Equality Party (WEP), whose peddling of fear makes Zac look like a rank amateur in the doom-spreading stakes. In recent days the liberal press has featured

Stephen Robinson

A toe-curling tragedy

Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I think that detail was offered as a bit of journalistic ‘colour’ to show Zac’s sense of filial duty, but that was the only sense in which his painfully understated campaigning could be said to have owed anything to Sir James Goldsmith’s bombastic, manic style when he ran the Referendum party. Some political campaigns are failures;

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

May 2016 elections: The Spectator guide

Britain goes to the polls this week, as electoral contests take place in London, Scotland, Wales and across England. They’re the elections which James Forsyth described in the Spectator last week as the ones ‘no one has even heard of’. So what will happen on Thursday night and when will the results be announced? Here’s The Spectator’s run-through of the May 2016 elections: London Mayoral election: Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan go head-to-head in the London Mayoral contest. In 2012, Boris and Ken ran a close-fought race, with Boris getting 971,000 first-round votes to Ken’s 889,918. The relatively small margin between the two meant the result didn’t filter through until

Stephen Robinson

Zac Goldsmith’s London campaign has been a toe-curling embarrassment

Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I think that detail was offered as a bit of journalistic ‘colour’ to show Zac’s sense of filial duty, but that was the only sense in which his painfully understated campaigning could be said to have owed anything to Sir James Goldsmith’s bombastic, manic style when he ran the Referendum party. Some political campaigns are failures;

Steerpike Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith’s greatest hits

Tomorrow is D-day for the London mayoral hopefuls. After months of mud-slinging between Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan’s teams over the Labour candidate’s links to extremists, Goldsmith’s campaign has been branded ‘racist’ by certain Labour politicians. However despite these allegations, the Tory candidate has also been the provider of some of the biggest laughs of the campaign. Although it is rarely on purpose, Goldsmith’s many awkward interviews and photo opps have offered much light relief as the campaign has progressed. Ahead of tomorrow’s vote, Mr S thought it only fair to revisit the mayoral hopeful’s greatest gaffes: Zac isn’t big on public transport Keen to be seen as a man of the people, the Old Etonian told the BBC’s Norman Smith that he

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why won’t Labour go for Zac Goldsmith’s non-dom jugular?

Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists.   It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists.   It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims.  Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions. But one thing puzzles me.  While Goldsmith’s campaign has stooped to a relentlessly negative