Conservative party
Johnson is making the sleaze row worse
Is there anyone left in the Conservative party who is happy with Boris Johnson? The Prime Minister has now managed…
The sleaze row isn’t finished yet
Number 10 will have been relieved that the weekend did not bring new stories about Conservative MPs raking in lots…
Boris Johnson will struggle to contain this sleaze row
A week ago today, Tory MPs were getting increasingly nervous about Downing Street’s plan to stay the guilty verdict against…
The Tories’ health battle
Boris Johnson knows the value of three-word slogans. ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ helped propel him to his…
The blame game
Anxiety among Tory MPs is growing
Rishi Sunak’s low tax pitch to MPs
Is Rishi Sunak a low tax chancellor? He certainly likes to tell anyone who will listen that he is. Yet…
A matter of Truss: the unlikely rise of Lizmania
If Boris Johnson were to vanish tomorrow, who should replace him? The American pollster Frank Luntz asked this of about 200…
The Tories will pay a price for Boris’s housing strategy
One of the themes of Conservative conference was that the government has dropped plans for a radical reform of the…
Sunak faces the free-marketeers
Rishi Sunak didn’t give too much away tonight when he spoke at the ThinkTent Conservative Party Conference. The Chancellor is…
Priti Patel strikes a bullish tone
The theme of Priti Patel’s party conference speech this afternoon was very much ‘large and in charge’. She devoted much…
Running on empty
The government has no ideas and no direction
The Tories aren’t in party mood
Nearly two years on from the general election and 11 years since the Tories took office, they remain comfortably and…
How do we stop the next David Cameron?
One of the enduring charms of British politics is how slight the pecuniary rewards are for taking up the job…
Boris Johnson’s popularity problem
The Westminster rumour mill is in overdrive today on the question of whether Rishi Sunak will be Boris Johnson’s successor in…
Boris’s last shot
Last week there was acute concern in government about the country’s re-opening. Would restrictions need to be reimposed when schools…
The tax-and-spend Tories
When you ask a government minister why something hasn’t happened, you get a one-word answer: ‘Covid’. It has become the…
The march of the unwhippables
‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington after…
Big Boris is watching
Has Covid killed the PM’s liberalism?
In defence of levelling up
Modern pragmatist political leaders are generally keen to reassure us that there is a unifying philosophy to be found running…
There’s trouble brewing for Boris
Covid restrictions are meant to end on 19 July. But parliament will not return to normal until September. The Commons…
The Tories, Islam, and the importance of pluralism
The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief…
Boris’s Tory enemies don’t know how lucky they are
It is often said that most Conservative MPs have a highly ‘transactional’ relationship with Boris Johnson. The inference is that…
Keir Starmer isn’t Labour’s biggest problem
Keir Starmer has turned a drama into a crisis. The local elections were always going to be difficult for Labour.…
Real life
Being told by the Tories not to put a local election poster in my window because it will only remind…
Inside the Tory party’s China split
Back in 2005, Boris Johnson wrote that among geopolitical gloomsters, China was becoming the ‘fashionable new dread’. They were obsessed…
