Tonight’s Republican CNN debate should be, to use the Donald Trump word, yuuge. I don’t mean to sound like a boxing promoter; I know that TV debates, especially Republican ones, are overhyped. They often turn out to be little more than soundbites and fury, signifying nothing. But anybody who thinks a bad debate can’t harm a political
Quite naturally, those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union have seized on today’s net migration figures as evidence that staying in won’t resolve voters’ concerns about immigration. Priti Patel has said that ‘the proposed deal will do nothing to reduce the level of immigration from the EU, and will leave unelected politicians in
David Owen said it was time for Britain to leave the EU. Speaking this morning, the SDP founder said Brexit was a way of restructuring Europe in the way it needed to be. Owen went on to say there was no need for Britain leaving behind the EU to be a damaging process: Dame Janet
Yesterday PMQs descended into ‘Punch and Judy’ style politics after David Cameron responded to a heckle about his mother by laying into Jeremy Corbyn’s fashion sense. David Cameron criticised Corbyn’s shabby appearance: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.’ However rather than take the criticism on board, it
David Cameron had a tough time trying to convince his European counterparts at the European Council; but hopefully he will be up for seconds when he goes head-to-head with the European Parliament. He paid its Members a long overdue visit last week, but only met with a select few. He will have to do more
Niall Ferguson got me thinking about this in his Sunday Times piece, in which he rejected the allure of Brexit and declared himself an ‘Anglosceptic’. He concluded: ‘In the days before empire, Henry VIII’s version of Brexit was to renounce Roman Catholicism and divorce Catherine of Aragon. A true sceptic in those days would have
The Dame Janet Smith report into Jimmy Savile has already been labelled an ‘expensive whitewash’ by a lawyer representing 168 victims, just hours after it was published. The review found that BBC staff knew of complaints and allegations about the entertainer but that little was done to pursue them because of a culture of fear
The net migration statistics have, for quite a while, been an awkward quarterly occurrence that the Tories just have to sit through and pretend isn’t happening. Today’s release from the Office for National Statistics shows that David Cameron is still nowhere near hitting his pledge of driving net migration into the tens of thousands, with
The vision of a European Common Market was a good one when in 1962 membership was first envisaged for the UK. Nevertheless, we were rightly warned even then by the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, that a federal Europe lurked in the background. As far back as 1971 Edward Heath’s White Paper on
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/insidethetorieseudogfight/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss the Tory dogfight over Europe”] Listen [/audioplayer] Many Tories had doubts about David Cameron’s EU renegotiation, but only Boris Johnson was promised a piece of legislation to assuage his particular concerns. It was quite a compliment. The so-called Sovereignty Bill was, in effect, the
Last time I went to Thailand, there’d been something of a misunderstanding about accommodation, and my friend and I ended up in a dive on Khao San Road. In a grim room with stained mattresses and peeling paint, the thud of beats from the disco made everything vibrate gently. Stalls outside offered fake IDs, tatty
What happens when 95 per cent of people like something, but 5 per cent of people prefer something else? You might think natural democracy would prevail: that the 5 per cent would acquiesce and go along with the taste of the majority. Not necessarily. In many cultural settings, it is common for a small, intransigent minority to beat
If the Church of England was once the Tory party at prayer, then the nation’s shotgun-owning farmers were the party’s armed wing. I grew up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales and must have been about 18 before I met someone who didn’t identify as TBC (True Blue Conservative). Ours was one of the
As you came from the Holy land Of Walsingham Met you not with my true love By the way as you came? The Walsingham poem used to be attributed to Walter Raleigh, which must be an error. ‘True love’ had a different meaning in his gallantries, most famously when he pleasured a maid of honour
Europe has opened up an unbridgeable chasm in the Conservative party. Labour remains, near as dammit, united. On the EU referendum, an opposition accustomed to defeat has a rare chance of victory. Yet when Jeremy Corbyn makes the case for staying in he speaks without conviction. Like a man called into work on his day
It’s tempting to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London the voice of Kenneth Williams is still roaming, rich, ribald and ever-so-fruity, ready to jump out and surprise us. He was just so unmistakable on air, both fantastically intimate with the microphone and very aloof, but never better than playing someone
The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’ we were clearly intended to think, ‘it’s a bit like James Bond.’ True, the main character works — at this stage, anyway — in the hotel trade rather than as a secret agent. Yet, when
From ‘Justice and Security’, The Spectator, 26 February 1916: If the conditions upon which we are willing to make peace are to be summarised, they cannot be summarised better than by the words Justice and Security. It is for these that we and our Allies are fighting. These are the signs in which we shall
Never before has a radio soap crossed so far over from fiction and into the real world. Never before has it become imperative to listen to each and every episode of The Archers (just after 7 p.m. on Radio 4, every day except Saturday) as if by being there, listening in on the ether, we can
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes decent talents — Richard Gere and Dakota Fanning, most notably — for no discernible purpose and has you thinking throughout that whatever they were paid it wasn’t enough, and even if they’d been offered more,
