Election

Read the latest General Election news, views and analysis.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The reckoning: it’s payback time for voters

39 min listen

This week: the reckoning. Our cover piece brings together the political turmoil facing the West this week: Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Joe Biden all face tough tests with their voters. But what’s driving this instability? The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews argues it is less to do with left and right, and more a problem of incumbency, but how did this situation arise? Kate joined the podcast to discuss her argument, alongside former Cambridge Professor, John Keiger, who writes in the magazine about the consequences that France’s election could have on geopolitics (2:32).  Next: what role does faith play in politics? Senior editor at the religious journal First Things Dan Hitchens explores

William Atkinson

The Tories don’t deserve my vote – but they’ll still get it

Sometimes I feel like the only person in Britain who is intending to vote Conservative. I know this can’t be true, since I have a few colleagues at ConservativeHome, and someone has been putting blue leaflets through my door. I assume Rishi Sunak will vote Tory, but he might have been distracted by dreams of Santa Monica. Not many others are hoping today proves more Britain 1970 than Canada 1993. Half of all voters want us Tories completely wiped out, including 24 per cent of those who voted for us in 2019, according to a poll published last month. And a YouGov survey published yesterday revealed that almost half of

Sam Bidwell

The problem with outdated Commonwealth voting rights

It’s time to decolonise Britain. And no, I’m not talking about tearing down statues of Victorian imperialists, or running roughshod over the school curriculum with self-flagellating historical revisionism. Instead, I’m talking about the fact that more than two billion people worldwide have the automatic right to vote in British elections, thanks to an archaic feature of our post-colonial citizenship laws.  Ludicrous as this might sound, Commonwealth citizens – that is, citizens of any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states – enjoy automatic voting rights in the UK, whatever their reason for settlement in the UK and regardless of their intention to seek citizenship. When the ballots are finally tallied at this year’s election, hundreds of thousands –

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Stanley Johnson and the trouble with Green Tories

I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who a few years earlier had written that wind farms ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ was reborn an environmentalist. If I am right, Boris sure kept his side of the bargain. But if so, Stanley evidently no longer feels bound to keep quiet about Brexit, or even to remain loyal to the party

Alexander Horne

What would a Labour landslide mean for parliament?

As Rishi Sunak faces electoral oblivion today, his final gambit before polling day is to threaten voters with the risk of a Labour ‘super-majority’. The term ‘super-majority’ is constitutionally meaningless in the UK: in our system of government a majority of one gives a party the same right to make and unmake laws as a majority in the hundreds. But voters should care about the impact of a large Labour lead. Arguably, a Labour landslide could have a practical impact on the way parliament works. Parliament’s two core functions are making legislation and holding the government to account. The most obvious concern is the effect a landslide would have on

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The Tories: a requiem

And now the end is near. Barring a polling error of galactic proportions, we are hours away from the final nemesis of the Tory government. It is 14 years since Cameron and Clegg invited the press into the Downing Street garden to reveal that the coalition would ‘give our country the strong, stable and decisive leadership we need’.  As Rishi Sunak prepares to vacate the Downing Street premises on Friday, he will probably be looking about and having one of those moments so simply but so accurately captured by ABBA in ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. ‘We just have to face it, this time we’re through.’ All of that groping, sacking

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

It’s payback time for voters

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral sword. Joe Biden will be lucky to survive the summer as the Democrats’ presidential nominee after his disastrous debate performance. Almost every opinion poll says he’s losing to Donald Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron bet on a snap election, daring his country to vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Voters accepted that bet and are making the French President pay. This weekend we could see Jordan Bardella, 28, asked to become the next prime minister. Justin Trudeau looks doomed as Prime Minister of Canada. Around the world, leaders are

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

The Sun backs Labour

Talk about an eleventh hour endorsement. This afternoon, one long-anticipated announcement dropped less than a day ahead of the general election. The Sun newspaper has now officially backed Sir Keir’s Starmer’s Labour party – just hours before polling stations are due to open. Tweeting out an image of its front page splash, Rupert Murdoch’s famed red top has officially given its seal of approval to Starmer’s army this afternoon in just five words: ‘Time for a new manager’. A play on the ongoing Euros tournament – and, perhaps, a nod to the England team’s own extraordinary last-minute turnaround at the weekend – the election special of Britain’s most-read tabloid depicts

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

There is no quick fix for Britain’s overcrowded prisons

Imagine the scene. It’s Friday morning and the new Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, has just slipped into the big chair. Her predecessor has left her a note on the desk, ‘I’m afraid there is no cell space. Kind regards – and good luck! Alex.’ With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and new jails still on the far horizon, the first priority of the new Lord Chancellor is to stop the criminal justice system grinding to a halt. Keir Starmer, aware that the shelf life of ‘inherited mess’ will be brutally short, has gone on TV to prepare public opinion for the emergency early release of prisoners

James Heale James Heale

Labour heading for landslide, say Tories

Labour is ‘highly likely’ to win a landslide majority tomorrow of historic proportions, according to Rishi Sunak’s own candidates. During this morning’s media round, Mel Stride was asked by the BBC if he agreed with Suella Braverman, who wrote in the Telegraph that a near wipe-out looks to be on the cards. ‘I have accepted where the polls are at the moment,’ replied the Work and Pensions Secretary. ‘That we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where [Labour has] the largest majority that any party has ever achieved,’ adding that he thinks it will be ‘much bigger than 1997’. But just a few hours later Sunak backtracked slightly

Steerpike Steerpike

JK Rowling slams David Lammy over women’s rights

The Harry Potter author strikes again. After blasting Sir Keir in a recent Times column, this time prominent women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling has hit out at Labour’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy over past comments he made on gender issues – and she’s not pulling any punches. The renowned writer has reposted an old BBC Radio 5 Live interview with Lammy from a few years back, where the Labour man was being questioned on the trans debate. His interviewer Rachel Burden spoke of how women’s rights activists have been accused of being ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘hoarding rights, as though “rights” are some kind of pie with a finite end’. Stopping

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What Labour gets wrong about inheritance tax

What is the primary purpose of a tax: to raise revenue to fund public services or as a tool to help engineer society in a way which the government favours? It should disturb us that Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury who is likely to be holding the real job by Friday, seems to believe the latter. Addressing a public meeting in Bristol in March he hinted that Labour will seek to increase inheritance tax, telling his audience ‘you need to think of the inheritance tax as a way to redistribute money’. He added that a Starmer government will seek to use the tax to tackle ‘inter-generational

Steerpike Steerpike

Suella’s scathing attack on the Tories

If there’s one thing this election season hasn’t been short on, it’s surprises. Now, with less than 24 hours to go until polling stations open, former home secretary Suella Braverman has weighed in on her party’s impending implosion with an extraordinary OpEd in the Telegraph. Blasting her own side, Braverman sets about a blistering attack on the Tories, lamenting that ‘the writing [is] on the wall: it’s over and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition’. Crikey. In a scathing entry, the former cabinet minister and Rishi Sunak critic raged about her party’s decline in the polls. ‘Our vote is evaporating from both Left and Right,’

Laurie Wastell

Keir Starmer will be the perfect part-time PM

It is perhaps unsurprising that Sir Keir Starmer’s admission that he may soon be our first part-time prime minister has been seized on gleefully his opponents. ‘I haven’t finished at 6 p.m. ever’, Rishi Sunak has sniped, with the Tories accusing Starmer of wanting to work a ‘four-day week’. The Labour leader told Virgin Radio that as PM he would clock off at 6 p.m. on Fridays, ‘pretty well come what may’. Take any animating political issue and you find that Labour plans to remove it from democratic control So close to the end of his campaign, Starmer will no doubt be ruing giving Sunak the chance to attack him over personal laziness. But this

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will there be an election upset on Thursday?

12 min listen

Tomorrow, voters will head to the polling booth to cast their vote in the 2024 general election. Will there be any surprises in store? So far, there has been little movement when it comes to the gap in vote share between Labour and the Tories. However, there’s still plenty of uncertainty across the parties as to what the exit poll will say at 10 p.m. on Thursday night. James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and James Kanagasooriam, chief research officer at Focaldata.

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Starmer parachute Harman into top equalities job?

It’s Election Day Eve and the likely victors are already planning for the future. Mr S wrote today about how Sir Keir’s top team have been trying to cosy up to Donald Trump – but it’s not just foreign policy they’ve been considering. Closer to home it transpires that Labour is considering appointing a new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – and it might ruffle just a few feathers… Starmer’s army want outgoing Labour veteran Harriet Harman to take on the top job at the equalities watchdog, the Times has revealed today. Currently the position is held by Baroness Falkner of Margravine. While her current contract

Lauren Atkins

The Tory candidate system is broken: I should know

A few weeks ago, if you’d asked me how I expected to spend my time on Thursday, I’d have answered without thinking: trying to win my seat. I was a Conservative candidate, and have poured a five figure sum of my own money into trying to get into parliament. But in the end, I didn’t get a seat, and it turns out that I’ve dodged a bullet. Even if I had won, I suspect I would have ended up in a much-reduced Conservative party that has totally lost its way, among MPs with little chance to effect change. Unlike many of those MPs, though, I don’t think it has to

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump campaign lead blasts Labour meetings as ‘fake news’

Oh dear. As election campaigns draw to a close, Sir Keir Starmer has found himself under scrutiny at the eleventh hour. A Telegraph article about his ‘pragmatic’ approach to US relations that states Labour has been talking to Donald Trump’s team on a ‘daily basis’ has been slammed as ‘fake news’ – by none other than top GOP strategist and Trump’s own campaign manager himself. Oo er. The Telegraph piece states that ‘staff working for David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, have been in near-constant talks with Trump’s team for weeks, since he met the former president’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita in Washington in May’.  But Chris LaCivita took to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris and Gove give the perfect Tory requiem

The high point of the Tory rally last night were the superb speeches from Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. ‘Is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority?’ said Johnson. After all, voters ‘sent Jeremy Corbyn and his then-disciple Keir Starmer into orbit’ in 2019 and then saw the UK develop the vaccine first and has now beaten the ‘post-Covid inflation’. Reform UK voters will end up with ‘exactly the opposite of what they want’ – the ‘Kremlin crawlers’ who ‘make excuses for Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine… don’t let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas’. Gove listed Tory

Catriona Stewart

Will the Tories manage to hold on to rural Scotland?

South of the border, a Labour majority is a foregone conclusion. Yet in Scotland, in almost all 57 seats, contests are predicted to be tight. ‘Knife-edge,’ is the phrase heard on repeat, most recently from First Minister John Swinney. While the Scottish central belt has drawn intense interest – given polls have consistently suggested there will be a Labour resurgence with even Glasgow looking to turn red – rural Scotland has received a little less attention. Sir Keir Starmer’s party is less a player, with key battlegrounds here a race between the SNP and the Tories. There is a long held Scottish narrative that boasts Scotland is more left-leaning than the