Election

Read the latest General Election news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The problem with Reform’s plan to scrap Net Zero money

Never mind net zero – let’s spend the money on the NHS instead. That, in an echo of the infamous promise on the side of the Vote Leave battle bus, is what Reform chairman Richard Tice announced this morning at the party’s latest press conference. Achieving net zero, he said, would cost £30 billion a year. Drop that and the party would be able to spend more money on the NHS. Reform’s plans, he said, would involve spending an extra £5 billion a year on extra NHS staff, £7 billion a year on commissioning independent treatment for NHS patients and £3 billion on tax relief for people using private healthcare. With

William Atkinson

The betting ‘scandal’ has gone too far

Thomas Macaulay, the 19th-century historian, said there is ‘no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality’. Two hundred years on, the sentiment holds true, as the farce of ‘betgate’ – a stupid name for a stupid scandal – descends into ever greater absurdity. This is not to say there is nothing serious about a politician using insider knowledge to place a bet. Hoping to cheat the bookmakers like that is a criminal offence, and it is only right that the Gambling Commission investigate anyone, of any political stripe, accused of doing so. Two weeks ago, nobody considered this an issue of note

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The bookies must learn from the Westminster betting scandal

Nothing excuses the behaviour of the Conservative MPs, party officials and police protection officers who took a flutter on the date of the general election, but honestly, what did the bookmakers expect? If you are going to offer odds on events which come down to the decision of one individual or organisation you can hardly be surprised when you receive a flurry of bets which might be traced back to inside information. The past fortnight has been one big advert for political betting The political betting scandal has similarities to the spot betting scandal of 2010 involving the Pakistan test cricket team, three members of which were later convicted of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Mel Stride always doing the broadcast round?

It’s a day ending in ‘y’, so it must be time for Mel Stride to make one of his appearances on the broadcast round. Stride is one of the few ministers who have been prepared to go out and about for the Tories during this campaign, alongside Grant Shapps. They seem to perform slightly different functions. Shapps will walk into the studios with a striking warning about how badly the election is going for the Tories, while Stride is the genial character who tries to mollify everyone and exit the interview without creating any news.  This morning, Stride’s job was to try to move on from the gambling row. He

Alexander Larman

What happened to all the celebrity election endorsements?

JK Rowling’s denunciation of Labour leader Keir Starmer marked a rare moment in the election – a campaign in which the celebs have fallen quiet. At the 1997 election, Labour’s landslide was accompanied both by explicit endorsements from the great and the good. Noel Gallagher and Geri Halliwell, those two Britpop icons, both appeared alongside Blair in public. In New Labour’s later years, Gordon Brown had Rowling, and Ed Miliband spent time and dignity in courting the once-influential Russell Brand, leading to the much-ridiculed Guardian headline: ‘Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried.’ The resulting Conservative majority disproved his point. Even Jeremy Corbyn could count

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour dragged into betting probe

Uh oh. On the same day that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his party would be dropping the two Tory candidates caught up in the election betting scandal, now Labour is facing problems of its own. It transpires that Sir Keir Starmer’s party has suspended Central Suffolk and North Ipswich candidate Kevin Craig after the Gambling Commission launched an investigation into the Labour man. Craig was placed under investigation by the gambling regulators after he allegedly gambled against himself winning the race for his constituency. Talk about hedging your bets… The Gambling Commission is already looking into the gambling history of former Sunak aide and candidate for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr

Steerpike Steerpike

Badenoch blasts David Tennant over trans debate

With only nine days left until the general election, tensions are flying high and parties are under more scrutiny than ever. Labour’s muddled messaging on the gender debate has ignited heated discussions on the treatment of gender-critical feminists by Sir Keir Starmer’s party – namely one of his own colleagues Rosie Duffield – and has prompted the likes of renowned author and women’s rights activist JK Rowling to speak out. Now Conservative politician Kemi Badenoch, who is also the women and equalities minister, has hit out at Labour – and former Doctor Who actor David Tennant. On receiving a prize at the British LGBT Awards, Tennant took aim at Badenoch

Lara Brown

Will Starmer have the courage to stand up for women’s rights?

Gender ideology was perhaps the last topic which Labour wanted to be front and centre of the election campaign but public opinion and JK Rowling are forcing them to address it. While their proposals on tax and spend have attracted much scrutiny, until the bestselling author intervened this weekend sex and gender had been consigned to the periphery of the campaign. Close analysis of Labour’s manifesto reveals that it is on ‘the culture wars’ – from transgenderism to restitution to a proposed new ‘Race Equality Act’– where they will be the most distinctive, even radical.  There can be no doubt that the landscape surrounding the thorny issue of gender ideology has shifted

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Steve Baker speaks as though the Tories have already lost

It’s pretty unusual to hear a minister speaking during this election campaign: other than Mel Stride, the rest seem to have gone to ground entirely, either because they want to save their own seats or because they don’t want to be associated with the campaign at all. So when Steve Baker popped up on Andrew Neil’s show on Times Radio this lunchtime, that in itself was pretty remarkable. The Northern Ireland minister then accepted that the Tory betting scandal looked ‘terrible’, and did not bother to defend the delay in suspending the two Tory candidates who are alleged to have placed bets on the election date. He merely said:  The

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Labour already know what public finance horrors await them

Over the weekend, a leaked document revealed by the Guardian outlined different tax hikes the Labour party could impose, including changes to capital gains tax and inheritance tax. It’s evidence of what has long been suspected: that what’s been left out of the party’s manifesto (almost every tax) remains on the table. How might Labour justify not being more upfront about this ahead of the election? As I have noted on Coffee House before, Labour has gone to great lengths to insist all its plans are costed by tax increases that have already been announced. The lack of specificity in the manifesto, we’ve been told, is evidence that the party isn’t planning to

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Rishi Sunak has proved he is terrible at politics

Today’s hot topic for the Rishi Sunak-is-terrible-at-politics club is the foolishness of suspending candidates mired in the election betting scandal a full week after Keir Starmer called for that to happen. It certainly makes Sunak look slow and weak and the Labour leader the safer bet, as it were, to be running the affairs of state. But this is just bog-standard tactical incompetence in the face of an unexpected event. Those of us who have been active in this club for longest know that it is at a strategic level where Sunak’s political cluelessness produces the most dire consequences for his party. Consider the point of attack that Sunak and

Steerpike Steerpike

JK Rowling slams Rayner and Reeves over trans debate

Following JK Rowling’s rather scathing attack on Sir Keir’s Labour party on Sunday, some in Starmer’s army have been grovelling for the author’s support since. But Rowling isn’t prepared to let them off the hook that easily… After Rowling slammed Starmer’s lot for the party’s ‘dismissive and often offensive’ approach to concerns of gender-critical feminists, Rachel Reeves got in touch. The Shadow Chancellor offered up an olive branch to Rowling, telling the renowned writer that she would meet with her to provide ‘assurances’ over the protection of women-only spaces. In response, the Harry Potter author retorted: I’ll be happy to meet after Keep Prisons Single Sex, Lesbian Labour, Women’s Rights

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Sunak withdraws support for gamble-gate Tory candidates

It never rains but pours for Rishi Sunak. After a weekend of negative headlines over the Tory gambling scandal and a grilling on the Sun’s leaders’ election special, the Prime Minister has decided to take action. In a statement released this morning, a Conservative spokesman said the party is withdrawing support from the two Tory candidates being investigated by the Gambling Commission: ‘As a result of ongoing internal inquiries, we have concluded that we can no longer support Craig Williams or Laura Saunders as Parliamentary Candidates at the forthcoming General Election. We have checked with the Gambling Commission that this decision does not compromise the investigation that they are conducting,

Sergey Radchenko

What Nigel Farage gets wrong about the Ukraine war

‘We [the West] provoked this war [in Ukraine],’ Nigel Farage recently declared on BBC Panorama, blaming Putin’s invasion of the neighboring country on the ‘ever eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union’. He later doubled down on his claims, arguing that Putin’s behavior in Ukraine was ‘reprehensible, but…’ Farage of course is not alone in explaining Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by blaming Nato and the EU. For a start, Putin himself has done so repeatedly. Putin and Farage clearly see eye-to-eye on this point. But Farage’s views are also aligned closely with those of several academics, best represented by John Mearsheimer whose famous article – ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is the Farage ‘Putin ally’ row putting off Reform voters?

So far in this election campaign the consistent theme has been Tory turmoil. A large part of this has been caused by Nigel Farage and his decision to return to frontline politics and lead Reform. Depending on which pollster you pick, Farage’s party is either narrowly behind the Tories on voting intention or ahead of them. The impact of this is that many Tory candidates in once safe seats of majorities of 20,000 plus now fear they could narrowly lose next week when voters go to the polls. But is Farage finally feeling some pressure himself? On Friday, Farage sat down with Nick Robinson as part of the BBC presenter’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform candidate slammed for pro-Putin remarks

Another day, another election mishap. This time it’s Reform UK under fire after one of the party’s candidates was found to have made pro-Putin comments during a hustings. Julian Malins KC, Reform’s Salisbury candidate, was booed at a recent election event after declaring that Putin ‘seemed very good’. Oo er. Asked by an audience member at the event whether a Reform government would support Ukraine, Malins told the people of Salisbury that: We support diplomacy. We support every possible effort to reach a compromise and a settlement over the issues in Ukraine. That is what the adults in the room do. Stop the killing and negotiate a proper settlement.  I

John Ferry John Ferry

The SNP needs to come clean about rejoining the EU

John Swinney and his colleagues continuously claim Scotland ‘rejoining’ the EU is possible, and that by voting SNP we can make it happen. In this general election the SNP manifesto commits to ‘an independent Scotland in the EU.’ This is a perfect example of the way a comforting lie becomes more popular than an unpleasant truth. Why deal with reality and its messy trade-offs when off-the-shelf utopia is available instead?  An independent Scotland in the EU is a myth for the simple reason that the act of separating from the UK would create a new Scottish state structurally prohibited from entering the EU, certainly within any reasonable timeframe. At the

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Meet the next lot of ministers to ruin the country

We’re going to be lumbered with them for at least five years, so I think it’s time to have a good look at the incoming Labour cabinet. Not the ones we know and love of old – Thornberry, Lammy or Miliband – or Starmer and Rayner, who may still be fresh-ish, but are very well established in our minds. No, I’m talking about the assortment of front bench faces that haven’t yet stuck in our cerebellums. This lot are presently fairly anonymous and unexamined, but pretty soon they’ll be smoothly taking up the reins of their Tory predecessors with a broadly similar plan to drive the country into the ground,

Monday

Catriona Stewart

The Scottish Tories need a better election strategy

It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear. While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP – so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light

James Heale James Heale

Sunak and Starmer slug out a stalemate

Tonight saw the penultimate TV exchange involving Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Both men took part in live-streamed interviews with the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and a live studio audience, ten days prior to polling day. Sunak was up first and had a difficult balancing act in the 30-minute exchange, seeking to embrace the Tory successes of the past 14 years while distancing himself from its failures. ‘This election is about the future,’ he insisted at one point – moments after praising the coalition’s education reforms. Three times he repeated his seven-word defence that: ‘I’ve been Prime Minister for 18 months.’ It was a line which sounded plausible on