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Just how could the Conservatives win so many seats in working class areas in the Midlands and North, areas which the party stands accused of hollowing out through its cruel monetarist policies in the 1980s? There is a fairly simple answer to this: it is no longer the 1980s, and areas which were once hollowed
Nicola Sturgeon is busy demanding a second referendum on whether Scotland should leave the UK. Boris Johnson should ignore her. And the last few years of British politics shows exactly why. If there is one lesson that Brexit has taught the country since the referendum, it is that if the public are to be asked questions
Thursday was a routing for Labour but the reckoning is still to come. Four years into the Corbyn project, and two years after it should have happened, the country crushed the Labour party for embracing the most extreme and dangerous figure in mainstream British politics since Oswald Mosley. For British Jews, who have been put
As we reach the end of an incredible year, we at The Spectator are delighted to announce our latest sales figures: 81,900 for the third quarter of this year. That means we close this decade with sales up 43 per cent, in a magazine market that has declined by 63 per cent. Not bad for
This is my 35th year in the BBC. I have covered every general election since 1987 and have presented countless election results programmes since then. But this December 2019 election provided my first overnight stint in the anchor’s chair, a stint which includes revealing the result of the Exit Poll at 10pm precisely. There are
Those who thought Boris Johnson would exploit his huge majority to be flexible on the end-2020 deadline for negotiating a trade agreement with the EU will be proved wrong at the end of the week. Because I understand that the revised Withdrawal Agreement Bill will put into law that the transition arrangements with the EU,
With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson has his pick when it comes to forming his new look government. However, for now the Prime Minister is contenting himself with a mere minor reshuffle – with plans for a wide-ranging reshuffle in the new year. Today he has filled vacancies in his Cabinet made from MPs standing
We won’t see the full scope of what Boris Johnson plans to do for life after Brexit until the new year. There will be a few appointments this afternoon to replace gaps in the government, and then the Queen’s Speech will introduce the legislative agenda on Thursday. But the full launch of the new government
As soon as the exit poll was released on Thursday night, showing that Labour had been decimated in the general election, most people expected that the party would spend the next few months (or longer) tearing itself apart. Even so, few expected that that its representatives would have begun suing each other so soon after
It is a little over four years since The Spectator journalist Toby Young joined the Labour party for three quid in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader. May I be the first to suggest that we should all do the same thing now, as Jeremy will soon, sadly, be going? We need to
Has Greta Thunberg been caught out repeating the same trick as Jeremy Corbyn? Thunberg tweeted an image of herself sitting on the floor of what she described as an ‘overcrowded’ train on her way back to Sweden: https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1205969006982815751?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw However, the tweet quickly sparked controversy with German train operator Deutsche Bahn appearing to derail Greta’s suggestion
It’s the first proper day in the Commons for newly-elected MPs, though many of them took part in induction sessions organised by the House yesterday. This evening, Conservative MPs will have a drinks reception with Boris Johnson, where the new Prime Minister will reiterate his commitment to spending this week getting Brexit done. The first
The last few days have seen a rapidly coarsening Labour debate over who is ultimately responsible for the party’s historic election loss. Corbyn-sceptics have criticised the leadership’s perceived failures while supporters have been flailing around in a desperate attempt to blame anyone but the leader himself. One such Corbyn cheerleader is Andy McDonald, who spoke
In the immediate aftermath of an election, its meaning is established. Once this is fixed, it is almost impossible to shift. There are plenty of such mythical explanations for defeat. Most famously, in 1959 Hugh Gaitskell and his supporters claimed Labour had lost its third election in a row because of the party’s association with
This “Brexit election” was about a lot more than Britain and the European Union. It was about the future of globalisation. As Gordon Brown underlined after the referendum, voters who chose to leave the EU had suffered unrelenting indignities on the “wrong side of globalisation”. These voters rang the alarm bells again in the European
Parliament returns tomorrow – without 47 of the people who were MPs just a few weeks ago. Some, like those standing as independents, had a pretty good hunch that they’d be booted out by the electorate on Thursday. Others had less notice, and realised only as the campaign wore on that their constituencies, many of
John McDonnell – I am responsible for Labour’s ‘catastrophic’ loss Thursday’s general election saw the Conservatives returned to office with a majority of 80, their best performance since Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1987. Boris Johnson’s gain was almost exclusively Labour’s loss, with the party achieving its lowest total number of seats since 1935. Leader Jeremy
Much of the political class is still in a state of shock. Many are tempted to echo Lord Melbourne: ‘What all the wise men promised has not happened and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’ This was an extraordinary election because underneath all the stress it was a very
This week, politics becomes a little less volatile as Boris Johnson achieves the biggest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher. So what happened in this election, and what next (00:50)? Katy Balls talks to Fraser Nelson and writer and broadcaster Steve Richards. Plus, China has interned over a million Uyghur Muslims in so-called ‘re-education’ camps –
I’ve been a lefty for long enough to be pretty familiar with the sensation of losing elections. I remember weeping in 1992 when John Major’s Tories beat Neil Kinnock’s Labour – but this time hurts like no other. When campaigning for Kinnock in 1992 and Blair in 1997, I had grave misgivings about some their
‘If Darlington high street isn’t visibly better in four years’ time, we’ll be in trouble’, one of Boris Johnson’s confidants told me the other day. Boris Johnson and his team are, as I say in The Sun this morning, acutely away that if they are going to make Thursday night’s electoral shift permanent then they
Dear Boris Johnson, Friday felt like June 2016 all over again. The electorate voted Leave; in their droves. Remain reacted by lashing out at the voters (far too many examples but see this for starters:) This was no ordinary General Election: it had another purpose of wresting back control from a gridlocked parliament that had
Donald Trump has reason to feel good about the British election. The success of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 was the harbinger of Trump’s own sensational victory against Hillary Clinton five months later. Will history now repeat itself, with Boris Johnson’s triumph heralding Trump’s re-election? What connected Brexit to the Trump-Clinton race was the stagnation
First, a clarification. I may previously have suggested that Boris Johnson is an unprincipled egomaniac wholly lacking in both moral character and political judgement. I may have intimated that he does not possess the empathy or imagination a prime minister requires and that he would neither lead his party to a crushing election victory nor
The first festively themed challenge of this year was to compose letters to Santa in the style of the author of your choice. I failed to track down examples of real letters from well-known writers to Old Nick (although both Mark Twain and Tolkien penned letters to their children from Father Christmas). But this was
In 2016, it was Sunderland that signalled what was to come. The North-Eastern town voted for Brexit by a margin of 61 to 39 per cent. That announcement was seen as a turning point on the night of the EU referendum – if a town as reliant on foreign manufacturing (namely the Nissan plant) could
A truly dire night for the Lib Dems. A net loss of one seat and a net loss of one leader. That was not the hoped-for outcome when Jo Swinson took the gamble of agreeing to Boris Johnson’s pre-Christmas election. So what went wrong? First, this wasn’t so much the Brexit election as ‘The Brexit
Never in modern political history has there been such a good general election for the Welsh Conservatives. The expectation before election night, shaped by the final pre-election polls, was that the Conservatives would be on the front foot. But Wales has had a very long history of Labour dominance and Welsh Labour had shown resilience
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Labour’s defeat is so terrible that it provides the kind of creative destruction that could save the party. It will be extremely difficult for the Corbynites to argue with much authority that one more push or slightly nicer newspapers would have got them over the line when the party hasn’t had a result this bad
At 10:10pm last night, the shadow chancellor began the inevitable firefight against claims that it was Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership itself that lost the party this election. John McDonnell told Andrew Neil: ‘We knew it would be tough because Brexit has dominated this election… As I say, I think this was a Brexit
Ken Loach is loyal to Jeremy Corbyn to the very end, even after the Labour leader led the party to its disastrous defeat overnight. The ‘Kes’ filmmaker said Corbyn has been the victim of a ‘torrent of abuse that has been off the scale’. Loach said Corbyn was: ‘A man of peace who has been
Boris Johnson’s victory speech in Downing Street was aimed at the voters unsure about his government, whether they be the voters who backed his party for the first time, or Remainers who didn’t vote Tory. In an acknowledgement of how difficult it will have been for many traditionally Labour voters to turn away from their
This morning I went to Buckingham Palace and I am forming a new government. On Monday MPs will arrive at Westminster to form a new parliament and I am proud to say that members of our new ‘One Nation’ government – a people’s government – will set out from constituencies that have never returned a