Seldom has support for a government fallen so far, so fast. Polls show that 24 per cent of the public would vote for the Conservatives if there was an election now, vs 52 per cent for Labour: figures that make 1997 look like a good result for the Tories. This is not just a one-off
Home Liz Truss said in a BBC interview as Prime Minister that she wanted to ‘say sorry for the mistakes that have been made’. Declaring that she would lead the Conservatives into the next election, she addressed blocs of MPs: the One Nation group one day, the European Research Group the next. She watched Jeremy
It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel anywhere in the world could compete with the fantasy of British politics. Continental Europe watched spellbound as the Prime Minister and her Chancellor humiliated themselves and the standing of the UK. The reactions of the
Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low taxes with economic growth. But she failed to persuade her audience that she knew how this could be achieved. If only Dr Kwarteng, a classicist, had drawn her attention to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (4th
Out to grass If Liz Truss is forced out of office (and doesn’t also resign her parliamentary seat as Tony Blair did on resigning as prime minister), there will be three ex-PMs sitting on the backbenches of the Commons. When was the last time this happened? — Between Jim Callaghan’s defeat in the 1979 general
Paying the price Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’, 15 October). When I, then working for a distinctly moth-eaten British university, visited a very famous private college in Massachusetts in 1985, I expressed my envy of his luxurious surroundings to a professor of English.
