Boris johnson

Where to start with the Conservatives’ “Buy British” promises to end EU state aid rules? The obvious point is that dumping rules that prevent governments subsidising domestic firms will make it much harder to strike a trade deal with the EU after Brexit. Limiting state aid is pretty much fundamental to the EU’s very existence and operations; arguably the story of the EU since the late 1980s is a story of trying to drag European politicians away from protecting favoured sectors and firms and opening their economies up to cross-border competition. Of course, that story isn’t much told in the UK where, thanks not least to the sort of journalism

Boris Johnson is today launching the Welsh Conservatives’ manifesto. For the Tories, this event comes with a trigger warning: it was where Theresa May defended her party’s social care U-turn in 2017 after its disastrous manifesto launch. The clip of her insisting that ‘nothing has changed’ became one of the defining moments of the election campaign. So far, it seems that today’s Welsh event won’t be quite so dramatic, which is just what the Conservatives wanted. They have devoted an entire page of their 2019 manifesto to social care, but what it amounts to is little more than thin air. It even promises to search for a ‘cross-party consensus’, which

Boris Johnson just took a very big political risk, by not making any serious attempt to compete with Labour on bunging cash at public services and the fabric of the UK. Where Corbyn is pledging £83 billion a year of increased spending on students, the elderly, health, schools, public-sector pay and so on by 2023, the Tories offer £3 billion. For Labour’s £80 billion plus per year on new housing, pension compensation for women born in the 1950s, nationalisations, greening businesses and multiple other projects, Johnson is committing to £8 billion by the end of the next parliament. To be clear, Johnson’s relative parsimony is not quite what it seems

What happened last time means that the Tories are extremely nervous about their manifesto launch tomorrow. As I say in The Sun this morning, the Tories have had teams poring over it to see what might blow up in it. One of the many problems with the 2017 document was that it failed to understand the shift in the public’s mood when it came to austerity. This manifesto gets that change. I understand that it will bring back a version of the nurses’ bursary, which helped with the costs of training to be a nurse, that George Osborne abolished in 2015. This was widely regarded by the public as a

It had not occurred to me that the Lib Dems would ‘allow’ Boris Johnson to remain PM if he were to fail to win a majority but the Tories nonetheless were to emerge from the election with more MPs than any other party. I assumed Jo Swinson’s and her Lib Dem MPs’ savage criticism of Johnson and the Tories would lead the Lib Dem leader to swallow her pride at the last and eat the vitriol she has thrown at Corbyn. I have been taking it for granted she would find a way to agree some kind of arrangement with Remain parties and MPs, with Labour and the SNP, that

What is the main take away from ITV’s leaders’ debate? Listen to the news bulletins and it appears to be that the Conservatives have been accused of misleading the public. During the debate on Wednesday night, one of the Conservative party Twitter accounts was renamed (and rebranded) as a ‘fact-checking’ site. Throughout the showdown between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the account published tweets suggesting Labour claims did not add up. For those who looked, the Twitter handle was still @CCHQPress. Today there has been a backlash over that decision. While the Tories say it was a mere campaign stunt, the Liberal Democrats have called on the Electoral Commission to intervene.

Despite the consistent poll lead and projections of a majority of about 40 seats, the Tories are still nervous. They are nervous because they are uncertain, because their route to victory involves taking seats that the Tories haven’t won in living memory, so no one has a proper sense of how well (or otherwise) it’s going. The debacle of the last general election campaign has left the Tory party with a collective fear of terra incognita. At the start of that campaign, there was talk of the Conservatives sweeping through the Labour heartlands, but instead they had a lesson in how badly campaigns can go wrong. The Labour vote is

Every election campaign has a wobble. But the Tories broke new ground in managing to wobble before they’d even launched their campaign. However, the formal start of the Tory campaign on Wednesday night does appear to have stabilised things, I say in The Sun this morning. I understand that the Tories own polling still shows them on course to win the election and return with a working majority. But, in the assessment of one of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet allies, this contest is ‘the most complicated election we have had. Two minor parties that can take from both major parties’. This dynamic means that this election will be more unpredictable than