Conservative party

Boris Johnson needs to use the departure of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain to repair relations with his parliamentary party. That is very clear, and the problems have been brewing for months. What is less clear is how much of a group of naturally loyal MPs, who have the same political instincts as the Prime Minister, remains. Johnson is a strange combination of charismatic communicator and loner. Many who have known and worked alongside him for years say they still don’t see themselves as his close friends and find it hard to identify a cogent social group around the Prime Minister. His lieutenants had to work hard to build a

A few days ago, I came across a group of Tory MPs in a House of Commons corridor looking rather perplexed. It soon became apparent why. They had been discussing the government’s myriad problems and expressing their concerns about how things were being handled by Downing Street. Then their phones had pinged with news of a poll that showed the Tories moving into a six-point lead. To be sure, not all the polls are this favourable to the Conservative party: one at the weekend had Labour two points ahead. There is also an argument that it’s not useful to look at voting intentions so far away from the next general

In a non-Covid world, next week would be the Tory party conference. Boris Johnson would march on to the stage in Birmingham to receive the adulation of his grassroots supporters. The biggest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s final victory in 1987 would have been celebrated. There would have been cheer after cheer for the new intake of Tory MPs, elected in seats that had been Labour for generations. It would have been a triumphalist conference with much talk of how the Tories had won a two-term victory. The virus has changed everything. Tory conference is now an online only event with short speeches. Instead of attempting to set the agenda

The government will pass the test it has set itself: schools in England will return next week. Pupils may well have to wear masks at times, but they will be back in the classroom. Yet ministers privately acknowledge this isn’t the real challenge. The bigger question is what effect the return of schools has on the prevalence of the virus and what happens to education in the case of further local outbreaks. The exams grading debacle and the various other summer U-turns have been damaging. As one minister concedes: ‘There’s only a limited amount of time before the “incompetence” label sticks. It hasn’t yet — but we can’t afford many

Fear is the politician’s friend. When terror grips the public, an opportunity arises for those in power to step forward as the people’s guide and protector in dangerous times. One sees this in wars. One sees it whenever the public suspects hostile conspiracies, networks of spies or mischief-makers. We likewise cleave to leaders who will confound predatory foreign powers, terrorist plots or the danger of being swamped by waves of immigrants. In fear or anxiety the people will hug their leaders closer, and their leaders know this as surely as every priest knows that despair and anxiety are his faith’s most reliable draw. Do not, therefore, overlook the power of

Politics is full of events that are meant to change everything but actually do little. Yet the coronavirus crisis will be one of those rare events that does have lasting political impact. This disease, and its aftermath, will change how the country works. Covid-19 has already directly affected every household, business and institution in the country in a way that not even the 2008 financial crash did. Boris Johnson’s government will now be defined by how it handles both the crisis and its aftermath. Before he went into isolation, Johnson remarked to Downing Street aides that he was keen to get back to the agenda on which he had been