Conservative party

The main problem with the government giving in over free school meals during the holidays — other than that it is immoral and unconservative, neither of which have been bars to Conservative policy-making in the past — is that it is a hostage to fortune. What if, next week, another highly paid professional footballer — Tottenham’s Harry Winks, for example, or Liverpool’s Joe Gomez — decides that the nation’s children should also be given by the taxpayer elevenses and high tea? Such a campaign would generate enormous traction, especially among the affluent. Newspapers would feel unable to resist. Come on, Prime Minister, how can you deny a starving child his

If you haven’t heard of Thérèse Coffey, then this will be — to her — a sign that she has been doing something right.  As Work and Pensions Secretary she has had to sign people on to benefits faster than anyone who has held the position before. If this had gone wrong during lockdown, she would be as infamous as Gavin Williamson. But the system, Universal Credit, managed 1.5 million claims in four weeks. Many things have gone wrong for the government over the past few months, but the welfare system has (so far) held up. Coffey has kept her anonymity.  ‘My main task has been making sure that DWP

Trade minister Conor Burns has resigned from the government, after a parliamentary inquiry found that he had used his position as an MP to intimidate a member of the public in February 2019. In a statement announcing his resignation, the MP said it was ‘with deep regret I have decided to resign as Minister of State for International Trade.’ Adding that ‘Boris Johnson will continue to have my wholehearted support from the backbenches.’ According to the Committee on Standards, Burns used parliamentary stationery to contact a member of the public about a dispute over a loan with Burns’s father. In his letter, Burns implied that he could use parliamentary privilege

MPs are back in Parliament today after the Christmas recess, and for some of them, this is the first real week of work after spending their first few days in the Commons reeling after winning their seats. New MPs are still waiting to be given offices, and are starting to hire new staff so they can start up with constituency work and trying to understand what’s happening next on the parliamentary agenda. All new members go through a period of trying to work out what sort of MP they’re going to be, but it’s a particularly interesting question for the Conservative MPs who won former Labour ‘red wall’ seats in

All election campaigns see politicians exaggerate, stretch the truth and make promises they can’t keep. But if a report issued in early December is anything to go by, the 2019 general election campaign was a particularly dishonest affair – and one party was particularly guilty. On 10 December, Metro reported: Similarly, the Independent reported: Websites which make no attempt to be impartial were more vociferous. Under the headline, The Tory war on truth – and how to fight back, Open Democracy reported: Independent fact checkers have found that 88% of Tory Facebook adverts contain lies, while 0% of Labour’s do. After the election, the (admittedly risible) Canary asserted that: The 2019 election was won on the back of lies

The 2019 general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential elections in Britain’s recent history. Aside from rejecting a more economically radical Labour Party, the British people used the election to provide what their elected representatives had been unable to provide: an answer to Brexit. For Boris Johnson and the Conservative party, the election was a triumph. They won their largest majority since 1987 and the largest majority for any party since New Labour’s second landslide in 2001. Remarkably, and despite older arguments about the ‘costs of ruling’, a Conservative Party that had been in power for nearly a decade attracted nearly 44 per cent of the vote; this was not

What’s the point of political leaflets, anyway? Many voters in target seats will be asking that very question on an almost daily basis, as they shovel the latest snowdrifts of election literature into their recycling bin. We have social media, party election broadcasts and phone banks to reach voters. Who needs leaflets? There is a (I believe only half-serious) ‘test’ that some Liberal Democrat campaigners apply to the amount of information they think it is possible for a voter to absorb from a leaflet they’re carrying from the letterbox to the bin. Given the parties keep sending them, particularly in those marginal seats where it’s just not clear where the