Conservative party

Theresa May is back in the Commons this afternoon updating MPs on her Brexit deal. She’s in the middle of a frenzy of campaigning that makes her efforts during the referendum itself look quite lacklustre (admittedly not hard, given how little effort the then Home Secretary put into that campaign), with phone-ins, newspaper interviews and a bid for a live TV debate on Brexit with Jeremy Corbyn. Tomorrow, May is also going to tour the UK to sell her deal to the public. The Prime Minister’s strategy is to talk over the heads of her warring party and straight to the public, in the hope that at least some of

Is Theresa May about to face a vote of no confidence in her leadership? The Prime Minister is acting as though nothing has changed, to coin a phrase, focusing on selling her Brexit plan to business leaders at the CBI, rather than getting too bogged down with the internal problems with her party. But those trying to organise the move against her had been making noises all day that they may have the requisite number of letters calling for such a vote by this evening. This doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case. Indeed, today a number of Brexiteers including Owen Paterson and Iain Duncan Smith have been

The consensus in the Conservative party is that Theresa May’s visit to the 1922 Committee last night hasn’t materially changed anything. Those who want her gone are still plotting her demise. A larger group of her MPs are very frustrated and unhappy. And there are still a good number of loyalists prepared to make supportive noises about the Prime Minister in the Chamber or ‘crunch’ meetings like the one last night. What this does suggest is that there won’t be another flood of letters calling for a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, though the working theory remains that it is more likely that the threshold of 48

Theresa May is to face her MPs at the 1922 Committee tomorrow, it has been confirmed. There had been calls for the Prime Minister to do so, after feverish speculation that Tory MPs were plotting to remove her because of her disappointing Brexit performance. She has clearly decided to take on those critics and face her party, rather than hide and hope that this is all going to go away. One of the reasons MPs are increasingly dissatisfied with the Prime Minister is that she isn’t offering any sense of progress towards a deal, and there will again be demands for her to show that she will win a concession

Theresa May’s Hell Week 2.0 has aptly ended with a Conservative backbencher branding the current operation a ‘sh-t-show’. In an interview with The House magazine, Johnny Mercer has let rip – complaining that were he not a Conservative MP he wouldn’t vote Conservative. Mercer says the party’s values have changed since the Cameron days and if he weren’t an MP already ‘there would be absolutely no chance that I would try and be a Member of Parliament’ in the current climate. Mercer also rules out taking a job in the current administration – though it’s safe to presume that No 10 won’t be particularly minded to give one to him

Cabinet ministers toddled up Downing Street this morning in a largely good mood. Most of them were relieved that last week’s Conservative conference hadn’t been the catastrophe that everyone had expected, and many were even happier that the conference had closed with Theresa May declaring that austerity is over. Of course, one of their number will be feeling rather less comfortable with that: Philip Hammond will now have to sift through even more bids from his ministerial colleagues for more funding, now that they believe they could be in line for the dividends of the end of austerity. The Chancellor now needs to work out a way of fobbing off

How does Theresa May plan to reinvigorate her party and send it out, united and happy, after this week’s conference? If the extracts of her speech that have been trailed tonight are anything to go by, it’s not clear that the Prime Minister knows how to answer that question, either. It’s either the case that May is holding back a series of announcements for the speech itself or for individual newspapers, or that she is planning to make motherhood and apple pie look controversial in comparison to the epithets she is going to deliver. The Prime Minister will tell the country that ‘our best days lie ahead of us and

The Tory conference hall is, so far, struggling to replicate the size and excitement of Labour’s gathering last week. This isn’t entirely the party’s fault: the venue itself might be great for listening to an orchestra, but it tends to dampen what atmosphere there is. But the decline in audience enthusiasm has been taking place over a number of years across a number of venues. The reasons for this are manifold. One is that the Tories simply do not have the grassroots membership that Labour does. Another is the way Conservatives struggle to give rousing speeches about what drives them in the way that Labourites do. Ask a Labour MP

As you’d expect on the eve of Tory conference, everyone in the party is offering plenty of advice for Theresa May. Some are tugging the Prime Minister leftwards, while others are fretting that the Conservatives risk abandoning their values. There’s Jacob Rees-Mogg arguing that the Tories need to support the institution of the family, Sam Gyimah worrying that the party has ‘lost our way’ and is both ‘talking business down’ and ‘ignoring the concerns of voters’, Boris Johnson complaining about, well, quite a lot, and Liz Truss saying Labour’s latest PPB ‘does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party’. And it’s not even the real

The worst of Britain’s post-war mistakes, ideas we thought long dead, are once more in the air. Yet again there are plans for ‘workers on boards’ (the govern-ment, of course decides who’s a worker), and for mandatory price caps, based on the delusion that government can make things cheaper by diktat. Intelligent people are once more agreed that British employers should pay the highest minimum wage in the developed world — a policy estimated to condemn tens of thousands to unemployment. The tax burden is at a 30-year high, yet many assume we should make that burden still heavier — as if the country can be taxed to prosperity. The

The Conservative party has to move beyond Brexit and leaders: what is it going to be about? I suggest it has to be about healing capitalism. Capitalism is the only system that is capable of delivering mass prosperity, but it cannot be left on autopilot. Once every few decades it veers off track and requires active public policy. In the mid-19th century, the old Tory party was revolutionised by Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ agenda, correcting the social catastrophes of early industrialisation. In the 1930s, there was no Disraeli: indeed, no political party rose to the challenge of mass unemployment, which was addressed as an inadvertent by-product of rearmament. During the 1980s,

Theresa May has quite a few challenges to meet this conference season. One is obviously to avoid the sort of farce that her speech descended into last year. Another is to try to unite the warring wings of her party and convince her MPs that Chequers really is the only game in town. But equally as important is the need to show she has things she wants to do when it comes to domestic policy. This is hard: May hasn’t really managed to give that impression at any stage of her premiership, so to start in what feels like the swan song isn’t ideal. Added to that is the general