Conservative party

Even by the accelerated standards of modern politics, this is fast. Three months after the Chancellor was appointed, the Treasury has had to deny that he has threatened to resign. No. 10, for its part, has had to declare that the Prime Minister has ‘full confidence’ in Philip Hammond. It is telling that neither felt that they could just laugh off the reports. So what is going on? The most innocent explanation is that Westminster is still adjusting to the return of normal relations between Downing Street and the Treasury. David Cameron and George Osborne did everything but actually merge the two. Indeed, until the coalition came along, they planned

Polls have made miserable reading for Jeremy Corbyn ever since he won his first leadership election last year. And the bad news for the Labour leader is that they seem to be getting worse. The latest Ipsos Mori survey out today hands the Tories an 18 point lead, giving them a 47 per cent share of the vote. That’s the largest percentage of voters saying they’d back the Tories since before the 2010 election. It’s also a clear sign that Theresa May’s leadership is going down well with voters. Here are the numbers: Conservatives: 47% (+7) Labour: 29% (-5) Lib Dems: 7% (+1) Ukip: 6% (-3) Greens: 4% (-1) This latest

The financial crisis defines our age. It helps explain everything from the presidential nomination of Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party after 30 years on the political fringe. Certainly, the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened without it. The crash of 2008 created a sense of unfairness that is still roiling our politics, as well as calling into question the competence of the West’s ruling class. The soi disant ‘experts’ were easily dismissed during the EU referendum campaign because nearly all of them had got the economic crisis so wrong. The Brexiteers asked: why should the public listen to the arguments of organisations and businesses that had

I never really agreed with the central-thesis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I have no great animus against the number — it does its job, filling that yawning gap between 41 and 43. But I had never thought it actually-special until the beginning of this week. That’s when I read that the Conservative Party was 17 points ahead in the latest opinion polls, on 42 per cent. A remarkable figure. I suppose you can argue that it says more about the current state of the Labour party than it does about Theresa May’s stewardship of the country.

Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away with it, and you will see it is reconstituting the oldest and dirtiest alliance in Tory-history: the alliance between snobs and mobs. I accept it takes a while to see our new rulers for what they are. Theresa May represents the dormitory town of Maidenhead. Although Eton College is just a few miles down the Thames valley, she could not be further socially and intellectually from David Cameron’s public school chumocracy. As for inciting mobs, what more ridiculous charge could I level against her? May seems to have no need

After voting for Brexit earlier this year did you come over all homophobic? I mean after you did all the obvious stuff like beat up a few ethnic minorities and burn a Torah. A piece in the Guardian at the weekend explains that ‘Homophobic attacks in UK rose 147 per cent in three months after Brexit vote.’ It claims that this shows how ‘toxicity fostered by the EU referendum debate spread beyond race and religion, new figures suggest’. None of which makes any sense. Who would decide, after voting Brexit, to attack the gays? I suppose it is possible that some people thought Ian McKellen spoke for all of us (as he himself

People attack the whole business of having an EU referendum, but one of its pluses was that it invited millions of people who had never before been asked to form an opinion on the European question to do so. They responded thoughtfully — perhaps more thoughtfully than people do in general elections when a sizeable minority vote pretty much automatically for one party or another. We quickly developed a much more educated electorate. The idea, strongly touted immediately after the result, that the voters’ majority view could be set aside by Parliament because they didn’t know what they were talking about has almost completely vanished from political debate, with the

Mrs May’s plain style may well come to irritate people in a few months, but just now it is extremely popular. The lack of glamour, soundbites, smart clothes, and ministerial overclaiming is a blessed relief. I can’t pretend that I find Mrs May an endearing figure, but when she said in her speech that Britain should not go round saying ‘We are punching above our weight’ (a phrase beloved of the Foreign Office), I almost wanted to hug her. There isn’t even much party knockabout. In the old days, any speech which made some pathetic jibe against ‘the brothers last week in Blackpool’ could be guaranteed laughter and applause. Now

Theresa May has brought the curtain down on this year’s Tory party conference with a speech in which she made a snatch for the centre ground. The Prime Minister pledged to stick up for the working class and went on the attack against the ‘sneering elite’, who May said looked down on others. But how successful was her speech? And did it tell us anything more about May? On the Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast, James Forsyth says: I think she is keener on the state than most Conservatives are. I think there was a lot of aim taken at the liberal elite. There was a lot of vicar’s daughter

Theresa May hasn’t been Prime Minister for 100 days yet but already she’s achieved what few other Tory leaders before her have done: get her eurosceptic backbenchers on board. In doing this, May will have made the likes of David Cameron green with envy. So how did she succeed in this task? It seems her speech on Sunday lived up to the high expectations of the Brexiteers and managed to warm even the stoniest of hearts among the traditional Tory troublemakers. In return, they’ve spent this year’s conference determined to sing the joys of May. That show of support was on display last night from two of the biggest names

Philip Hammond is the unlikely headline act of the day at the Conservative party conference. The Chancellor used his speech to row back on his predecessor George Osborne’s plan to cut the deficit and also promised to up spending. But Hammond also had some words of warning about Brexit. He said that while the referendum vote marked the ‘beginning of a new age’, there was no room for complacency as he pledged to prepare Britain for possible turbulence ahead. So how did his speech go down? James Forsyth, who was in the hall listening, has this to say on the podcast: ‘Philip Hammond isn’t a classical orator. This was not