Conservatives

Boris Johnson has just announced his plans to increase National Insurance by 1.25 per cent for both workers and employers to fund extra spending on the NHS and social care. Johnson framed the measure as necessary to deal with the backlog that had built up during Covid. He claimed that without action hospital waiting lists would reach 13 million. He said that he didn’t break his manifesto promise lightly but that a ‘global pandemic was in no one’s manifesto’.  Of course, the problem with this argument is that the tax promise, as well as the commitment that no one would have to sell their house to pay for social care,

It is very easy to dismiss Wednesday’s recall of Parliament as a pointless exercise in handwringing that sums up the way most MPs approach foreign policy. There will certainly be plenty of frustrating hindsight on offer from politicians who haven’t taken a blind bit of notice of Afghanistan right up until the point where they scent an opportunity to bash the government. But there are also important questions to be answered that cannot wait for the normal return of the Commons in September. The first is whether there is any likelihood of British and NATO troops returning to the country. This morning on the Today programme, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace

Sometimes things that don’t happen are as important as those that do. In the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze, about the theft of a racehorse, the failure of a dog to bark is the central fact that allows the crime to be solved. Holmes mentions this ‘curious incident of the dog in the night-time’ to a Scotland Yard detective who is puzzled and tells him: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ Holmes replies: ‘That was the curious incident.’ There is a strong case for regarding the failure of a dog to bark as the central fact of British political life today. As I recently noted on this site, the

When the government announced a Commons vote on its decision to cut the foreign aid budget from 0.7 per cent of GNI to 0.5, the expectation was that the vote would be tight. In the end, the government won comfortably: it had a majority of 35. But despite their success, the whips would be wrong to be feeling triumphalist about this, I write in the magazine this week The usual whips’ line — if you keep your nose clean preferment might come your way — is ineffective Twenty-four Tories voted against the government, 14 of which were former ministers. The overwhelming majority of these are either uninterested in returning to

The coming Batley and Spen by-election — triggered by the incumbent MP’s election as the first mayor of West Yorkshire — is currently attracting a lot of attention. It is a northern constituency that Labour won at the last election with less than 50 per cent of the vote and that voted to Leave, which has led people to wonder if the Tories can repeat their by-election success there. (It is, though, worth noting that the 2019 Labour share of the vote in Batley and Spen was 43 per cent compared to 38 per cent in Hartlepool).  But there is a group of Tory MPs who’ll be watching the Chesham and Amersham by-election even more

‘It’s the return of Tory sleaze’: so said Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. His was an assertion immediately echoed by various leading Labour figures across social media. Former prime minister David Cameron’s questionable relationship with Greensill Capital is the immediate occasion for this potentially toxic claim. But Labour clearly hopes to drag Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and many other ministers into the mix. For, as Starmer went on, ‘sleaze’ is ‘at the heart of this Conservative government’. In contrast, Johnson is seeking to protect himself against the taint of ‘sleaze’ by announcing an inquiry into claims of impropriety. Perhaps it will protect him. But in the meantime,

It wasn’t so long ago that ministers were lining up on broadcast to insists vaccine passports were out of the question when it came to the UK. While they could be used for travel abroad, the UK was — as Matt Hancock put it — not a ‘papers, please’ country. Instead, the UK appears to be turning into an ‘app, please’ nation. On Monday, Michael Gove met with MPs across the House for a private ‘listening exercise’ on immunity IDs. Although the purpose of the session was supposedly to gather MPs’ thoughts on the issue of vaccine passports, attendees were left with the distinct impression that they would be going ahead regardless of

Say what you like about David Cameron, the man never stops trying to exceed expectations. I once thought that he’d never do anything sadder than giving his wife’s stylist an honour then running away from parliament like a child. Then he proved me wrong by publishing his memoirs. And now, demonstrating his unstinting commitment to the cause of his own humiliation, he has reinvented himself as a shoddy lobbyist. When he naffed off after making a horlicks of the referendum, Cameron warbled the usual shiny words about duty to the nation. It turns out he meant it: in these dark times, we all need a laugh, so we should thank

The Hartlepool by-election is a big moment in British politics. If Labour retains the seat, it will take a lot of heat off Keir Starmer, whose rocky patch as leader continues. If the Tories win, it would likely be politically fatal for the Labour leader. He would either continue on, wounded almost certainly beyond repair, or Labour would get rid of him and replace him with someone much worse. In terms of red wall dominance, the Tories taking Peter Mandelson’s old seat would be highly symbolic as well. Therefore, the prize at stake here for the Conservatives is huge. Capture Hartlepool and the next general election looks to be theirs

It’s possible I am alone in not minding about Shaun Bailey’s observations during the hunt for poor Sarah Everard. Before her body was found, he tweeted that ‘as a father and husband it breaks me to think that my wife and daughter have to live in fear in their own city. It doesn’t have to be this way. As Mayor, I‘ll ensure that we are working to deliver for the safety of women and girls in London.’ Was that wrong? We saw last night at that catastrophically mismanaged vigil at Clapham Common that women’s safety is a live issue. The subject of women living in fear was all anyone could talk

Nigel Farage is in some ways a victim of his own success. It was the political threat he posed during the coalition era that more than anything else caused David Cameron to pledge to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if he won a majority. It is safe to say that without his persistence, we would never have left the European Union. Yet Farage is now politically redundant and what’s so strange about that is that he did it all to himself. When Farage declared that the Brexit ‘war is over’ after the government announced its trade deal with the EU on Christmas Eve, my first thought was that

Today’s papers are splashed with good news on the pace of the vaccine rollout, with over-70s now being invited for a jab. However, the issue currently causing angst in the Tory party is universal credit. Last week, Labour attacked the government over free school meals, today they will put the government under pressure over the universal credit uplift. At the start of the pandemic in April last year, Rishi Sunak increased the payment by £20 a week.  The issue of whether that increase will continue will be discussed at opposition day debate this evening. Boris Johnson is being urged to extend the benefit increase beyond 31 March when it is currently set to

On New Year’s Eve at 11 p.m., the United Kingdom departed both the single market and the customs union, making the end to the country’s former membership of the EU complete. It was a moment to celebrate for Brexiteers; the commemoration of sadness for some Remainers. Or should I say ‘Rejoiners’ — there is no remaining now, Great Britain having departed the European Union. Many Rejoiners have set out their stalls already. ‘When they tell you to “move on” DO move on — to the long, strong, campaign to rejoin,’ tweeted Simon Schama, the historian and noted fan of the UK’s membership of the EU, ‘However hard the road, however

Keir Starmer has announced he is whipping his Labour MPs to vote for Boris’s Brexit deal in the House of Commons today. There are two likely reasons behind this decision: firstly, to make himself seem like a Labour leader who is a grown up, after Corbyn’s teenaged politics; secondly, to demonstrate that Labour accepts Brexit in order that it may win back Leave voters in red wall seats at the next general election. But there is a big problem with this calculation. While all of Starmer’s Brexit options are difficult ones, he may be about to enact the worst of the lot. A no-deal situation would have allowed Keir Starmer

Tomorrow will see the next flashpoint in the row between Conservative MPs and the government over the tiered system, with the publication of new allocations today, following a review of the restrictions. Backbenchers have been led to believe by ministers that there will be a more localised approach to the tiers, which is something they called for in the recent rebellion on the vote reintroducing the system. In conversations with individual MPs, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has accepted that the decision this week to split parts of Essex and Hertfordshire in order to put the areas with high infection rates into Tier 3 set a precedent for the rest of

The terms of the Covid debate have changed markedly since Nigel Farage decided to re-enter the political arena after Boris Johnson’s second English lockdown. Even with multiple vaccines coming on stream, we can still not rule out a third lockdown — but we can be pretty darned sure there won’t be a fourth. It’s not the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the end. So Farage and his chief lieutenant Richard Tice can no longer depend on anti-lockdown fervour alone to give them a flying start, despite the rebellious mood of Tory MPs. Could they, therefore, decide that discretion is the better part of valour and call the whole thing off, especially if there

Is Boris Johnson’s government jumping from one crisis to the next or is No. 10’s agenda progressing roughly as planned? It depends who you ask. After a difficult few weeks, there are plenty of Tory MPs who believe it’s the former. Many of whom don’t even feel the need to keep their grievances anonymous.  Charles Walker MP recently used an interview to complain that it was becoming ‘increasingly difficult’ for Tory MPs to defend government policy: ‘too often it looks like this government licks its finger and sticks it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing’. His colleague Bernard Jenkin MP made a similar observation – saying a pattern appears to