Labour party

I haven’t been in Camden this afternoon, so I can’t vouch for there being no marches of activists holding banners with the words ‘Labour Out’ and ‘Corbyn Must Go’, but somehow I doubt there are – and I certainly haven’t seen them on the news. But why not? Last week we saw no end of left-wing activists out on the streets trying to exploit the Grenfell Tower tragedy for their own party political purposes – trying to present it as a case of callous Tories treating the lives of the poor as worthless as they slash their way through budgets with abandon.   Yes, Kensington and Chelsea is a Conservative-controlled borough

So, they limp on, and Corbyn is justified in holding aloft the Queen’s Speech in jubilantly derisive fashion. Some of you Tories are no doubt hoping that Theresa May ‘recovers her mojo’ and that the past six weeks have been some weird transgression from her norm. No, sorry. She does not have a mojo. She has never had a mojo. Theresa May with a mojo is about as probable as Ruth Davidson getting it on with a hunky fella. The rest of you – me included – wonder who she will be replaced by. Only Davies and Davidson would improve the current position. And even then not by much. But

‘There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58’. Unite the Union’s rules appear to operate on much the same basis as the Soviet provision against ‘counter-revolutionary action’. Gerard Coyne, Unite’s West Midlands secretary, has been sacked after what he claims was a ‘kangaroo court’.  So far, so internal union politics. But Coyne is not just some provincial functionary. He was most recently a contender for General Secretary of Unite, losing to incumbent Len McCluskey by around 5,500 votes. It was a process — calling it an election would be something of

Who would want to be a political leader in the wake of a disaster such as that of Grenfell Tower? If you show up and hug the victims you run the risk of being accused of opportunism and obstructing the emergency services in their work; if you stay away from the site you will be accused of callousness – even if you are spending your time working on the practical issues relating to the event. But there is a very strong emerging narrative: that Jeremy Corbyn got it right by turning up and sharing the grief of the victims, and that Theresa May got it horribly wrong by restricting her

Nick Timothy has penned an honest and reflective piece about the Tory election boorach. It can’t have been easy to write less than a week on from defeat and his departure from Downing Street. The most important point he makes is substantive. Theresa May abandoned the One Nation vision she sketched out on the doorstep of Number 10 upon becoming Prime Minister. It was a blueprint for a modern conservatism that believed in markets but didn’t worship them, that championed liberty but also the freedom to take advantage of its opportunities. It was a communitarian Toryism halfway between Burke and Berlin — the kind of politics advocated by Robert Halfon, sacked

It tends to be the case that if you hear cheers from outside a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, it’s safe to bet it’s not Jeremy Corbyn doing the talking. However, tonight that all changed. The Labour leader received a 45-second standing ovation from his colleagues in what was a positive and productive meeting. After Labour defied expectations in last week’s election, the leader was welcomed by his party with rapturous applause. In his speech to his party, Corbyn said they had shown what they can do when the party is united – and that this must continue as they campaign to win power: ‘Last Thursday, we turned the tables on

How deliciously tempting it must be to do as the Times and FT has done today, along with many others since last Friday, and try to interpret the election result as somehow a vote against Brexit – or against the withdrawal from the single market. ‘The notion of a ‘hard’ (to be precise, a dogmatic and ideologically driven) Brexit should be promptly abandoned’, asserts a leader in the Times, echoing the sentiments of Tim Farron, Nicola Sturgeon, Ruth Davidson and many others. How tempting – and how utterly wrong. The claim that the election result somehow undoes last year’s referendum result runs counter to the obvious evidence: that 84 per