Liz kendall

Now that I’m no longer editor of this magazine, I can admit that I spent the election night of 1997 cheering on Tony Blair. Reader, it gets worse. I didn’t particularly want a Labour government but I badly wanted the devolution they had promised. A parliament in Edinburgh would, I thought, consider why the East End of Glasgow – home to many of my extended family – had some of the worst deprivation in Europe. Drugs deaths, unemployment, crime, all ignored by Westminster, would surely be remedied by the new politicians in Holyrood. There are lots of organisations to help people sign on, but those who want to get back to

Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. In politics, it’s more often than not the latter that matters most. Liz Kendall, star of my somewhat unsuccessful 2015 campaign to ‘Make Liz Kendall Labour Leader and Queen of Everything’, has been pilloried online for suggesting care workers would be ‘better off stacking shelves at Morrisons’ given their pay and conditions. Her remarks were pounced upon as proof of snobbery towards supermarket staff, a largely unacknowledged army of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As ever with outrage rampages, the truth is a bit more prosaic. Here is Kendall’s question in full: ‘Despite repeated promises, the truth is

In recent weeks, Westminster politicians have found themselves compared to the characters of House of Cards and Game of Thrones over their post-referendum antics. Happily, parliamentarians were able to put such differences aside on Wednesday night as they took a well-deserved break from work at The Spectator summer party. As Labour’s Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall caught up with Liz Truss, Laurence Fox — the Lewis actor — put on a passionate display for the cameras with his male companion for the evening. Meanwhile with a Tory leadership contest underway, Theresa May made sure to do the rounds and rally support for her campaign at the champagne-fuelled bash. Her efforts did not go unrewarded, with Fox confiding to

In the largest event in The Spectator’s 188-year history, 2,200 people packed into the Palladium this week to watch our debate chaired by Andrew Neil on whether Britain should leave the EU. Dan Hannan, Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey backed Brexit. Whilst Nick Clegg, Liz Kendall and Chuka Umunna argued that Britain was better off remaining a part of the European Union. Leave won the debate, which was sponsored by Rathbones, with a resounding number of the audience siding with Hannan, Farage and Hoey. But if you weren’t lucky enough to make it to the Spectator’s Brexit debate yourself, then you can make up your own mind by watching the

It was the largest debate in The Spectator’s history: we sold out the 2,200-seat London Palladium for our debate on whether Britain should leave the EU, sponsored by Rathbones. The lineup: Dan Hannan, Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey vs Nick Clegg, Liz Kendall and Chuka Umunna. Andrew Neil chaired. Here are summaries of all the speeches, as well as the full audio: Daniel Hannan for Out. https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/daniel-hannans-speech-in-spectator-brexit-debate Tonight, I’m inviting you to make me redundant – and, into the bargain, make Nigel redundant. And I wouldn’t be doing if I were not confident that there will be plenty of openings for newly-unemployed MEPs in the boom that would follow our exit from the European Union. Why do

Although Liz Kendall insists that she gets on well with her former Labour leadership rival Jeremy Corbyn on a personal level, she is less fond of some of his supporters. While it’s well known that Kendall is on the opposite end of the spectrum to Corbyn when it comes to their political views within Labour, the Blairite says that it is the  ‘old-fashioned misogyny’ of the hard left that she takes issue with. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Kendall says that many members of the hard left targeted her with misogynistic abuse just because she held opposing political views: ‘There’s a lot of old-fashioned misogyny on the hard left; you’ve only got

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Stephen Bush discuss the upcoming Labour party conference” startat=1650] Listen [/audioplayer]Five years ago this Saturday, Ed Miliband was crowned Labour leader. Three days later, he had to deliver his first conference speech in that role. It was a distinctly underwhelming address. Miliband was overshadowed by his brother, who ticked Harriet Harman off for clapping. To try to give its new leader a better start this time round, Labour decided to announce the result of its leadership contest a fortnight before the party conference. But two weeks has been nowhere near enough time for Labour to come to terms with what has happened. The Parliamentary Labour

If you’d missed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, and pitched up to business questions in the Commons today, you might not have noticed that much had changed, initially. Labour had a good frontbench team scrutinising the government, with Angela Eagle leading in her customary dry manner. She asked questions about the skills gap, while Tory ministers complained about Labour’s legacy from its time in government and tried to provoke the Opposition over the Trade Union Bill. Not much change there. But there were differences, even if Labour looked as though it was functioning vaguely effectively after a turbulent few days. The first was that Tory frontbenchers and backbenchers such

Liz Kendall has all but admitted she is not going to be the next Labour leader. At a speech in Westminster this morning, the shadow care minister spoke about the future of the party and referenced ‘whatever happens on Saturday’ — but she was no longer talking about her plans as leader. Kendall urged Labour to stick together after the new leader is elected, specifically if Jeremy Corbyn wins: ‘First, everyone must – and I believe will – accept the result and mandate of the new Leader. They will have won the right to pursue their agenda and must be given the space and scope to do so. If Jeremy Corbyn wins, it would

Yesterday Channel 4’s Michael Crick reported that a pro-Corbyn Unite official had told him ‘careerist’ MPs will be purged from Labour if Jeremy Corbyn gets in. Among those on the list of targets for de-selection was Tristram Hunt, who would ‘make a wonderful scalp’. Yet despite all the noise, Hunt doesn’t seem too bothered. Although his fellow New Labour comrade Chuka Umunna performed a reverse ferret earlier this week over whether he would support a Corbyn-led government, Hunt appears not to be backing down. Writing in this week’s issue of The Spectator, the shadow education secretary says that he does not understand why a lurch to the left would lead to success at the polls: ‘I break

The summit on the integrity of the Labour leadership contest is over and interim leader Harriet Harman described it as a ‘routine’ and ‘useful’ meeting. Although she is ‘confident that there won’t be questions over the integrity of the result and there aren’t any bases for legal challenges’, some of the numbers released on the number of infiltrators are pretty high. 3,000 ‘cheats’, as Harman described them, have been excluded from voting so far but the final number could be substantially higher. Harman has suggested the selectorate would be ‘fewer than 600,000. It will be over half a million’ — meaning there are tens of thousands of rogues still to be weeded out. Around 60,000 people are expected to

A hidden reason for Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1975 was that lots of older Tory backbenchers fancied her. She was 49 and made the best of it without obvious strain. She was not disturbingly sexy, and she behaved with absolute propriety throughout, thus preventing any filthy old wretch from taking liberties, but she appealed to the chivalrous instincts of the knights of the shires. If today’s Labour selectorate knows the meaning of the word chivalry at all, it is only to denounce it. On the other hand, there is an understanding that no leader — especially, despite the age of equality, a woman — can look grotesque on television and

Louise Mensch has once again become the subject of much ridicule online over something she has tweeted. The incident occurred last night after the former Tory MP claimed Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters — who have recently been accused of being anti-semitic — were insulting Corbyn’s Labour leadership rival Liz Kendall. Mensch claimed that Twitter’s autocomplete function showed that the most common search words to appear by Liz Kendall’s name were ‘Nazi’, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jews’. To prove this Mensch even offered a photo of the ‘auto searches’ to demonstrate the ‘sewer that is Jeremy Corbyn’s support’. Alas there was a catch. As each suggestion appeared next to an ‘x’, this means that the words were her own search history rather than the work

Watching the very pleasant Liz Kendall on television this week, I was struck by how extraordinary it is that more than 40 years have now passed since the Conservatives selected a woman leader and still the Labour party cannot bring itself to do so. (Although, come to think of it, it took Labour 142 years to catch up with the Conservatives in selecting a Jew, so perhaps we have another century to wait.) I am not necessarily saying that Ms Kendall is the answer — she seems able, but inexperienced — but there does appear to be a serious barrier to women at the very top of the Labour party.

He may be out of power but Labour’s Prince of Darkness is still attempting to pull the strings. Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that Peter Mandelson suggested to Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall that they should drop out of the Labour leadership contest in order to have the whole thing called off. One source told the paper ‘Lord Mandelson and other Blairites were saying – this is a disgrace, let’s get this thing pulled. But it was not going to happen’. On the Today programme, Yvette Cooper gave a guarded answer as to whether there had been any contact with Mandelson. Cooper denied she had spoken to him directly, but left some wiggle room if it emerges there had