Theresa may

Although it’s widely accepted that Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election was disastrous, one of the few upshots for the Tories was that it managed to stave off calls from the SNP for a second independence referendum. Alas, whoever is running the Prime Minister’s Twitter account doesn’t appear to be on the same page when it comes to preserving the ‘precious union’. Following May’s meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, the Prime Minister tweeted that ‘the UK and Scotland must continue to work together to ensure businesses and consumers have the certainty they need as we leave the EU’. Only there’s a problem. Unless Nicola Sturgeon gets her wish for independence,

This week a Conservative politician managed to get both the SNP and Labour to applaud them in the Chamber. Unfortunately for Theresa May, it wasn’t in response to government policy. Instead it was Europhile – and Tory grandee – Ken Clarke, who took the opportunity to explain why he thinks Nigel Farage is the ‘most successful politician’ of his generation, why bent bananas won’t be making a comeback and, most importantly, why MPs ought to oppose Theresa May’s Brexit date amendment (also known as amendment 381) to the EU Withdrawal Bill. Announced in the Telegraph last week, May has put an amendment in the bill which would mean the date

Another week, another Cabinet resignation. Now, as I say in The Sun this morning, there are those saying that Theresa May is just being unlucky right now. As Downing Street aides point out, few would have predicted a few weeks ago that Westminster was going to be engulfed in a sex scandal or that Priti Patel was going to have to resign for running her own, independent foreign policy. Theresa May’s problem, though, isn’t that a black cat walked in front of her. Rather, it is that her government is becalmed. It doesn’t have enough momentum to get through crises, so it gets stuck in them. As a result, the

Dealing with a hung parliament was never going to be easy, but no one quite foresaw the decay which now seems to have set in to Theresa May’s government. The best that can be said for the Prime Minister is that the past week’s events have weakened her rivals within the Conservative party. No one is talking up Priti Patel as a potential rival any more and a challenge from Boris Johnson is now highly unlikely, following his loose words about a British woman incarcerated in Iran — which the Iranian regime may use as a pretext to increase her sentence. Like John Major, the Prime Minister benefits from the

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’. He repeated the point about clarity being the

The Tory leadership stakes have been upended this week, I say in The Sun today. Gavin Williamson’s elevation to defence secretary shows that he wants to be a contender and that several of those around Theresa May think he might be their best hope. The most interesting question is why Williamson has decided to get out of Downing Street now. He has a sharp political brain and a good feel for the mood of the parliamentary party. So, he’d have known that a reshuffle where he was the only person to enter the Cabinet would put a big target on his back. There are two explanations doing the round in

To say that Gavin Williamson’s appointment as Defence Secretary has received a mixed reaction is to suggest, wrongly, that there is a balance of opinion on both sides. Most Conservative MPs I have spoken to today are just shocked that someone with no departmental experience is now in charge of the biggest department of all, with some of the biggest budgetary challenges. ‘I’m not sceptical, because that would suggest I hadn’t reached a conclusion,’ said one colleague. ‘I’m appalled. He’s smarmy. He uses bad language about other people. He is not to be trusted.’ Others have no problem with Williamson himself, seeing him as one of the better whips they’ve

The Conservative Party appears rather burnt-out at the moment. At its conference – even before Theresa May’s disastrous speech – it seemed to be the Knackered Party rather than the Nasty Party that the Prime Minister herself had warned about so many years ago. But it is still in government, and desperately needs to find new ideas and reasons to exist while also negotiating Brexit and dealing with unexpected scandals, such as the allegations swirling around Westminster at the moment of impropriety from Cabinet ministers. When parties are knackered, they often find a period of opposition to be a comfort, a chance to have the sort of debate about policy

Political Cabinet on Tuesday was a fascinating occasion, as I say in The Sun, and not just because Andrea Leadsom took the opportunity to tell Theresa May she had a wonderful smile.  The Cabinet were given a detailed presentation on the state of public opinion—and bits of it made for grim reading for them. David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary, summed up the mood of the meeting when he told Theresa May, to chuckles, that his first impression from all the data was that she shouldn’t call an election anytime soon. The problem for the Tories is that the voters are wary of their values and fed up with austerity. A

It was always going to be difficult for Theresa May’s government to secure a legacy beyond Brexit. With the negotiations running into difficulty, it becomes all the harder. Ministers must avoid, however, resorting to well-meant gestures which open the government to ridicule. Take, for instance, the revelation that Britain has insisted on the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights making reference to pregnant transgendered people — although it now denies that it objected to the term ‘pregnant women’. The purpose of the relevant clause is deeply serious — to dissuade malignant regimes from subjecting pregnant women to the death penalty. Britain’s approach, by contrast, has an air of

Theresa May has the perfect answer to all difficult questions: we don’t want to give away anything that will harm our position in the Brexit negotiations. No matter whether the information an MP is requesting has anything to do with Britain’s negotiating position: it’s a handy line to use when the answer is in fact ‘I don’t actually know’. The Prime Minister deployed this argument about not wanting to undermine the negotiations several times as she took questions from MPs in the Commons following her statement on last week’s European Council summit. She refused to give any further details on the sort of figures involved in the divorce bill negotiations

Well, that lasted long. Although Theresa May didn’t get the green light to talk trade on her EU council summit charm offensive last week, there was a general consensus that the mood music had at least improved. The EU27 struck a conciliatory and optimistic tone – agreeing to begin internal trade discussions in anticipation of moving to trade talks in December. Angela Merkel even went so far as to say she had ‘no doubt’ a deal would be reached between the EU and Britain. However, it seems that the memo to play nice failed to reach the European Commission. Just as happened the last time May had dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker,