James Forsyth

Alastair Campbell denies that he ever said that no Cabinet Minister can survive a negative story lasting ten, eleven or 14 days. But even if he didn’t say it, it is not a bad rule and one that Amber Rudd has fallen foul of. Rudd’s resignation is a result of the fact that more and more

Next Saturday had long been circled in Tory plotters’ diaries as the date on which the next effort to remove Theresa May would begin. But as I say in The Sun this morning, even May’s most ardent Tory critics now accept that next week’s local elections aren’t going to lead to her downfall. Why, because

A few weeks ago, Westminster went into a frenzy over allegations in The Observer about the relationship between Vote Leave and the campaign group BeLeave. I have seen a copy of a statement that Vote Leave has sent to the Electoral Commission which they believe proves that they did not destroy evidence. Vote Leave statement:

It is sometimes tempting to imagine that the Brexit negotiations will follow the course of a Sunday night TV drama: weeks of suspense, then everything is miraculously resolved with five minutes to go. Last December’s agreement was a case in point. Theresa May turned up to see Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission President, expecting to do

Len McCluskey, the secretary-general of Unite and a key Corbyn ally, has poured petrol on the flames of the Labour row over anti-Semitism. In a piece in the forthcoming issue of the New Statesman, he accuses a group of backbench Labour MPs of using the anti-Semitism issue  ‘to attack and undermine Jeremy Corbyn’. McCluskey claims

At Cabinet today, ministers discussed the fallout from the Windrush scandal. I understand that Boris Johnson made the point that there needed to be a broader immigration amnesty for long-standing Commonwealth immigrants. He argued that this was necessary to prevent others from getting caught up in the same situation, having to produce overly onerous amounts

Senior Cabinet Brexiteers are more concerned about the project than they have been in some time, I write in The Sun this morning. The reason for this is that there is a concerted push underway to keep Britain in a customs union with the EU for good even after December 2020. If Britain is to

The Tories’ great worry after the last election was that they had effectively vaccinated the electorate against Jeremy Corbyn. They feared that the next time they tried to show that he was extreme, weak on national security and too friendly with the West’s enemies, voters would yawn and declare that they had heard it all

Theresa May came to the House today to explain why the UK joined in the strikes on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities and why she had not consulted the House first. May argued, rightly, that there was no prospect of getting UN authorisation for action because Russia would simply veto anything that affected its client regime

So, what are strikes on Syria meant to achieve? Well, as I write in The Sun today, Boris Johnson was clear at Thursday’s Cabinet what they aren’t trying to do. The Foreign Secretary emphasised that this wasn’t about regime change in Damascus or altering the course of the Syrian civil war. Instead, it was about

Britain’s imperial past distorts the debate about our place in the world, but not in the way that is commonly assumed. It is often asserted that claims about this country’s international importance are a form of nostalgia. It would be more accurate to say that Britain tends to underestimate its power because it is no

With more than fifty murders in London already this year and knife crime up by 21% in England and Wales according to the latest figures, there’s a clear need for action on violent crime. As I write in The Sun this morning, the government’s long awaited violent crime reduction strategy is out next week. The

The case for Labour moderates leaving their party strengthens by the day. Jeremy Corbyn’s behaviour demonstrates that he is not going to change. His decision to attend a Seder with Jewdas, a fringe group who have claimed that the anti-Semitism scandal is being whipped up by his political opponents, shows how determined he is to

It might be raining outside but the political weather has changed, I say in The Sun this morning. Theresa May is now in the strongest position she’s been in since the general election, and Jeremy Corbyn the weakest. When May addressed the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers on Wednesday, she received a—rather unusual—standing ovation. She

With a year and a day to go to Brexit, David Davis sat down for an interview with Andrew Neil this evening. Davis was clear that there wouldn’t be a deal, and thus a £37bn payment to the EU, unless there was an agreement on the future relationship too. Contrary to the received wisdom, David