James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
This is an article about Twitter, so you might decide to ignore it. Social media is not real life, after all, and many sensible people dismiss it as meaningless noise: ‘it’s just Twitter’. But this article is also about the current state of politics and journalism, neither of which can – sadly – be discussed
Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth is proving to be a jolly affair so far. I’m writing this in the garden of the Highcliff hotel, looking out over the Channel that divides the UK from France and, perhaps one day, the European Union. It’s Brexit that’s making the Lib Dems happy as they bustle by. Parties
This is a thought-experiment. Imagine the following scenario: A Conservative Prime Minister is dishing out peerages. Among the people given a lifelong right to sit in the House of Lords and vote on new laws is a lobbyist who has conducted a long campaign to diminish women’s rights under the law. The lobbyist, leading an
An awful lot of Theresa May’s resignation honours list is awful. In no particular order: Knighting Geoff Boycott would be a horrible act for any PM, let alone one who actually did some good on domestic violence. Who cares if he punched a woman repeatedly in the face, he played great cricket, eh? A gruesome
As a Remain voter who believes that Britain must leave the European Union, I’m finding the Brexit seas ever harder to navigate. In particular, the siren call of the outraged Remainers grows louder. I have little time for many people on the Stop Brexit extreme of the debate, and that includes those who hide beneath
Boris Johnson is trapped. He has thrown away his working Commons majority by expelling 21 reality-based Conservatives. He gambled on his political enemies doing the thing he wanted them to, vote for an early general election, then appeared surprised when they declined to do so. If he can’t get a Commons vote for that election
Nigel Farage: whatever happened to him? You remember, the chap in the coat who used to go on about Europe and all that. Time was, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing him. These days, not so much. Farage’s relative quiet in political circles says quite a lot about how easy a ride Boris
Exam question: what percentage of 17 and 18-year-olds sit A-levels? The answer – I’ll come to it in a bit – might just be the most important fact in British politics that most people in British politics don’t know. I ask because this is A-level results week, the annual festival of photogenic teenagers jumping joyously
In private moments of exasperation with rebellious Tory MPs, prime minister David Cameron used to complain that “too many of my colleagues think they’re here as tribunes of the people”. For him, as for Conservatives since the days of Edmund Burke, MPs should be representatives autonomously exercising judgment, not delegates meekly obeying instructions. Well congratulations
Revolutions, once started, are hard to stop. The fire that David Cameron so casually lit in 2016 has burned through many things that seemed like fixtures of British national life. Judicial independence; the Civil Service and the Bank of England; the Union; the Conservative party’s faith in institutions; basic standards of journalism; and parliament itself:
Some thoughts on the arrival in office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, based on his first speech, his first appointments and some conversations with people in different parts of the Conservative party and Whitehall today. These are not all my own predictions; some belong to others. But they’re under my name, so I’ll be happy
Westminster is, naturally, fixated on Boris Johnson and his first speech since his Conservative leadership victory. But it’s just possible that the most interesting and important speech of the day took place in Scunthorpe. That’s where Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England was delivering a speech called ‘Climbing the Jobs Ladder’. His
Why are increasing numbers of children designated as transgender? Are the resulting medical interventions safe and justified and in the best long-term interests of those children? These are questions of public interest. Some of the answers being offered are troubling, to say the least. One such answer came this week, and deserves attention from politicians
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure
I’m bored with writing about politicians and Brexit so this is an article about genitals instead. Feel free to make your own jokes about the sentence above, but I promise what follows is not funny. You could not, as the old phrase goes, make it up. Most of us, I think, like to see ourselves
It’s said that when Iain Dale, overseeing last night’s Conservative hustings in Manchester, announced the news that Oliver Robbins, the senior civil servant in Theresa May’s Brexit team, was leaving his post and the Civil Service, many of the Tory audience cheered. I’m told Iain Dale just read this tweet out at the Tory hustings
Everyone knows the story of how a small number of Conservatives will cast a vote that decides something of great and lasting importance. But the group of Tories is much smaller than you think, and they vote much sooner than you imagine: on Friday, in fact. I am not referring to the 160,000 members of
It’s not hard to work out the ‘lines to take’ that are being handed out from Boris Johnson’s team to his surrogates in politics and the media after the police were called to the flat he’s been living in. ‘It’s a private matter. It’s an invasion of privacy. The neighbour who taped the incident, called
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to look at recent media coverage of the Tory leadership race and conclude that Bois Johnson is a bit scared of Rory Stewart. Johnson’s fiends and surrogates have been training their fire on Stewart since the weekend, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. This started when Matt Hancock
In less than a month, Theresa May’s premiership will be history. If she is remembered at all, it will mainly be for Brexit. She took on a near-impossible task, made it harder (her misjudged ‘red lines’ from autumn 2016 will always haunt her), and finally failed at it. That had many consequences, not least the
