James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
Six years ago this week, I went to dinner with four friends. Three were journalists: James Lyons, Sam Coates, Tim Shipman. The fourth does something else; I’m not going to drag him into this tale. Dinner was in the Blue Boar, a cornerstone of Westminster entertaining and then, as now, the sort of place you
Let’s assume this really is the start of the last act of Theresa May’s premiership. Let’s assume too that her Withdrawal Agreement dies a fourth and final death in the Commons in early June. The Conservatives will then go looking for a new leader and prime minister. There are already no end of candidates. But
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has launched an impressive new commission on inequality. What’s most impressive about the project is not the Nobel-winning array of commissioners, it’s the fact that the IFS is trying to broaden public and political understanding of what inequality is. And in so doing, it also describes a political trap that
The Tory leadership contest hasn’t formally begun but the shadow-boxing has been uninspiring. Brexit positioning dominates, leavened with a bit of backstory and personal colour: Dominic Raab’s kitchen, Michael Gove’s parental home in Aberdeen, Liz Truss’s Instagram account, Jeremy Hunt’s wife. And Boris Johnson keeping quiet, for some reason. To be fair, Rory Stewart’s simple
I have written several times here about the fear that some women have about expressing their opinions and concerns about the trans-rights agenda. I know of women in many walks of life, some of them prominent public figures, who think that current and potential policies intended to make life easier for trans women (that is,
It can never be said enough that Twitter is not real life, and that it is a huge mistake to think that what goes on there is representative of politics, society or humanity as whole. I’m not sure about its overall impact on the world, but I sometimes think that British politics and journalism might
One of the many things that has been neglected in the Conservative Party because of all-consuming Brexit is a meaningful debate about markets and business. Confronted with a Labour leader offering a clear critique of capitalism as a “rigged” system and outflanked by Nigel Farage telling a remarkably similar story about big money financing a
It makes almost no sense for the Brexit debacle to have come down to the issue of an ‘independent British trade policy’. Trade was not a central issue at the referendum and remains wildly misunderstood by public and politicians alike. But we are where we are. If we end up crashing out by accident, or
The Times today reports serious concerns about the functioning of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Lucy Bannerman, the Times reporter, writes: “The Times has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting
Nick Boles’ Common Market 2.0 plan for Brexit has an awful lot going for it: it would honour the instruction of the British people to leave the European Union, while minimising the economic cost of that decision by keeping the UK largely within the Single Market. And the fact that the previous paragraph will drive
It’s come a day earlier than I expected, but we are now entering the ‘government of national unity’ phase of the Brexit debacle. Nicky Morgan, once a Tory Cabinet minister, said this on the Today programme: ‘It may well be that if you end up with a cross-party approach to finding a majority in the
Failure. A failure of politics, a failure of courage. MPs have failed over Brexit, time and time again. Worse, many MPs fail to realise how badly they’re failing, the harm they are doing. This isn’t true of everyone in the Commons. There are still some heroes. Nick Boles is one. His cross-party Common Market 2.0
The first job of a columnist on a big newspaper is to be noticed. If people aren’t talking about the things you’ve said, what’s the point? By that measure, Sarah Vine is a good columnist. Her name is known. At the Daily Mail she says things that people notice and talk about. She does it on
Theresa May has united Westminster. Right across the political spectrum, politicians and journalists agree that her televised statement from No. 10 last night was an epic misjudgement, that seeking to pin public blame on MPs for the failure to agree a Brexit outcome has made it even less likely that they will now reach such
Here we go again. Another woman is facing a police investigation – and potentially, a jail sentence — because she wrote things online about sex, gender and a person who changed gender. So far, so familiar, but this tale has a significant feature. The woman is a journalist. A British police force is investigating a
Here we go again. Another woman is facing a police investigation – and potentially, a jail sentence — because she wrote things online about sex, gender and a person who changed gender. So far, so familiar, but this tale has a significant feature. The woman is a journalist. A British police force is investigating a
Whether Britain leaves the European Union and the manner of that departure, are the most consequential decisions that British politicians will face for a generation. The choices our leaders and representatives are making this week are as important as any they will make in their careers. And as things stand, with the European Research Group
A Commons defeat for Theresa May’s proposed EU withdrawal agreement this week is priced in. Westminster has shrugged and accepted another Commons drubbing as a given. MPs’ refusal to back the deal is just another fact of life, something mundane and barely worth commenting on; all the action is in considering reactions and responses to
The recent history of the BBC is a tale of two Dimblebies. David, the elder, enjoyed the higher profile on television, but at a terrible price: his latter years at Question Time saw him acting as ringmaster for a programme that had become a ‘show’, a three-ring circus of shallow anger and offence. Now Jonathan,
I am a little late in coming to the recent report on community cohesion by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hate Crime. It was published earlier this month but drew little attention at Westminster: yet another example of Brexit smothering the domestic policy agenda, I suppose. The report has lots to say about lots