Patrick O’Flynn

The surest way to put people off an opinion they might otherwise agree with is to get somebody they actively despise to articulate it. Yet this is what the anti-Boris Johnson political class proposes to do repeatedly in the House of Commons on Sue Gray Day, perhaps as early as tomorrow. One does not have

For those of us who were reporting on politics way back in the 1990s, ‘Tory sleaze’ is a phrase that echoes down the ages. Though there had been plenty of run-of-the-mill scandals involving Tory MPs in the first couple of years of John Major’s premiership, things really took off after his ‘back to basics’ conference speech

Labour spin doctors this morning whisked Keir Starmer to the scene of his party’s biggest gain in the north in order to provide the TV networks with pictures of him celebrating victory. They took him to Barnet. That’s Barnet, North London. For that’s how far the red tide ran last night. It couldn’t even sweep

Awarding themselves the unearned prize for moral superiority and assuming that the electorate will do so too is a crippling fault of the modern Labour party. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has just outed himself as a severe sufferer of the syndrome via the wounded tone he has taken over being questioned about the events

For a week and a half no migrants at all crossed the Channel in dinghies. A theory began to take hold that the mere prospect of migrants being transferred on to Rwanda – a plan unveiled by Home Secretary Priti Patel in mid-April – was already acting as an overwhelming deterrent to people in camps

It seems to many of us that British society is falling apart and that this – even more than our present economic difficulties – is the biggest problem politics has to deal with. This falling apart is not by accident, but by the design of a new cult of leftism that seeks to divide people

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the 1980s heyday of the light entertainment show Blind Date. A series of well-scrubbed young men and women would compete to be taken out by a potential paramour who was hidden on the other side of a screen. They would begin their moment in the spotlight with a

The Tory party has always had an ‘awkward squad’ of MPs ready to stir up trouble against their party leadership at the slightest pretext. Its members used to be right-wingers marked out by their penchant for extravagant attire – stripey blazers and bow ties loomed large – and their failure ever to get near a career

If you want to see what explosive growth looks like then I invite you to eschew all the old Covid charts and instead make your own graph plotting the number of Channel-hopping migrants year on year. In 2018 there were 299, in 2019 there were 1,843, in 2020 there were 8,466 and in 2021 there

When the original Sue Gray report was published at the end of January it seemed indisputable that Boris Johnson would be toast if he received a fixed penalty fine as a result of the partygate furore. Back then the PM was hanging on to majority support on the Tory benches in Parliament by his fingertips.

There is a scene in one of the Lord of the Rings films in which kindly Bilbo Baggins becomes contorted with fury as he glimpses the ring around the neck of his young cousin Frodo and tries to snatch it away. This shocking loss of emotional balance reminds us of the old saying that power

Away from the well-merited focus on Ukraine, normal politics carries on in Britain. One has to poke around a bit to find it, but there are several issues, rendered all but invisible, that will weigh heavily on the minds of voters at the next general election. Rather than Russian barbarism in Ukraine, it is these

Poor Rishi Sunak. Within two months the Chancellor has gone from someone confident enough to publicly rebuke the Prime Minister over his choice of words to someone who merely seeks to ape them. ‘I wouldn’t have said it,’ Sunak grandly told a press conference at the start of February when asked about Boris Johnson’s jibe

Who was to blame for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being held captive in Iran? It shouldn’t take a professor of ethics to answer such a question. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held on trumped-up charges by a despotic regime that has used hostage-taking to advance its agenda ever since its formation in the Iranian revolution of 1979. Back

Among opposition politicians there is a new question being asked of the war in Ukraine: why has the UK not taken in more refugees? A mere 50 visas were initially issued by the Home Office. Meanwhile, Poland had taken in more than a million Ukrainians, Hungary 180,000, Slovakia 128,000 and even little Moldova 83,000. Labour shadow

Is Rishi Sunak any good at politics? In recent days Labour sources have been putting it about that they no longer fear the prospect of the Chancellor stepping up to take over from Boris Johnson if he is forced out by partygate. According to one briefing to the left-wing New Statesman, Keir Starmer’s team has

After a relatively successful spell attempting to side itself with ordinary folk, Labour has lurched back into hardline identity politics with a particular focus on the issue of race. Over recent days some of the party’s leading figures have stoked up the idea of Tory Britain being a hotbed of discrimination. Shadow foreign secretary David

Well I don’t know about you, but I definitely heard a nasty slur flung from one leader to another during the parliamentary debate on the Sue Gray report. Not Boris Johnson’s claim that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile while he was Director of Public Prosecutions. That was merely a pathetic, unbecoming, unwise