Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express
The idea of bringing back national service to knock into shape teenage tearaways and long-haired layabouts was a staple of my youth. Peppery comment articles along those lines in the old, broadsheet Sunday Express or News of the World would crop up intermittently through the ill-disciplined 1970s. Typically they would then be countered by the response that ‘the army
Rwanda removals policy, for so long an anticipated cornerstone of the Tory re-election effort, has today officially become an ‘over the rainbow’ idea wide open to mockery from opposition parties. Not only will the deterrent impact on small boat crossings of the ‘regular drumbeat’ of flights that the Prime Minister promised us not have had
What happens when a resistible force collides with a moveable object? Such is the nature of the imminent battle between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak for the keys to No. 10. Given the underwhelming appeal of both men and the extent of public disillusionment with politics in general, it is hardly likely to be a
For Rishi Sunak, today amounts to another instalment of the fantastic success story of his premiership: that ‘the plan is working’. A new key statistic about the rate of inflation shows that consumer prices are rising much less quickly. Taming inflation is the singular success among the five key targets he set out at the
Talk to almost any right-wing Tory MP these days and one of the first things they raise – with me anyway – is whether or not the Reform party is going to cost them their seats. ‘It makes no sense getting rid of people like me. The way we are going, we will only send
Labour’s new ‘stop the boats’ policy is a risible exercise in deception that will only ever fool the truly gullible. The centrepiece, announced by Keir Starmer today, is to set up a new ‘Border Security Command’, which will be an elite force empowered to use anti-terror laws to ‘smash the people-trafficking gangs’. Funding for the
With the best will in the world, it is hard to see the defection of Natalie Elphicke MP to the Labour party as a noble deed. You could paper the walls with disobliging observations that Ms Elphicke has made about Sir Keir Starmer’s party, especially when it comes to her supposed driving mission to restore
Tory supporters went to bed on Friday night believing that their man Andy Street would hold on handily in the West Midlands Metro Mayor contest, while also daring to dream that Susan Hall might just pull off a sensational win over Sadiq Khan in London. It has not played out like that. Not only did
Given the universal forecasts of the Tories taking a proper pasting in yesterday’s elections, it is quite something for Rishi Sunak’s party to have done worse than expected. But a truly dismal result in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election, coupled with early council results indicating the party could end up losing half of the thousand
There is an old Rowan Atkinson joke about the secret to good comedy timing in which Atkinson says the word ‘timing’ at just the wrong moment. Timing is important in politics too. As Harold Macmillan observed of Anthony Eden’s brief and unhappy premiership: ‘He was trained to win the Derby in 1938. Unfortunately, he was
If you have been doing as badly as Rishi Sunak has as prime minister, then it doesn’t take much to register a notable improvement. Yet there is no point in his detractors denying that over the past week he has done just that. First, he got stuck into the issue of Britain’s burgeoning ‘sick note
Like a cowboy builder sucking his teeth about unanticipated complications on the job, Rishi Sunak has just pushed back another deadline. The Prime Minister was meant to get flights off to Rwanda this spring but has now given himself until July. And this isn’t even the main job. The actual grand design he is supposed
In economics, there is a phenomenon known as ‘automatic stabilisers’, which kick in at the onset of a recession. Without politicians having to do anything, state spending on out-of-work benefits increases while the amount of money taken off private citizens in taxes decreases, thereby preventing the economy from going into freefall. Hence wild fluctuations in
The great trans hoax is coming to an end. The idea of thousands of people being ‘trapped’ in the wrong body is an interpretation of gender dysphoria that is increasingly being seen as damaging nonsense. The invasive treatment regimes, particularly for teenagers, carried out by the NHS, are unravelling too. And so is the claim
The herd of Conservative MPs is on the move again, this time obediently setting off towards the abattoir in which the careers of most will meet a grisly end. When historians come to write their accounts of the Conservative administrations of 2015-24, they will have a bewildering variety of ‘worst weeks’ to choose from, but
Is there anyone in Britain who believes that Rishi Sunak will take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights? If there is then that person may also still think they got an absolute bargain when they paid a man in a pub £10,000 in cash to take ownership of Tower Bridge. For the
Were I to tell you that the most significant political figure of his age celebrates a landmark birthday this week, you’d probably work out that I could not be referring to Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer. There would be an argument for suspecting I might be talking about Boris Johnson, given that he was born
By their rugby analogies shall ye know them: when Boris Johnson was asked about his chance of becoming prime minister, he spoke of the ‘the ball coming loose at the back of the scrum’. That characterisation sought to disguise his burning passion to reach the top. Getting to be PM would be the result of
Abdul Ezedi is dead and gone. The Clapham acid attacker was laid to rest in a Muslim burial at a cemetery in east London after a funeral at a mosque in the west of the capital. This is what his family and friends wanted for him. Given that we know he was a loyal customer
Is Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer right to have limited the access to and sway held over him by Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence? Lady Lawrence, a Labour peer who was made the party’s race relations adviser by Starmer after he became leader early in 2020, is in no doubt
