Patrick O’Flynn

Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens, the author Fay Weldon once declared.  This observation about life’s tendency to deliver sudden squalls between periods of apparent calm could certainly be applied to the leadership of the Conservative party.  It is only a year ago that Kemi Badenoch rather brilliantly used the leadership contest

We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday. And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to

It hardly takes a genius to work out that whoever is in charge of the government’s media grid over the summer parliamentary recess has designated this as ‘illegals week’. Not only has Home Office floated the eye-catching idea of building a holding centre on Ascension Island, but the Bibby Stockholm has finally seen its first

There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme

It will not come as much of a shock to learn that people who voted Conservative in 2019 generally think their chosen party is fairly useless these days. A new poll this week from YouGov has broken this down issue by issue – the results make chastening reading for any Tory MP who thinks the

How big is a 20 point opinion poll lead and what word should we use to describe it – insurmountable, commanding, or maybe flaky? Right now, 20 points is the average advantage Keir Starmer and Labour hold over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives: 46 plays 26. In Tony Blair’s case, such a lead proved more than sufficient

After claiming that Labour is on the same side as criminal people-trafficking gangs, Rishi Sunak clearly owes a rival party leader an apology. The person he should be saying sorry to is not Keir Starmer but Boris Johnson. When Johnson struck a low blow against Starmer for having failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile while DPP,

The Tory green brigade now tends to be heavily concentrated in the House of Lords, where Zac Goldsmith recently joined John Gummer, now known as Lord Deben. This pair were jointly responsible for the Conservative party ‘Quality of Life’ report of summer 2007, which argued: ‘Beyond a certain point – a point which the UK

‘One out of three ain’t bad’ isn’t a saying you hear often. Yet avoiding a clean sweep of by-election defeats overnight will surely have Rishi Sunak breathing a sigh of relief. Holding on in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip not only means the Tories have exceeded the rock-bottom expectations of the

When the Lib Dem peer Brian Paddick complained on social media last month that the House of Lords was keeping punishing hours, it is fair to say the plight of peers was not greeted with universal sympathy. Lord Paddick, the Lib Dem spokesman on home affairs in the upper house, had the battle around the

The announcement by Ben Wallace that he will stand down as Defence Secretary at the next Cabinet reshuffle and then give up being an MP at the general election hardly counts as a sensational turn of events. There are at least a dozen happenings at the top end of the Tory party from the past

When Rishi Sunak made ‘stop the boats’ one of his key pledges at the start of the year he mentioned the importance of being seen to ‘strain every sinew’ in pursuit of that goal. This led some of us to suppose he had a fall-back position should he prove unable to stop all illegal immigration

When confronted with a list of problems and setbacks afflicting the Government, a minister recently told me: ‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn.’ I doubt she really believed it, which is just as well because, in a scientific sense at least, it turns out not to be true. But Tory ministers – aware

The very modest poll ‘bounce’ that Rishi Sunak delivered for the Tories after the farcical Liz Truss premiership has proved to be of the dead cat variety. The most recent YouGov poll showed the Conservatives at just 22 per cent – about half the vote share they achieved in the 2019 general election. This, you

If Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges already looked in terrible shape at the start of the week – which they did – then today’s events have placed one of them on its deathbed. The promise to ‘stop the boats’ was administered its last rites in the Court of Appeal this morning when Lord Chief Justice

These are heady times for Britain’s smaller political parties. Seldom has there been as much interest from voters in breaking away from the stale embrace of the entity known to many as the ‘LibLabCon’. On the left, the Greens keep growing – though their addiction to identity politics in general and the militant trans movement

Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold

The Commons privileges committee report into the conduct of Boris Johnson is completely damning. All the kerfuffle about whether the committee was justified in devising a new intermediate category of mendacity defined as ‘recklessly misleading parliament’ turns out to be irrelevant. The entire seven-strong committee, including the four Tory members on it, have found that

Such is Boris Johnson’s magnetic draw that his resignation gambit is still being discussed largely in terms of what it means for Boris Johnson: will he be back in the Commons next year? Could he lead his party again? But it is time to ponder what it means for Rishi Sunak, who after all is