Patrick O’Flynn

At the start of a roller-coaster ride, a motorised chain pulls the carriages up to the highest point of the circuit, emitting a clanking sound as a ratchet takes effect. When the clanking stops those in the cars know they are about to go over the top. The canniest politicians across the western world are

It would be an exaggeration to say that in politics conventional wisdom is always wrong – but equally it’s not a bad rule of thumb. The prime mid-wittery of the moment concerns housing policy. We’re told that we’ve been building far too few houses. The way to help frustrated young adults escape the repressive confines

It was quite possible that Kemi Badenoch could have proved an instant hit with the British public and taken the Tories straight into a sizeable opinion poll lead. External factors could have fallen in her favour, enabling her not only to capitalise on the unpopularity of Keir Starmer and Labour, but also to win back

Some political disasters take a very long time to live down, as the Tories will discover over the coming years. One thinks of Labour’s winter of discontent during which, as folklore records, rubbish piled high in the streets and bodies went unburied. Or Black Wednesday, subsequently renamed White Wednesday, when the pound sterling crashed out

Does it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than two million signatures within a few days? Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm Conventional analysis would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors

Tony Blair spent much of his time as prime minister projecting a persona that most people of a conservative mindset found quite reassuring. But Keir Starmer is no heir to Blair. The New Labour leader removed a commitment to nationalisation from the party’s constitution. He pledged to keep the tax burden under control. And he

Labour’s approach to tackling the small boats crisis is based around a dichotomy so overly simplistic that it should not fool even an averagely intelligent child. Keir Starmer set it out in an article for the Sun newspaper in July: the people in the boats are innocent victims, the people arranging for the boats to

If Peter Mandelson is confirmed as our next ambassador to Washington there will be an outcry among swathes of both the right and the left of British politics. There always is when Mandelson lands a plum position. On the left, the resentment began over his transfer of allegiance from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair more

Hold the front page. The government may have finally smashed part of a people-smuggling gang, or as word-mangling Keir Starmer put it in a piece to camera, a ‘people-smaggling gun’. The details are as follows: a 44-year-old Turkish national was arrested at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in an operation involving the UK National Crime Agency

There was a cranky call doing the rounds online last week suggesting veterans should turn their backs on Sir Keir Starmer as he laid a Remembrance Sunday wreath. Naturally I opposed it, alongside many other conservative-leaning commentators. We argued that honouring our war dead is something we should want all the main strands of political

Never has there been a politician to have fallen so foul of the Eric Morecambe mistake of playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, as William Hague. The former Conservative leader spent the first years of this century as a hardline EU-sceptic and telling voters that lax immigration policies were

Here is a sign of how weak Keir Starmer’s relationship is with the new leader of the free world. Nigel Farage has repeatedly offered to act as a bridge between the UK Labour government and the incoming Donald Trump administration. And for the second time, Farage is celebrating a Trump presidential election victory with the

The shiny new Downing Street operation that has come into being since the departure of Sue Gray has decreed that this is going to be ‘small boats week’. They have created a media grid with the aim of promoting the idea of Keir Starmer as a strong and authoritative leader busily coordinating measures to accelerate

Kemi Badenoch could probably already have served a truncated term as prime minister had she made different choices. Back at the turn of the year, key figures inside the secretive group behind the commissioning of giant MRP polls that indicated how badly the Tories would lose under Rishi Sunak hoped she might indicate her willingness

A year ago, the Reform party had an average poll rating of six per cent and was as good as invisible to that large majority of the electorate which does not obsess about politics. Its then leader Richard Tice was showing impressive reserves of stoicism in keeping the show on the road, but there was

Were Kemi Badenoch not to be unveiled as the next Conservative party leader in a couple of weeks it would now go down as a very notable upset. Exposed to a demanding hour of cross-examination on the GB News leadership special, Badenoch landed her pitch almost perfectly. As the strong favourite with the bookies, Badenoch

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has this week put out an official statement that could fairly be described as ‘Wir schaffen das nicht’ – ‘we can’t do it’. Its official title is the rather drier – ‘Work on designing innovative ways to counter illegal migration’ – but you get the drift. It was

And then there were two. Either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will be the next Conservative leader. This is a contest that, for the first time since members were given the final say, will really go down to the wire. Whoever wins, the Tory party looks set to change radically. Badenoch’s list is peppered with