Patrick O’Flynn

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

So the Conservative party is not going to try to become ‘more normal’ in the eyes of establishment centrists after all, but will instead chart a course towards becoming more conservative. After the astonishing elimination of James Cleverly from the Tory leadership contest this afternoon, Tory grassroots members are to be presented with a right-of-centre

Today’s third round of MP voting in the Tory leadership race has given James Cleverly an almost perfect result. Not only did he have a massive uplift of 18 MPs to 39, but with the 20 votes of the eliminated Tom Tugendhat now in play, it looks like he can afford to ‘choose’ the opponent

When is the best time to hit the front of a Tory leadership contest? In the final chain of the final furlong after coming up unseen on the rails, obviously. As charismatic front-runners from Michael Heseltine to Michael Portillo have found out, Conservative leadership battles are brutal for the established heir apparent. There is something about

Something happened at the Conservative party conference today which suggested it is too soon to write off the democratic world’s most successful party: there were three brilliant speeches in a row. Given that this political era is not known for its great orators, this was a most unusual and very welcome occurrence. It is too soon

Back in the 1980s, the American business guru Tom Peters came up with the advice to companies to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’. The idea behind it was that there was an asymmetry in customer responses to service standards which depended on what they had been guaranteed. A long delivery time could, for example, be perfectly acceptable to

Fans of Frank Sinatra used to have a favourite saying when their hero was in his pomp: ‘It’s Frank’s world. We just live in it.’ After a day and a half of the Tory conference in Birmingham, there is a temptation to refashion the observation around Kemi Badenoch, so completely has she dominated proceedings. And

What will be Rishi Sunak’s political legacy, other than the terribly embarrassing thing that happened on July 4? Not free speech on campus: Sunak never got round to putting that law onto the statute book before the general election. Not the absurd age-related rolling smoking ban: ditto. Nor A-level reform. Nor the new law that was