Patrick O’Flynn

What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras,

The Labour party is not very good at electing prime ministers but it is very good indeed at electing House of Commons Speakers. Lindsay Hoyle is the fourth in a row to have been a Labour member, though it should be noted that John Bercow was nominally a Tory when he was installed and didn’t

And with one bound he was free. In fact let’s make that two. A pair of whopping by-election wins in seats the Tories held at the last general election with five-figure majorities have brought to a close a torrid fortnight for Labour leader Keir Starmer. His U-turn on green policy can now safely gather dust,

Sometimes a single act changes the entire course of events for years to come. For instance, many Manchester United football fans fondly recall the moment in 1990 that a young striker called Mark Robins scored a crucial goal in an FA Cup tie that saved the job of Alex Ferguson, who had at that stage

It is quite some achievement to launch an attack on Keir Starmer’s contortions over trans rights versus women’s rights and come off worse. Yet that is what has happened to Rishi Sunak this week thanks to an increasingly visible flaw in his make-up: Sunak simply lacks political nous. While he may have been a fluent

It came as quite a shock when we learned that many of our universities had moved into the lucrative trade of selling visas to foreign nationals, with a bit of higher education attached as a legacy sideline. Now there is a new question hanging in the air: is nothing sacred? For we are having to

Rishi Sunak is a drab technocrat mired in a failed political paradigm and with a tin ear for public opinion. And yet to blame him for the current dreadful state of the Conservative party is largely to miss the point. The Tory party is facing an extinction-level general election result, not primarily because of Sunak

It was ‘the knife of the long knight’, joked one social media wag about the bid by the unfeasibly tall Sir Simon Clarke to oust Rishi Sunak from 10 Downing Street. So lanky was he as a youth that Clarke was nicknamed ‘stilts’ in his schooldays. Conventional wisdom at Westminster will tell you this morning

There is a scene in the film Reservoir Dogs where three gangsters are pointing guns at each other and one suggests they should put down their weapons and ‘settle this with a conversation’. Instead the trio create the ultimate bloodbath by all pulling their triggers. The absence of trust can do that to people. Just

The debate about whether Rishi Sunak’s Tories are heading for a 1992-style against-the-odds narrow election win or a 1997-style landslide defeat is pretty much settled now: it’s the latter. A terrible few months for Sunak had been pointing that way in any case, but now a huge political data-dump has confirmed it. YouGov’s giant opinion

There is a modern country music standard called ‘When You Say Nothing At All’. The song, taken to the top of the UK pop charts by the Irish singer Ronan Keating a quarter of a century ago, is a treatise on the power of non-verbal communication. The central ‘hook’ line involves someone telling their lover:

Let the trumpeters trumpet and church bells across this land peal away in celebration: the Home Office has an administrative achievement to its name. According to ministers, a ‘legacy’ backlog of almost 92,000 asylum claims made before the end of June 2022 has been cleared, just as Rishi Sunak pledged that it would be. It is

How is the idea that Nigel Farage might join the ‘broad church’ Conservative party going then? Given that he floated the notion mainly to troll the party’s high-ups and then they breathed life into it mainly to try and keep right-leaning voters on board, it’s going about as well as one might expect. Which is

That best-selling 1970s toy Action Man proved the power of evolution. First, the painted hair on the initial models was superseded by ‘realistic’ flock hair and then came an ‘eagle eyes enhancement’ that allowed the eyeballs to be moved back and forth via a lever at the back of the head.   One is put in

Do not let the relatively comfortable margin of victory for the Rwanda Bill’s second reading fool you: we have now moved squarely into the ‘third Brexit’ stage of British politics. The first British exit from looming European control over key policy levers came when eurosceptics beat off a plot to take the country into the

When he found out that a career-minded MP called Rishi Sunak had come out in favour of leaving the EU, David Cameron turned to George Osborne and declared: ‘We’ve lost the future of the party.’ Almost eight years later, Sunak should be turning to his own wing man – Oliver Dowden perhaps or even Cameron