Stephen Daisley

The sacking of David Mundell as Scottish Secretary has left Ruth Davidson’s Tories reeling. The response is not tribal or even ideological; Brexiteers and Remainers alike regard his replacement Alister Jack as a good sort. What most are still struggling to fathom is the thinking behind Mundell’s punting. Of course, he is an opponent of no deal — Jack, by contrast, has taken the pledge and says he could support a crash-out Brexit — but he was seen as hard-working and effective in the Scotland Office. He knew the brief, had the experience and was well-briefed in the tactics of the SNP.

When I was fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a parliamentary aide to Jo Swinson. The MP for East Dunbartonshire was full of promise and more to my political tastes then than the clunky managerialism of new PM Gordon Brown. She rejected me. If nothing else, this shows Swinson has sound judgement. After all, I would have made a terrible Lib Dem staffer. I was – and remain – in favour of the Iraq War, the war on terror, tuition fees, first past the post, nuclear power and erecting a statue of Tony Blair in every parish in the land. For many years, that was the Lib Dems’ strong suit: what they were for was so vague almost anyone could support them.

Darren Grimes has won his appeal against a £20,000 fine imposed by the Electoral Commission. Grimes, the 25-year-old who ran the BeLeave campaign group, was accused by the watchdog of breaching expenditure rules during the EU referendum. Following proceedings which saw Grimes crowdfund his legal campaign, Judge Marc Dight has ruled that the fine be withdrawn. The Guardian reports: ‘Dight agreed with Grimes’ counsel that the campaigner had not intended to mislead and had been confused by the Electoral Commission’s registration form. He further concluded that the commission had failed to satisfy itself beyond reasonable doubt that BeLeave was not a genuine unincorporated association, and therefore was not able to conclude an offence had been committed.

The Final Showdown, as the Sun/Talkradio’s debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt was billed, clarified some important points for Tory members still deciding how to cast their vote. Both candidates ruled out a general election before the UK leaves the EU, though Hunt warned that setting a deadline as Johnson has means we could ‘trip ourselves into an accidental general election before October 31’. Both men were also clear that the backstop has had its day, with Hunt declaring it ‘dead’. The Foreign Secretary talked up technological solutions to the Irish border, while stressing the need for a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ to Dublin that there would be no hard border.

Nicola Sturgeon is expert at laying traps for her opponents but this time she may have ensnared herself. During the May 2016 Holyrood elections, the SNP leader and occasional First Minister said a Leave vote in the upcoming EU referendum should be grounds for a second ballot on independence. This, of course, was when Remain was expected to win and when England voted Out while Scotland voted In, Sturgeon’s bluff was called. She has spent the past three years devising evermore elaborate ruses to distract her restive grassroots. The latest is a Citizens’ Assembly, a forum used in Ireland to ease in constitutional changes on gay marriage and abortion.   The idea is to bring together 120 randomly-selected Scots to ruminate on the future of the nation.

In less turbulent times, the disappearance of the Home Secretary would lead the television news bulletins and clear the next morning’s front pages. Yet Sajid Javid went missing on Monday with barely an eyebrow raised. The former Conservative leadership candidate travelled to Jerusalem and visited the Western Wall, the second-holiest site in Judaism and buttressing the holiest site: the Temple Mount. His pilgrimage to the destination of millennia of Jewish prayers is the first by a UK Cabinet minister in 19 years and especially noteworthy because while there he had, in the eyes of his own government, dropped off the map.  The UK does not recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and in fact doesn’t recognise it as even being inside Israel.

This evening in Britain, the Jewish Shabbat dinner will follow the traditional order: blessing the candles and the wine, washing hands, giving thanks for the bread and trying to get through the first serving of noodle kugel before someone brings up the Labour party. The decision by the national executive committee to restore the whip to Chris Williamson will be on the menu tonight. The Jew-baiting Nosferatu was suspended in February for ‘a pattern of behaviour’, that pattern taking the shape of a giant middle finger to the Jewish community and culminating in a grisly speech declaring Labour ‘too apologetic’ about anti-Semitism.

A revolution stopped in its tracks is an uncanny sight. After impatiently pursuing reforms to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), the Scottish Government has suddenly hit the brakes. Shirley-Anne Somerville, SNP social security minister, announced the halt in a statement to the Scottish Parliament on Thursday. Although Nicola Sturgeon, at her minister’s side for support, remains committed to ditching medical diagnosis in favour of self-identification, she has made substantial concessions to feminist dissenters.  The proposed three-month wait for a gender recognition certificate will be extended by a ‘mandatory three-month reflection period’.

'Rorymania is over,’ Isabel Hardman pops into my inbox to tell me, in last night’s Evening Blend. Rory Stewart’s elimination from the Conservative leadership race cuts short a seductive insurgency that began with pseudo-selfies and flirted with the opportunity, however wishful, of a political realignment. One place Rorymania never took off was inside the Conservative party, where Stewart’s campaign was viewed with something between bewilderment and resentment. At its electoral apex, Rorymania commanded support from just 11.8 per cent of the parliamentary Tory party.

One of the most awkward moments of Tuesday night’s Conservative leadership debate was when a Muslim voter challenged the candidates on anti-Muslim prejudice within their party. The BBC identified the man as ‘Abdullah Patel from Gloucester, speaking from a studio in Bristol’, and described him as an imam. His question stood out because it left Boris Johnson flustered and eventually falling back on his Muslim great-grandfather who immigrated to the UK a century ago. The question also prompted Sajid Javid to urge his rivals to back an independent inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry within the Tory Party, something they all appeared to agree to.

If you’ve ever been in group therapy, you will have recognised many of the behaviour types in the BBC’s Tory leadership debate. There was Mr Avoidance (Boris Johnson), who kept his head down and let the clock run out, and Mr Calculating (Jeremy Hunt), who kept his interjections to a minimum and studiously ignored his rivals in favour of speaking directly to the inquisitive punters. There was The Overachiever (Michael Gove), trying to one-up everyone by boasting about his achievements in government and his many plans to solve all of Britain’s ills. Sajid Javid was the Passive-Aggressive Snarker, agreeing with Gove here, jabbing Boris there, and mugging sceptically throughout Rory Stewart’s every answer.

You might not have realised from his lack of appearances but Boris Johnson is standing to be Tory leader. There are MPs on the left of the party, and so he’s told them he’s a One Nationer. There are MPs on the right of the party, and so he’s told them he’s a tax-cutter. And what a tax-cutter he is. Johnson says in this morning’s Daily Telegraph that he wants to hike the higher rate income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000. This, the paper estimates, will cost £9.6bn annually and will be paid for using the £26.6bn fund for No Deal Brexit preparations and by raising National Insurance contributions. So far, so Tory, but what about Scotland?

The Conservative Party was founded 185 years ago and may not survive the next five. YouGov and Opinium both put the Tories in third place and on less than 20 per cent of the vote. They managed just 8.8 per cent in the European election, coming fifth behind the Greens and losing all but four of their MEPs. The primary cause of la crise actuelle is the government’s failure to deliver Brexit and it is to this which much of the Tory leadership conversation is addressed. However, there are other factors, structural and social, which have depressed the Tory vote and candidates to replace Theresa May are keen to prove they can win voters back to their party’s tarnished brand.