Politics Archives

Saturday

8 June 2019

The real problem with Michael Gove’s drug admission

The problem for Michael Gove is not that thousands of Conservative party members will open their copy of the Daily Mail this morning and think to themselves: ‘Gove has taken illegal drugs, therefore he is unfit to be Prime Minister’. It is that Gove or his supporters will fall into the trap of trying to turn his admission into a virtue. How tempting it will be for them to try to say: ‘look, all Govey’s done is what millions of other students have done. That makes him a normal human being – unlike all these swivel-eyed moralists who would condemn him for it’. But that is what would be fatal to Gove’s chances of winning the Tory leadership.

Steerpike

Michael Gove’s cocaine blues

The Tory leadership race has taken on a new turn this weekend with the Daily Mail splashing on Michael Gove's cocaine confession. The Environment Secretary tells the paper that he took the 'drugs on several occasions at social events more than 20 years ago'. At the time, Gove was working as a journalist. Of the experience, he says: 'It was a mistake. I look back and I think, I wish I hadn’t done that.' Gove goes on to say that he doesn't think this should rule him out of the leadership race: 'I don’t believe that past mistakes disqualify you.' The admission comes ahead of the publication of a book about Gove by Owen Bennett – Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry. So, how did it come to pass?

James Forsyth

Could the Tory leadership race end early?

The Tory leadership is fast becoming Boris Johnson’s to lose, I say in The Sun this morning. He has more MPs backing him than any other candidate, and his campaign receives a further boost this morning with the former Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon endorsing him. In the words of one of those knows the Tory parliamentary party best, ‘the wind is blowing in one direction’. There is increasing talk among senior figures in the party that if the former Foreign Secretary comes out on top in the parliamentary rounds, it would be best to skip the members part of the contest and make him Prime Minister straight away. The argument goes that the polling shows that Johnson is the members’ choice, and so they wouldn’t mind him being coronated.

Claire Fox

What Channel 4’s Jon Snow can learn from the Brexit Party

Since being elected a Brexit Party MEP, I have gone from gamekeeper to poacher as far as the broadcast media is concerned. Until six weeks ago, I had the privilege of being a commentator who could sit on couches endlessly pontificating. Now as a politician, I’m the target of my fellow commentators. They either discuss me in my absence or ask a series of staccato questions with little room for context or nuance. Maybe I’m fair game. After all, I have spent two decades as a Radio 4 Moral Maze panelist interrogating witnesses. This, perhaps, is my comeuppance.

Friday

7 June 2019

Stephen Parkinson

Boris Johnson’s court victory is good news for remainers and leavers

In the end common sense has prevailed – and swiftly. When District Judge Margot Coleman decided last week to issue a summons against Boris Johnson for misconduct in public office it looked as if the case would drag on for weeks or months. But exceptionally the High Court today intervened in the criminal case to stop it now, recognising that it would have inevitably failed had it made it to the Crown Court. The arguments in court today centred around the nature of the crime that Boris Johnson was alleged to have committed. Misconduct in public office is an offence aimed at public officials who misuse their public position to such an extent that it constitutes a gross breach of trust.

Nicole Lampert

The shame of Labour MPs who campaigned for Lisa Forbes

How seriously is Labour taking the investigation into its anti-Semitism problem by the UK equalities watchdog? Well, in the early hours of this morning it was celebrating the election in Peterborough of a woman accused of anti-Jewish racism. Her campaign had been supported by around 60 Labour MPs as well as hundreds of activists. Just over a week after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) launched its investigation into Labour, we now have in Lisa Forbes an MP who both the anti-racism group Hope not Hate and the Labour party’s Jewish affiliate, The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), are demanding has the whip removed before she even steps into Westminster. Forbes has insisted that she believes anti-Semitism is ‘abhorrent’.

Konstantin Kisin

Brexit and the death of the British sense of fair play

As an immigrant Remain voter, I am starting to worry about my fellow members of the metropolitan elite. Some of those whose cause I share dutifully attend protest marches, attack people whose political views they don’t share and talk cheerfully about the rise of fascism. The madness of this supposedly liberal cause is in plain sight, yet it continues to thrive, boosted supposedly by Remain’s performance in the EU elections. We were told by some that Remain won the election in which a six-week old Brexit Party captured first place, a third of the popular vote and 40 per cent of seats. It rather reminded me of how we do elections in Russia: first you vote and then someone comes along and explains who actually won.

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: what awaits the next prime minister?

As Theresa May hands over the keys to Downing Street, what burning injustices will she also hand over to her successor? Isabel Hardman writes in this week’s cover piece that there’s nothing funny about the question – there is a series of hard decisions on domestic crises that the May government has put off for three years. From social care, to housing, to energy, HS2, and rising crime rates – the real question for the Tory leadership contenders isn’t who has the balls to deliver Brexit, but who has the strength of character to sift through that scary in-tray.

Robert Peston

Will Brexit destroy – or save – the Tory party?

Pretty much the whole intellectual gap (if we can dignify it as such) between the candidates in the Tories' leadership contest is summed up in two tweets this morning that react to the Conservative humiliation in the Peterborough by-election. One tweet was by the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the other by his predecessor Boris Johnson. And I will come on to the dispute between them after weighing the catastrophe that Peterborough was for their party. In what for years was a relatively safe Tory seat, the Conservatives slumped from second place to third, suffering a fall of 25 percentage points in their share of the vote, compared to the result in the 2017 general election.

Ross Clark

Labour’s victory in Peterborough should terrify the Tories

Politics may seem to be deeply confusing at present, but in fact there is one very stark conclusion to come out of the Peterborough by-election – that while Labour and the Conservatives are both deeply unpopular, the Labour vote remains more tribal than that of the Conservatives and will hold up better in a general election. Hard though it might be to see the bright side when your party’s share of the vote has plunged from 48 per cent to 31 per cent, Peterborough is something of a quiet triumph for Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour result is truly miserable until you realise that the Conservatives’ share fell from 46 per cent to 21 per cent.

Steerpike

Watch: Peterborough’s new Labour MP quizzed on anti-Semitism

Peterborough's new Labour MP has only just been elected but already she is finding herself embroiled in controversy. Lisa Forbes was taken to task in the early hours of this morning over a revelation that she once liked a Facebook post saying that Theresa May had a 'Zionist Slave Master's agenda'. Here is what she had to say in response: 'I don't have an anti-Semitic bone in my body.... It was engaging in posts in error and for that I'm deeply sorry.' Forbes also once signed a letter calling on Labour not to adopt the full IHRC definition of anti-Semitism. It now seems she has changed her tune: 'At the time there was a lot of concern about that definition.

John Connolly

Labour win the Peterborough by-election

After a long night of counting, and an even longer campaign, the Labour party have been declared the winners of the Peterborough by-election. Lisa Forbes, the Labour party candidate, will replace Fiona Onasanya who was ousted from the seat earlier this year after she was convicted of perverting the course of justice. Forbes won 10,483 votes in the election, ahead of the Brexit party on 9,801, and the Conservatives on 7,243. In a speech celebrating her victory, Forbes said that the Brexit party's rejection at the ballot box showed that the 'politics of division will not win.' Tonight will be a disappointing result for the Brexit party candidate, Mike Greene, and the party's leader, Nigel Farage.

Katy Balls

Rory Stewart campaign point to new polling in bid to win backing of MPs

Will Rory Stewart still be in the Tory leadership race come Tuesday? The International Development Secretary is seen as the wildcard of the contest. Regarding at first as having little to no chance of becoming leader owing to his pro-deal position, the undeterred Tory MP has ran a rather creative campaign going on various walks and meet and greets with members of the public in a bid to convince members of Parliament to get behind his leadership bid. His efforts have garnered a lot of attention and endorsements from unlikely places. The problem is very few of those endorsements are coming from the Conservative parliamentary party that decides who makes it through the rounds – before the membership selecting from the final two.

Thursday

6 June 2019

Peter Jones

Seduction and the Boris bus

Boris Johnson is to be tried at the Crown Court on the grounds that, during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, he crucially affected the referendum result by arguing that the UK paid the EU £350 million a week, ignoring another interpretation that the sum was only £250 million a week. Ancient Greeks knew all about advocating one side of an issue, as a law suit exemplifies. Euphiletus was the defendant in a homicide case brought against him by the relatives of one Eratosthenes. The relatives claimed that Euphiletus had murdered Eratosthenes after luring, or even forcing, him into his house as part of a premeditated plan. But Euphiletus’s defence (we do not possess the prosecution’s case) was that Eratosthenes had been seducing his wife.

The Spectator

Letters | 6 June 2019

Trump and Brexit Sir: Your leading article (‘The Trump card’, 1 June) states that ‘May’s successor should seek to capitalise on Team Trump’s enthusiasm for Brexit’. President Trump — the leader of by far our most important political, economic and military ally — has always respected what most British MPs have chosen to ignore: that the British people voted to leave the European Union. Assuming that the Conservative party wants to survive, it must choose a proven vote-winning leader who is determined to leave the European Union on WTO terms by 31 October this year, unless the EU has agreed by that date to a convincing, substantial improvement to its current offer.

Toby Young

Could a Tory-Brexit Party alliance actually work?

In 2013, I started promoting a tactical voting alliance between Conservative and Ukip voters. It wasn’t just about avoiding the calamity of a Labour victory at the 2015 General Election – which looked likely then – it was also about trying to secure a parliamentary majority for an EU referendum. I called the campaign ‘Country Before Party’. Given that a potential alliance between the Tories and the Brexit Party is something that almost half of Conservative Party members are in favour of, I thought it might be worth recounting my experience. Having once been a tub-thumper for this type of arrangement, I’m now less enthusiastic. It’s happened before, of course.

Michael Gove

How I could get a better Brexit deal

There are things that we can do which will change the way in which we leave the European Union. I think that, critically, one of the issues that caused me particular concern has been the backstop. And it's caused me concern for two reasons. One: as a unionist I didn't like the idea of any part of our United Kingdom being treated differently. And secondly, as someone who wants all the benefits of a full Canada-style free trade agreement I don't want to have some of the customs restrictions that are implicit in the backstop. At the last meeting at Strasbourg, the EU committed to working alternative arrangements that could obviate the need ever to go into the backstop or could ensure that we actually replace it.

Robert Peston

How Boris and Corbyn could both be undone by Brexit

When the influential Tory ERG Brexiter Steve Baker refused last night on my programme to deny Boris Johnson is closer to his position on how to leave the EU than Dominic Raab, and he would be backing Johnson, I concluded that Johnson is now unstoppable. Barring some self-inflicted cataclysm (which cannot be ruled out) – the former foreign secretary will be Tory leader and new PM in July. Because where Baker goes, a significant number of other Brexiter Tory MPs will venture too; Baker denies he is their shepherd, but the ERG MPs habitually choose the sometimes illusory safety of travelling as a herd.

Gavin Mortimer

Could Marion Maréchal-Le Pen stop Macron winning a second term?

There were two significant interviews on French television on Sunday evening. One featured Laurent Wauquiez, the erstwhile leader of the centre-right Républicains, who fell on his sword after the disastrous performance of his party in the European elections. Minutes before Wauquiez announced his resignation, Marion Maréchal gave her first major television interview since stepping down as a National Front MP in June 2017.

Katy Balls

How will Raab’s prorogue comments play out with Tory MPs?

To prorogue or not to prorogue? That’s the question dividing the Brexiteer candidates today following the One Nation conservative hustings. After Boris Johnson, Andrea Leadsom and Sajid Javid on Tuesday all ruled out proroguing Parliament in order to achieve a no deal Brexit in the event that MPs tried to block one, Dominic Raab used his appearance on Wednesday night to tell a group of MPs that he would not rule out suspending Parliament to bring about the UK's exit from the EU – with or without a deal. Proroguing Parliament is what happens at the end of every parliamentary session.