Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Lauren Atkins

The Tory candidate system is broken: I should know

A few weeks ago, if you’d asked me how I expected to spend my time on Thursday, I’d have answered without thinking: trying to win my seat. I was a Conservative candidate, and have poured a five figure sum of my own money into trying to get into parliament. But in the end, I didn’t get a seat, and it turns out that I’ve dodged a bullet. Even if I had won, I suspect I would have ended up in a much-reduced Conservative party that has totally lost its way, among MPs with little chance to effect change. Unlike many of those MPs, though, I don’t think it has to

Gavin Mortimer

Macron has himself to thank for the rise of Jordan Bardella

The mood has taken a dark and intolerant turn in France since the National Rally’s (NR) victory in the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The left and Macron’s centrists have not accepted their reverse with good grace. On Sunday evening there were spontaneous protests in several cities, including Bordeaux, where police had to use tear gas to disperse an angry crowd of 200. In Cherbourg on Monday, a gang of Antifa assaulted Nicolas Conquer, a candidate for the wing of the centre-right Republicans that has allied with NR. He said later that it was another sign of the ‘normalisation of political violence by the extreme left’.

Steerpike

Trump campaign lead blasts Labour meetings as ‘fake news’

Oh dear. As election campaigns draw to a close, Sir Keir Starmer has found himself under scrutiny at the eleventh hour. A Telegraph article about his ‘pragmatic’ approach to US relations that states Labour has been talking to Donald Trump’s team on a ‘daily basis’ has been slammed as ‘fake news’ – by none other than top GOP strategist and Trump’s own campaign manager himself. Oo er. The Telegraph piece states that ‘staff working for David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, have been in near-constant talks with Trump’s team for weeks, since he met the former president’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita in Washington in May’.  But Chris LaCivita took to

Fraser Nelson

Boris and Gove give the perfect Tory requiem

The high point of the Tory rally last night were the superb speeches from Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. ‘Is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority?’ said Johnson. After all, voters ‘sent Jeremy Corbyn and his then-disciple Keir Starmer into orbit’ in 2019 and then saw the UK develop the vaccine first and has now beaten the ‘post-Covid inflation’. Reform UK voters will end up with ‘exactly the opposite of what they want’ – the ‘Kremlin crawlers’ who ‘make excuses for Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine… don’t let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas’. Gove listed Tory

Catriona Stewart

Will the Tories manage to hold on to rural Scotland?

South of the border, a Labour majority is a foregone conclusion. Yet in Scotland, in almost all 57 seats, contests are predicted to be tight. ‘Knife-edge,’ is the phrase heard on repeat, most recently from First Minister John Swinney. While the Scottish central belt has drawn intense interest – given polls have consistently suggested there will be a Labour resurgence with even Glasgow looking to turn red – rural Scotland has received a little less attention. Sir Keir Starmer’s party is less a player, with key battlegrounds here a race between the SNP and the Tories. There is a long held Scottish narrative that boasts Scotland is more left-leaning than the

Cindy Yu

Why the Tories can’t count on the Hong Kong vote

On a high street in suburban London, a curious message appeared recently. Written on a stand-up whiteboard in traditional Chinese, it read: ‘Thank you to Chris Patten, who fought for British residency for Hong Kongers. 4 July – please vote Conservative’. In the last few years, the leafy commuter town of Sutton, to the south of London, has seen thousands of new arrivals from Hong Kong since the government opened up a route to citizenship for those with British Nationals (Overseas) passports. In total, 140,000 have arrived in the UK since 2021, most of them given the right to vote. In a number of constituencies, they make up a significant

Charlotte Henry

The Liberal Democrats should be more liberal

The Lib Dems have had a much more enjoyable campaign than their rivals. Sir Ed Davey has been splishing and splashing all over the country. On Monday he jumped off a crane attached to a bungee cord while imploring people to ‘do something you’ve never done before: vote Liberal Democrat!’ A few days before he was at a theme park. We will see in the early hours of Friday morning if his stunts have paid off. We can see where the Lib Dems’ comfort zone is, and the party still retreats there when it can It hasn’t all been bungee jumping and rollercoasters. Alongside all that, the Lib Dems have remained

Jay Mens

How Trump and Starmer could form an unlikely alliance against Iran

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated. Tehran may never have a better window for building a bomb Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer’s party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris swoops in late to help out Tories

Boris Johnson has tonight made a surprise appearance at a ‘stop the supermajority’ Conservative rally to warn of the dangers of Keir Starmer. The former prime minister, who has spent most of the election campaign on holiday, came on stage in Central London to chants of ‘Boris! Boris’ and told the crowd of party activists that: ‘I’m really, absolutely clear that I was glad when Rishi asked me to help. Of course, I couldn’t say no, and I’m here for one reason and one reason only, which is the same reason as all of you, all of us are here. We’re here because we love our country.’ He warned that

Isabel Hardman

How will Starmer handle reshuffles?

Will Keir Starmer keep David Lammy on as foreign secretary? That sort of question would not normally be at all relevant until about midday on the day after an election, but the result has become such a foregone conclusion that everything has sped up. The Labour leader was today asked whether Lammy would go into the Foreign Office after the election, given there have been persistent rumours that he won’t.  Starmer replied that: I’m not going to be lured through your question into naming cabinet if we get that far. But I’m absolutely clear that we will return to stability and ensure that we have the right people in the

Steerpike

Deepfake porn site targets female politicians

Just when you think the election campaign can’t get any madder, it does. Now it transpires that a ‘deepfake’ porn site has posted a slew of doctored images bearing the likenesses of 30 female politicians – including deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner to senior Tory Penny Mordaunt. You couldn’t make it up… The targets of the dodgy photos – produced using artificial intelligence – are not confined to one particular party. As well as Rayner and Mordaunt, an investigation by Channel 4 News found that outgoing Tory Dehenna Davison and left-wing Labour candidate Stella Creasey were also featured. Davison has slammed the revelations as ‘disturbing’ and ‘violating’, while vocal feminist

Fraser Nelson

Has Reform peaked too soon?

14 min listen

The election campaign was going well for Nigel Farage’s Reform… until it wasn’t. A series of controversies have been difficult for the party to shake off. Will the distractions cost them votes and MPs? How will it affect their momentum – and who’s to blame? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale.

Limor Simhony Philpott

Will the IDF ever leave Gaza?

Israel has started another round of strikes in Khan Younis, having left the Gazan city in April. This isn’t the first time that Israeli forces had to return to areas from which they’ve already withdrawn. As Hamas terrorists flee current fighting zones, such as Rafah in southern Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) need to stop them from re-establishing fighting capabilities elsewhere. Having advised Palestinian civilians to leave areas in which terrorist infrastructure and activity exist in Khan Younis, the IDF has carried out several strikes last night and today. This was also in response to a barrage of rockets fired from the area into Israel by the terrorist organisation

Brendan O’Neill

The BBC’s Miriam Cates hit job doesn’t add up

This morning we witnessed BBC cant at its finest. It came in the form of an exposé of the Tory candidate Miriam Cates. This self-styled voice of conservative reason was once a trustee of a church that promoted ‘conversion therapy’ for gay people, the Beeb reports. It spares no detail. Ms Cates’ old church carried out ‘exorcism’ rituals designed to drive out the ‘demon of homosexuality’ from those in its wicked grip, we are told. The political undertone of the Beeb’s handwringing is unmistakable: are we sure we want religious oddballs like Cates in parliament? The BBC attack on Cates is thin gruel But here’s the thing: the BBC’s alarm

Stephen Daisley

Nigel Farage is not the future

Nigel Farage is the most misunderstood politician in Britain. Vilified by the liberal media as ‘far right’ and mistaken by nationalists as a kindred spirit, the Reform party leader doesn’t fully comport with the pub bore caricature sketched by his enemies nor with the blokey everyman persona lapped up by his admirers. He is a wilier, more elusive beast, as his comments on the French elections remind us. Speaking to UnHerd ahead of the first results, Farage warned that victory for the RN would be a ‘disaster’, saying the party would be ‘even worse for the economy than the current lot’.  Dis-moi que ce n’est pas vrai, Nigel! It’s a statement sure to

Steerpike

Labour will ‘destabilise’ Reform, Badenoch warns

Election day is just around the corner and politicians across the country are pulling out the stops. Now Kemi Badenoch has taken to the fine pages of the Telegraph to urge voters not to back Reform – after new analysis splashed across today’s papers (detailed by Katy here) suggests that 130,000 voters across 100 seats could result in a very different election outcome. The Business Secretary has opined on the threat posed by an incoming Labour government – which she suggests is Reform’s favoured outcome. ‘Reform leaders have been clear about their aim in this general election,’ Badenoch writes. ‘Not to win it, but to ensure that the Conservatives lose

James Heale

Is it going wrong for Reform?

Has Reform peaked too soon? In the wake of Rishi Sunak’s D-Day debacle, the party was riding high in the polls. Successive surveys suggested that they were neck-and-neck with the Tories. After one poll even showed Reform ahead, Nigel Farage hailed it as a ‘crossover moment’. He jokingly referred to himself as the ‘Leader of the Opposition’, declaring he ‘absolutely’ believed Reform would win more votes than the Conservatives. A fortnight on, things now look a little less rosy for Reform. Following Farage’s interview with Nick Robinson – in which he suggested the West helped provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the party faced an onslaught of cross-party criticism. Reform’s

Ian Acheson

Can Sinn Fein win the UK’s most marginal constituency again?

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue bunting, there are a sea of Israeli flags fluttering in the drizzle. Across town, in nationalist estates, Palestinian flags abound. These adopted tribal identities epitomise the immutable sectarian character of the competition for the seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. While Northern Ireland is slowly becoming a more homogenous society and progressive politics makes progress

Isabel Hardman

Who cares what Keir Starmer does with his Friday nights?

As part of their vote-Tory-or-the-kitten-gets-it final push, the Conservatives have spent the past 12 hours pushing the idea that Keir Starmer would ‘clock off’ at 6 p.m. as prime minister. This was based on a radio interview the Labour leader gave where he said he would try to protect Friday evenings for his family: his wife is Jewish and they raise their children in that tradition. Labour has been pushing back pretty hard against the Tory attacks on this matter, saying Starmer didn’t suggest in the interview that he would refuse to take important calls on a Friday night, and pointing to the full transcript where he also argued that

Ross Clark

The shame of Royal Mail’s postal vote delay

Britain’s creaking infrastructure and frequent paralysis of public services deserved to be a bigger factor in the election campaign than it has been. But could it now actually affect the result by disenfranchising some voters? A growing number of voters have complained about failing to receive their ballot papers in the post. Given that many people requested postal votes because they knew they were going to be away from home this week, it will now be too late for them to vote, even if delays are sorted out at the last moment. Come Friday, and the late arrival of postal ballots threatens to become a major scandal It is not