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Tory MPs are voting today on who should be their next leader. Candidates need more than 30 votes in order to proceed to the next round but while more than 200 Tories have declared their intentions, over 100 are still yet to say who they have backed. Below are the list of MPs who have not made their intentions known here.
Where do the Conservative leadership candidates stand on the Union? Jeremy Hunt has ruled out another referendum in the next decade. Tom Tugendhat says the SNP ‘can’t keep asking the same question hoping for a different answer’. (Oh, sweet summer child.) Penny Mordaunt reckons ‘another divisive referendum’ is ‘the last thing Scotland needs’. The biggest question mark hangs over frontrunner Rishi Sunak, who once reportedly advocated English independence from Scotland on financial grounds. (Finally, a prime minister Nicola Sturgeon can do business with.) The Union ought to be front and centre in this leadership contest. It is under threat in a way entirely unique in its three-century history.
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Today all candidates need 30 nominations to make it through to the next round. One dark horse in the race is Penny Mordaunt who is seen as Labour's greatest threat. This morning she held her official campaign launch in at Westminster's Cinnamon Club - promising to 'fix a broken Whitehall'. But will she be able to see off her rivals in the Tory leadership race?Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
Is Boris Johnson going to turn up to Prime Minister’s Questions next week? The final answer he gave to Keir Starmer at today’s session suggested he either thought this was his valedictory PMQs, or that he’s planning to be elsewhere next Wednesday. He said the next leader might be chosen by ‘acclamation’ – which doesn’t seem likely given how hostile the many camps are being to one another. Johnson added that ‘it is possible this will be our last confrontation’, and gave a barbed thanks to the Labour leader for being ‘considerably less lethal than many other members of this house’. He also said he would be leaving with his ‘head held high’.
As cabinet members were lining up last week to tell Boris Johnson to resign, one major actor was absent from the drama. Liz Truss was in Indonesia at a G20 summit and missed the fun. She flew back the day after Johnson announced his resignation, knowing that if she makes it to the final stage of the leadership campaign, she has a very good chance of becoming the next prime minister. She is the longest-serving cabinet member, having been environment minister, Lord Chancellor, a treasury minister, trade secretary and now Foreign Secretary. To her admirers, she’s a ‘true blue’ Tory who can inspire a following with her brand of liberty-loving conservatism. She loves the party base, who in turn seem to love her.
Is Penny Mordaunt the dark horse in the Tory leadership race? After topping a Conservative Home poll of Tory MPs, Mordaunt is certainly viewed as a dangerous candidate by her leadership rivals. This morning she held her official campaign launch in a sweaty, crowded room in Westminster's Cinnamon Club. The former defence secretary struck a patriotic tone as she recalled the Royal Navy's fleet leaving Portsmouth for the Falklands in 1982. Mordaunt said it made her realise the UK is a nation that ‘stands up to bullies’. Mordaunt suggested she would lead a return to traditional conservative values.
Prime Minister’s Questions got off to a rowdy start today – which was perhaps not surprising considering that it was the first since Boris Johnson’s resignation last week. But while Boris might have been expecting trouble from the Labour benches, it was parliament’s Scottish MPs who ended up causing trouble. As the Prime Minister began to answer his first question, the session was drowned out by heckling from the Alba party (formerly of the SNP) who began shouting incoherently about another referendum. Not to be outdone, the MPs were promptly shouted down by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who told them to ‘either shut up or get out’.
Priti Patel was supposed to be going before the Home Affairs committee this morning, but pulled out, citing ministerial changes in her department and recent events. The Home Secretary is understood to have cancelled the long-planned appearance at 5pm yesterday, seriously angering members of the cross-party committee. It raises an important question of whether the government is running a 'business as usual' operation while searching for a new PM This sounds like the sort of thing that only parliamentary nerds could possibly get cross about. But it does raise an important question about whether the government is really running a 'business as usual' operation while the Conservative party hunts for a new prime minister.
The Westminster rumour mill is in overdrive about Michael Gove’s intentions in the leadership contest. Fresh from bringing down Boris, the Brutus of the backbenches has surprised some by opting to back Kemi Badenoch in the race to find Johnson’s successor. His endorsement of Badenoch impressed some colleagues but many right wing Tories have convinced themselves that it is just part of a plot to split their wing of the party. Steve Baker went public on Monday, telling LBC listeners that: I am given to understand quite authoritatively from a candidate that Michael Gove started with Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove is now backing Kemi Badenoch.
‘You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing,’ said Winston Churchill, ‘after they have tried everything else.’ After much American talk of a ‘pivot to Asia’ and hence ‘withdrawal from the Middle East’, president Biden and his top team are visiting Israel today. From there, they will head to the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds: Saudi Arabia. Biden is coming from a White House full of young political staffers, most of whom have little respect for age and wisdom. In the Middle East, as with most Muslim-majority nations, a culture of veneration for the elderly still holds. Leaders, families, tribes, faiths, traditions and, with it, shame and honour resonate.
Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of 46, and soon afterwards Hunter started a short-lived relationship with his elder brother’s widow. In between he also developed a serious drug and prostitute addiction.
At a time of a worker shortage, we are somehow managing to keep 5.3 million people on out-of-work benefits. This is too much, says Suella Braverman. My colleague Stephen Daisley fervently disagrees and in his riposte, he quotes various figures about how Britain doesn’t spend very much on welfare compared to other countries. This is precisely what New Labour argued when it was keeping five million on benefits throughout the boom years and the argument didn’t stack up then either. The below shows the problem to which Braverman alludes: it really is quite a scandal and points to massive government failure. Set aside the wasted money: keeping 5.3 million working-age people in out-of-work benefits in a period of job vacancy abundance is a waste of lives and potential.
This is the full text of Penny Mordaunt's Tory leadership campaign launch: We’ve got to stave off a recession, we've got huge expectations to deliver on with Brexit, and we have new burdens to shoulder Over the past few days, I have been engaged in a form of speed dating with my colleagues. I've learnt a lot. I know that some of them were councillors before they came into parliament, they ran businesses, they worked with the voluntary sector, some of them are still pulling shifts in the NHS or with our armed forces, and many are veterans.They want to serve others. And when I meet people like that I wonder what it was that made them step up and take responsibility, to serve and make a difference.
Announcements from Tory leadership pretenders have been noticeably light on big ideas. But one interesting policy suggestion was floated today by the Mordaunt camp who have said that frazzled parents of toddlers should be given ‘childcare budgets’. This is likely to horrify Treasury mandarins who prefer schemes to get parents (in reality, mums) back into work and paying taxes as quickly as possible. Free nursery care for all is the fashionable go-to answer for every right-on lobby group hoping to reverse tanking birth rates. If we could only open up more super cheap nursery places, women would push out children to fill the places. The trouble is new mums don’t want this.
Here are some statistics that ought to send a shudder through Tory MPs. Between 1995 and 2012 the French centre-right was in presidential power, first under Jacques Chirac and then the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy. The month after Sarko was elected president in 2007, his party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), won 313 seats in the National Assembly. Today, following a rebrand to become Les Républicans in 2015, they have 62. This is actually better than some expected considering their 2022 presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, won just 4.8 per cent of the electorate’s votes, below the 5 per cent threshold required for candidates to be reimbursed their campaign expenses.
The emperor is naked. The public knows it, and they’re finally beginning to speak the obvious truth. The emperor, in this case, is President Biden. He took office with high hopes from voters and a promise to bring the country together. Those aspirations are dead. The public has lost confidence in Joe Biden – lost confidence that he can do the job, and lost confidence that he is even minimally competent. They certainly don’t think he has brought the country together (though they think Republicans share the blame for that). This sour mood hurts more than the President. It hurts his entire party, and will be extremely hard to reverse. Some decline in popularity is inevitable after a new president takes office. For Biden, however, the losses have been huge.
There’s a particularly amusing picture from the 1997 Tory leadership contest of Ken Clarke and John Redwood awkwardly paired up under a blue sign with the words ‘Uniting to Win’ on it. Though their campaign for power was forgettable, uniting to lose against William Hague of all people, they can take solace in being an unlikely pair of trend-setters. Theirs was the first use of a logo and slogan in an internal party contest, the start of a succession of design shockers on the British public ever since. The standard of this year’s leaders’ logos shows a slow decline. Back to basics would be a fine thing. Most slogans have been comically dire.
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar says of Gaius Longinus Cassius, the chief conspirator: ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look: he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’. None of the eight Tories fighting like ferrets in a sack to succeed our own fallen Caesar, Boris Johnson, looks leaner or hungrier than the former chancellor in his crisply laundered snow white shirt. But would what is beginning to look like his inevitable triumph as prime minister be good or dangerous for the Tory party, and the country at large?
Whoever is chosen to lead the Conservative party will be plunged into a storm of problems needing rapid and decisive action. This will require a fresh mind, boundless energy and courage. In short, the attributes of youth. This puts Kemi Badenoch and Rishi Sunak – both 42 years of age – at an advantage. Sunak, the current frontrunner, came across as suave and impressive in his leadership pitch yesterday. But Badenoch looks to be the better option for a Tory party – and for a country – in need of radical change. Too many leading politicians seem exhausted by office. At a time of soaring inflation and the threat of a summer of strikes, this is no time for an old hand.
Reporting from Sri Lanka over the years has left me with mixed memories. On the one hand, there’s the horror and trauma of the Easter Bombings of 2019, which claimed 269 lives. The traumatic scenes at the hospital and morgue have been hard to forget, as have the eeriness of the tourist spots after all its foreign visitors had fled. On the other hand, there is the country itself. It is relatively poor, of course, and beset by endemic corruption and nepotism, particularly at the top of government, along with its fair share of ethnic tension. But it has an incredibly warm-hearted and hospitable culture, filled with Buddhist gentleness and good humour, and that charming, slightly stuffy anachronistic Englishness that you find in certain postcolonial societies.
