Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

Coffee House

Live blog: Leadership timeline announced, Truss declares, Gove for Kemi

The Tory leadership race is getting increasingly crowded: a dozen candidates are now bidding for the top job. Rishi Sunak remains the front runner, but can he hold off challenges from fellow favourites Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt? Around half of Tory MPs have nailed their colours to the mast; you can read the exhaustive list of who’s backing who here. Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the main developments: Liz Truss launched her leadership bid last night, promising to ‘start cutting taxes from day one’ in an article for the Daily Telegraph today. Michael Gove endorsed Kemi Badenoch. Her odds of winning went from 80/1 on Thursday to 10/1 this morning. The 1922 executive elections are to be held this afternoon.

Nick Tyrone

The problem with Penny

I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days about who can beat Penny Mordaunt in the contest to be the next Tory leader. Despite the shaky start to her campaign, I still think she’s the favourite. Rishi Sunak has too many people trying to stop him; most importantly, a lot of the membership. Truss has too many detractors within the parliamentary party (although she could possibly overcome this and win). Kemi Badenoch is a real possibility but has a lot of ground to make up during the course of the contest. The rest are either too underbaked, have too much baggage, or are beset by other issues. Mordaunt’s appeal is pretty obvious: she’s articulate and outwardly confident.

James Kirkup

The case for Tom Tugendhat

When the editor of The Spectator asked me to write about Tom Tugendhat, I initially declined, explaining that doing so would put me in a slightly difficult position. Tom and I have been friends for 20-something years since we met as young journalists via the Scotsman and then Bloomberg’s City of London newsroom. So I can’t claim much objectivity here. Nor can I position myself as an insider-savant of the Tory leadership race. I’m not a Conservative, though I have spent a lot of my professional life talking to and writing about Conservatives. I first started writing about the Tories when William Hague was leader; the first leadership contest I covered was the one that Iain Duncan Smith won in September 2001.

Ed West

Boris Johnson’s classic fall

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career. Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to ‘how to behave morally and politically’.

Katy Balls

Are some Tory candidates about to be ruled out?

The Tory leadership contest is a very crowded place – with Liz Truss overnight becoming the tenth candidate to declare (with Rehman Chishti becoming the eleventh a few minutes later). But it could be significantly slimmed down by this evening. Monday marks the day of the elections for the 1922 executive made up of Tory backbenchers. Once the new executive is in place this afternoon, they will meet to immediately decide the rules for the coming contest. To avoid the contest dragging on, the plan is to get the current field narrowed down to two by the summer recess on 21 July. The committee will discuss raising the threshold of MP nominations required to enter in the first place.

Sam Leith

The fatuous idea that politicians must be ‘in touch’

I was in Hyde Park on Friday watching an open-air Pixies show with very great delight when somewhere between ‘Vamos’ and ‘Debaser’ one of my companions bid fair to harsh my buzz by asking what I reckoned to the Tory leadership contest. Well, goodness. I mumbled something about not really having a dog in the fight but thinking that, whatever his other shortcomings (the visible self-love, mostly, and maybe that thing with his wife’s tax status), Rishi Sunak seems to more or less have his head screwed on. ‘But he’s a multi-millionaire,’ my friend said. ‘Isn’t he just going to be hopelessly out of touch?

Sunday

Katy Balls

Liz Truss enters the leadership contest

Liz Truss has become the tenth candidate to enter the Tory leadership race. Announcing her intentions in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, the Foreign Secretary has promised if successful to 'fight the election as a Conservative and govern as a Conservative'. As for her pitch to MPs and members, Truss joins the list of Tory leadership hopefuls promising tax cuts. She says she would take 'immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living' which would mean cutting taxes from 'day one'. A supporter of Truss goes further: 'Liz is the tax cutting candidate who can actually lead the country from day one, help ensure Putin loses in Ukraine and the candidate with a track record of delivery in government'. So, how is Truss's campaign doing so far?

James Forsyth

Gove backs Kemi Badenoch for prime minister

Michael Gove has endorsed Kemi Badenoch for Tory leader. Badenoch, who was one of his junior ministers at the Department for Levelling Up, is described by Gove as ‘Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare’ and she has a ‘focus intellect and no-bulls**t drive’. Gove’s support is a coup for Badenoch. It is not every day that someone throws their weight behind someone who was their junior minister until a few days ago. Gove makes a typically eloquent case. But the jump for Badenoch from being a minister of state to being prime minister would be immense. The challenge for her is persuading 120 MPs – the final-two threshold – that she can make that leap at a time when there is an energy crisis, a security crisis and inflation.

Katy Balls

Penny Mordaunt’s trans problem

The Tory leadership contest is yet to officially begin, but things are already turning nasty. As well as reports in the papers of dirty dossiers on candidates, Tory grandees have come out to call for a ceasefire in which Boris Johnson loyalists stop attacking Rishi Sunak. Now a row has broken out over Penny Mordaunt's candidacy. The former defence secretary announced this weekend that she will be running for leader – storming into second place on MP support. On announcing the news, Mordaunt took to social media to try to address one of the biggest criticisms facing her when it comes to the contest: that she is too 'woke'. The allegations regard trans rights after she said in 2018 that 'trans women are women and trans men are men'.

Steerpike

Suella goes for Penny on gender row

Is the leadership race turning toxic already? Three days in and Rishi Sunak has been the target of a vicious private memo while Nadhim Zahawi is fighting off questions about his tax arrangements. Now it seems that Penny Mordaunt is the latest candidate in the firing line; namely over her past support for trans rights. The 'PM4PM' campaign has got off to a shaky start, having been forced to remove its campaign video after using footage of a British Paralympian without his permission. And now, despite releasing a midnight Twitter thread to try to rebut criticisms that Mordaunt is 'woke', Penny is facing flak from the Tory right. Mordaunt has claimed that it was she who 'changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender neutral language to use female terms.

Suzanne Moore

The Tories are showing Labour how it’s done on diversity

The elephant isn’t just in the room. It is trumpeting loudly but it is greeted with bemusement, denial, or polite silence. I am talking about the Tory leadership race which is full of what the renowned fox-killer now apparently calls 'brown' people and those other odd chaps, called women. The Tories can always claim the first ethnic minority PM in Disraeli who was Jewish but they don’t make a song and dance about it. Jollyon Morn has now deleted his so-called anti-racist tweet perhaps because it was in fact a teensy bit racist, was it not, to suggest that all 'brown' people must cleave to the political position of his choosing i.e. Labour? Is it possible that we end up with the next Prime Minister actually being the third Conservative woman PM?

Steerpike

Full text: leaked Tory memo attacking Sunak

The Telegraph has got hold of a zinger of a private memo currently doing the rounds on Tory MPs’ WhatsApp groups. The 421-word dossier, which sums up all of the ex-chancellor’s supposed errors during his two-year tenure, has been published by the paper’s associate editor Camilla Tominey.  The document lays into Sunak, accusing the favourite to replace Boris Johnson of reckless overspending and a commitment to ‘big state’ economic policy. It also claims that he lied about his wife’s non-dom tax status and that he committed ‘schoolboy errors’ that led to widespread fraud of the Covid loan scheme.

James Forsyth

Tory Grand National or demolition derby?

A cabinet minister yesterday observed to me that they would scream if they heard another person suggest the Tory leadership race was like the Grand National. Rather defensively, given it is one of my favourite analogies, I asked what they thought would work better. A little while later, they messaged back: demolition derby; a reference to the sport where cars drive into each other until only one is left standing. Today this analogy seems rather apt. The Sundays are full of quite extraordinary accusations of dirty tricks, which, if they were included in a TV drama would be thought of as OTT. The Telegraph has published an anti-Rishi Sunak briefing note that is being circulated.

Kate Andrews

Will the Tory hopefuls deliver on their tax promises?

Rather unsurprisingly, the bulk of MPs who have declared their leadership bids so far are promising lower taxes. Also unsurprisingly, very few details are on offer explaining how they’d do it. In Nadhim Zahawi’s early pitch to the public — he is expected to share more tomorrow — he’s asserted that ‘taxes for individuals, families and business need to be lower - and will be on my watch.’ Tom Tugendhat's ‘clean start’ manifesto made a similar point: ‘Taxes, bluntly, are too high,’ he asserted, ‘and there is an emerging consensus across the party that they must come down.

James Forsyth

Tories adopt American-style campaigning

We have seen two Tory Leadership bids this morning that aim to show they can bridge the party divides. Jeremy Hunt, who campaigned for Remain and sits for a Lib Dem facing southern seat, has announced that Esther McVey, Brexiteer and northern seat, will be his deputy PM. As he put it, John Prescott to his Tony Blair. Tom Tugendhat, Remainer, southern seat, never served under Boris Johnson, has announced the backing of Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Brexiteer, northern seat, one of Johnson’s leadership campaign whips and still a member of the government.  This is a very American approach, you balance the ticket with someone who can reach the parts of the party that the principal struggles with. In British politics, this approach has a chequered history.

Patrick O’Flynn

The case for Kemi

At the very top end of politics there is a vital distinction that is underappreciated whenever the case for change is being assessed. It is the difference between plausible and compelling. Tony Blair in his pomp was the latter, Gordon Brown never more than the former. Margaret Thatcher had only to be plausible to win the 1979 election against a broken Labour Party. But once she had overseen the liberation of the Falkland Islands in 1982 she became compelling and two further election wins followed, each by a landslide margin. The case for leaving the EU became plausible after the Lisbon Treaty was steamrollered through without a promised referendum to be swiftly followed by a crisis in the eurozone which highlighted its basic design flaws.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday show round-up: Boris was ‘too loyal’

Sajid Javid – I gave Boris the benefit of the doubt again and again The starting gun has been fired in the race for the next Prime Minister. Ten Conservatives have already thrown their hat into the ring, with Penny Mordaunt becoming the latest to declare as of this morning. Sophie Raworth spoke to the man who kicked off this process – the now former Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who resigned his post on Tuesday, being shortly followed by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak. She asked him if their resignations had been co-ordinated in order to bring the ‘Big Dog’ down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Fraser Nelson

Penny Mordaunt’s embarrassing start

Penny Mordaunt, the second-favourite to be the next Prime Minister, has declared that she’s running – via a video where she barely features. It's a mush of Tory visual cliches with a Little Britain-style voiceover man talking about service, the future etc with pictures of flags, soldiers, ships and (of course) Thatcher. But it doesn't really feature her. Her voice comes right at the end saying that 'our leadership needs to become a little less about the leader' and more about 'the ship'. And that seems to be it. On her website (registered, it seems, three years ago) Mordaunt lambasts Boris Johnson for policy that is 'poorly planned and executed'. Fair enough, but it seems she has cocked up her own video. Aren't those American marines?

Isabel Hardman

Will the next Tory leader tackle sleaze?

All the candidates in this Tory leadership contest will have to pay tribute to the importance of standards in public life, given what did for Boris Johnson. For some of them, this will probably be as meaningful as posting a #bekind meme on social media. But if there isn't a wider reckoning over standards and particularly sexual harassment, then the Conservatives –  and all the other parties –  are just setting themselves up for more scandals. This should matter particularly to the Tories given their general belief in preserving and strengthening institutions: parliament as a whole has been seriously damaged by the scandals of the past few months, and so far there is precious little evidence that anyone is bothering to think about how that will change.

James Forsyth

The battle for the Tory right

Who will be the candidate of the right in this contest? There is this morning a mighty tussle on to be the standard bearer of the right in this contest. Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, is the preferred choice of many in the ERG. She has the backing of Steve Baker and as a Spartan has the battle honours too. She is offering the full spectrum of scrapping net zero, tax cuts, protocol and anti-wokery. She also stole a march by coming out early on Wednesday. Then, there is Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, who is expected to jump into the race shortly. She holds a great office of state and has been an MP since 2010. Her argument will be that as the most senior figure the right should unite around her.