Conservative party

If Theresa May’s sole goal for the Tory conference is to survive it, then she’ll likely be less interested in what Boris Johnson was up to at his big ticket rally this afternoon, and more concerned about any comments made by the chairman of the 1922 Committee, Graham Brady. Brady is famously the man who keeps the letters calling for a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, and was introduced at a drinks event earlier in the conference as ‘the man who knows where the bodies are buried’. He is effectively the general secretary of the Tory backbenchers’ trade union, which makes him extraordinarily powerful. Brady and his

The Tory conference hall is, so far, struggling to replicate the size and excitement of Labour’s gathering last week. This isn’t entirely the party’s fault: the venue itself might be great for listening to an orchestra, but it tends to dampen what atmosphere there is. But the decline in audience enthusiasm has been taking place over a number of years across a number of venues. The reasons for this are manifold. One is that the Tories simply do not have the grassroots membership that Labour does. Another is the way Conservatives struggle to give rousing speeches about what drives them in the way that Labourites do. Ask a Labour MP

As you’d expect on the eve of Tory conference, everyone in the party is offering plenty of advice for Theresa May. Some are tugging the Prime Minister leftwards, while others are fretting that the Conservatives risk abandoning their values. There’s Jacob Rees-Mogg arguing that the Tories need to support the institution of the family, Sam Gyimah worrying that the party has ‘lost our way’ and is both ‘talking business down’ and ‘ignoring the concerns of voters’, Boris Johnson complaining about, well, quite a lot, and Liz Truss saying Labour’s latest PPB ‘does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party’. And it’s not even the real

The worst of Britain’s post-war mistakes, ideas we thought long dead, are once more in the air. Yet again there are plans for ‘workers on boards’ (the govern-ment, of course decides who’s a worker), and for mandatory price caps, based on the delusion that government can make things cheaper by diktat. Intelligent people are once more agreed that British employers should pay the highest minimum wage in the developed world — a policy estimated to condemn tens of thousands to unemployment. The tax burden is at a 30-year high, yet many assume we should make that burden still heavier — as if the country can be taxed to prosperity. The

The Conservative party has to move beyond Brexit and leaders: what is it going to be about? I suggest it has to be about healing capitalism. Capitalism is the only system that is capable of delivering mass prosperity, but it cannot be left on autopilot. Once every few decades it veers off track and requires active public policy. In the mid-19th century, the old Tory party was revolutionised by Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ agenda, correcting the social catastrophes of early industrialisation. In the 1930s, there was no Disraeli: indeed, no political party rose to the challenge of mass unemployment, which was addressed as an inadvertent by-product of rearmament. During the 1980s,

Theresa May has quite a few challenges to meet this conference season. One is obviously to avoid the sort of farce that her speech descended into last year. Another is to try to unite the warring wings of her party and convince her MPs that Chequers really is the only game in town. But equally as important is the need to show she has things she wants to do when it comes to domestic policy. This is hard: May hasn’t really managed to give that impression at any stage of her premiership, so to start in what feels like the swan song isn’t ideal. Added to that is the general

Following last night’s reports of open plotting against Theresa May, her critics in the Conservative party seem rather keen to row back on any suggestion that they really are planning a coup. Iain Duncan Smith, for instance, told BBC Radio 5 Live that he ‘would stamp on’ any attempted challenge, and that the talk of a plot was ‘totally overblown’. Others have pointed out that there were notable senior absences from the European Research Group’s meeting last night, including Bernard Jenkin, David Davis, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of course, even if those big names had been present and plotting merrily away, their plans would have been seriously undermined by

I am just going to let this speak for itself. It’s a slightly edited but verbatim account of tonight’s weekly meeting of the Brexiter European Research Group faction of the Conservative Party. It requires no additional comment from me – other than that I have multiple sources vouching for its veracity. “We’ve just had an ERG mass meeting, 50 odd MPs present, where virtually the only topic of conversation for 40/50 mins was: how best do we get rid of her? What’s the best way to use our letters? Comments included: ‘Everyone I know says she has to go’, ‘she’s a disaster’, ‘this can’t go on’. You might think that

The Conservatives were given a reality check today in the form of new Electoral Commission data on the financial health of political parties in 2017. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour managed to break previous records and raise just under £56m in a single year – beating the Conservatives by nearly £10m. Adding insult to injury, the Tories received more money from the dead (in the form of bequests) than from the (living) Tory grassroots, with income from membership fees nearly halved. Where Labour received £16.2m in membership fees last year, the Tories managed a paltry £835,000. This touches on a wider issue for the Conservative party: its relationship with the grassroots.

William Hague’s warning today that the Conservative Party mustn’t change the rules by which its leader is elected shows quite how much has changed in British politics over the past few years. Ideas that were very much in vogue in 2015 are now widely trashed. Where once it was considered a no-brainer that parties should make it easier and cheaper for members to join and even give them more say over policy making, now parliamentarians and commentators are running scared of just that. Why? Hague seems to think that there is little hope of encouraging healthy mass memberships today, writing: ‘A highly mobile and digital society is not conducive to

It’s been all out civil war in the Tory party since the disastrous snap election which saw Theresa May lose the Conservative majority. Now it looks as though the party, tired of all the infighting, might finally be turning their attention to Labour. A job advert on the site w4mp went up over the weekend for a Conservative ‘Battleground Manager’: Key tasks for the role include planning election campaigns, working out target seats, and taking the fight to the opposition. The ideal candidate will of course be a ‘self-starter,’ ‘manage multiple tasks under pressure,’ and have excellent campaigning skills. Based on the Party’s current skirmishes, Mr Steerpike thinks the job

Commentators on the left and right have been fiercely arguing for the past few weeks over which political party is more racist: Labour or the Conservatives. Conservatives have pointed out Jeremy Corbyn’s numerous links and associations with anti-Semites, Labour’s refusal to adopt the IHRA definition and Jewish conspiracy theorists on Twitter. In response, prominent left wingers have flung back at them calls by Sayeeda Warsi for an inquiry into Tory Islamophobia and comments by Boris Johnson about women in burqas looking like letter boxes. But what do the public actually think about allegations of racial prejudice within the two main parties, and who do they think is worse? Coffee House

‘The return of Ukip’ declared the headline on our cover story last week. The polling boffin Matthew Goodwin to whose analysis this referred was in fact more careful. Professor Goodwin did argue, however, that the potential may be there for a Ukip revival. So it may. But the figures for new recruits that he cites are modest. The doubt he describes as surrounding Nigel Farage’s chances of a comeback is real. Ukip’s present stance under its latest leader Gerard Batten (who has developed links with the campaign for the disgraced and imprisoned former leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson) looks crazier by the week. And there’s a world

Politicians in Wales sometimes complain, at least in private, about the lack of media and public attention they receive. But Andrew RT Davies’ resignation as leader of the Conservatives in the Welsh Assembly, means that Welsh politics is back in the spotlight. With the prospect of simultaneous leadership elections running over the summer for all four Assembly parties, this looks set to continue. The announcement in April that First Minister Carwyn Jones would stand down as Welsh Labour leader by the end of the year was followed last week by Ukip in Wales declaring that they would ballot their membership over who should lead their fractious National Assembly group. There

One of the laws of Brexit is that every Commons division and Cabinet meeting billed as being a ‘crunch vote’ or ‘crunch talks’ ends up postponing the crunching again, and again and again. This afternoon, Dominic Grieve announced that he would ‘accept the government’s difficulty’ on the matter of a meaningful vote and ‘support it’. He was speaking in the Commons shortly before a division was supposed to be called on this matter, and not long after the government had offered a compromise. That compromise involved David Davis issuing a Written Ministerial Statement which clarifies that the Speaker can decide whether or not a motion issued by the government using