Conservative party

It has become commonplace to remark that there exists in Britain a mainstream political grouping that seems to be dwelling on another planet. Lost in fantasy, harking back to days long-gone, it lives on illusion. Time and the modern world have passed it by. Fleet Street and fashionable opinion rage against these mulish daydreamers for turning their backs on the voters and depriving Britain of an effective opposition. And all this is true. In only one detail are Fleet Street and fashionable opinion mistaken. They’ve got the wrong grouping in their sights. It is not Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their crew who fit this picture: it is the Labour

Don’t expect ‘fireworks’ from the Budget one of Osborne’s closest political allies told me this week. Ahead of the Budget on Wednesday the Chancellor finds himself hemmed in by the EU referendum, fraying Tory discipline and the worsening global economic situation, I say in my Sun column this week. A Budget four years out from a general election is normally when a government takes some risks. But I doubt Osborne will be doing much of that on Wednesday. First, he doesn’t want to do anything to make the EU referendum more difficult for the government to win—the intensity with which David Cameron is campaigning reveals how worried he is about

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no–brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the

Later today, barring last minute developments, Labour and SNP MPs will temporarily unite with the Conservatives’ religious right to defeat the government’s plans to liberalise Sunday trading laws — echoing the defeat which Mrs Thatcher suffered on the same subject 30 years ago. The Left will chirrup, but why is it apparently in favour of keeping Sunday special when logic dictates that it ought to be against? The Reverend Giles Fraser aside, the Left nowadays is generally quite anti-God –– or it is certainly against the promotion of Christianity as an established religion. In the diverse, multi-cultural society of its dreams, no religion is superior than any other and none

Pro-Brexit Tory Cabinet Minister would, I suspect, not be complaining about the government’s referendum campaign tactics if they didn’t fear that they were effective. Whatever you think about how he has done it, David Cameron has driven the risks of leaving the EU up the agenda this week. He has pushed the Out campaign onto the back foot. This is what makes Boris Johnson’s appearance on Marr tomorrow morning so important, I argue in my Sun column this week. Out need Boris to drive their agenda as successfully as Cameron is pushing IN’s. The interview is a big moment for Boris too. It will be the biggest test yet of

Boris Johnson’s attack on David Cameron’s EU deal as achieving ‘no real change’ is part of the very high-profile campaign that the senior Tories campaigning for Brexit are waging. They have covered the media over the past week with interviews, quotes and rebuttals to every claim that the Prime Minister and his allies have offered. What is interesting about Boris’ comments is that he is trying to take the debate back to the question of whether Cameron actually got anything in the renegotiation. The Prime Minister has rather pointedly moved on from talking about that, focusing now on the dangers posed by a ‘leap into the dark’, which requires a

Of course it’s vicious. It was always going to be. Sure, they’ve spent decades living peacefully side by side, but so did the Hutu and Tutsi. So did the Alawites and Sunnis, and so did every manner of former Yugoslavian. In politics, old hatreds do not die. They merely keep mum, so as to get selected and maybe become a junior minister. You will not find me dwelling upon the row in cabinet, this week, about whether pro-Brexit ministers are allowed to see government papers related to the EU referendum. Personally, I’d pay good money not to see government papers related to the EU referendum. I consider it a very

Tory MPs believe they have sufficient numbers of would-be rebels to be able to amend the government’s Investigatory Powers Bill, which was published yesterday. Coffee House understands that there are already around 10 Tory MPs who would be happy to join forces with Labour to change key sections of the legislation on the authorisation of interception warrants, and on the level of detail on someone’s internet history that is available to intelligence services and the police. David Davis, the Tory MP who tends to lead the charge on civil liberties matters, is concerned that a number of the points set out by the joint committee that scrutinised the Bill when it

Sir Jeremy Heywood is currently insisting to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs select committee that there is absolutely nothing untoward about his guidance to civil servants about withholding documents that have a bearing on the EU referendum from ministers. ‘I’m really struggling to see what the problem is here,’ he has just argued to MPs. The row is occupying the energy of an awful lot of Tory MPs at the moment, and is unlikely to go away. One way that ministers could escalate the dispute is to work with backbenchers and use departmental questions in the Commons to make their point about the impact that this guidance has on

David Cameron’s slap down of Boris Johnson on Monday was one of the most brutal, and personal, that I’ve seen in six and a half years of reporting on parliament. But, as I report in my Sun column today, Number 10 are now keen to calm things down. Indeed, even some of Cameron’s closest allies now concede that the tone he took with Boris on Monday was a mistake. I’m told that Cameron and Boris have been in contact and are now exchanging, dread word, ‘bantery’ texts. One well-placed source is clear that the ‘PM’s tone will be much more emollient from now on’. Though, given how irritated Cameron is

If the Church of England was once the Tory party at prayer, then the nation’s shotgun-owning farmers were the party’s armed wing. I grew up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales and must have been about 18 before I met someone who didn’t identify as TBC (True Blue Conservative). Ours was one of the safest Tory seats in the country, with the local MP being Leon Brittan and then William Hague. And Margaret Thatcher was considered a hero in our ‘community’ not because of the Falklands war or her defeat of Arthur Scargill but because she liked to greet the dawn by listening to Farming Today on Radio 4

This could have been a tricky PMQs for David Cameron. Instead, it will be remembered for Cameron ventriloquising his mother and telling Corbyn ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’. What gave this jibe its potency, is that it sums up what a lot of voters think of the Labour leader. It was not quite as Flashmanesque as it sounds. For it came in response to a Labour front bench heckle asking what Cameron’s mother would say about cuts in Oxfordshire. Even before Cameron floored Corbyn with that line, the Labour leader was struggling. He chose to go on the NHS and the

The number of Tory MPs who have yet to declare what their stance is in the EU referendum is dwindling. Some of those are away, including Tracey Crouch, who is on maternity leave and gave this very amusing response to those asking about her priorities, while others have decided not to reveal which way they will vote because they are holding public meetings between now and the vote, and want to stay neutral so that they can chair those. But some are either torn, or just trying to work out the best way of announcing their intentions. And for those MPs, the pressure is becoming rather more intense. Many were

Rather rashly, Boris Johnson published The Churchill factor: How one man made history last year. It was without historical merit, or intellectual insight, but Johnson did not intend readers to learn about Churchill. The biography was not a Churchill biography but a Johnson campaign biography, where we were invited to see our  hero as Winston redux. Both ignored party discipline and conventional routes of advancement, after all. Both were great company. Churchill stayed in the wilderness for years making a fortune from journalism, and so has Johnson. Churchill was a man of principle and so is… Hold on. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all. For when we talk

George Osborne’s plan for this referendum was to turn it into a question of the future versus the past, for both the country and the Tory party. He wanted the voters to see the Out campaign as a bunch of people who wanted to take Britain back to a bygone era. Inside the Tory party, his aim was to have the talent and the ambition on the IN side with only old war horses and the passed over and bitter on the other side. But the events of the past 36 hours have blown this plan off course. Out now has one of the most popular politicians in the country