Theresa may

It’s almost 60 years since Ghana became independent from Britain. The world celebrated as the sun began to set on the age of European imperialism. ‘African Nationalism’, in the form of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, entered the stage and all cheered the breaking of a golden dawn as the colonial shackles were broken and ‘liberation’ belatedly arrived. Since then, some 200 coups or attempted coups have taken place, 25 heads of state have been assassinated and roughly 50 wars have been fought in Africa. Despite multiple interventions, Africa remains the most crooked continent with illicit transfers out far exceeding the total value of all foreign aid to the continent (currently estimated

On Tuesday night, Conservatives for Liberty, which I co-founded in 2013, hosted our annual Freedom Fizz reception.  Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young joined us, along with 400 party delegates, most of whom identify as right-wing libertarians. So like a lot of Conservative Party Conference delegates, I woke up with a hangover on Wednesday morning, with the elation of the night before left somewhere in the bottom of one of several bottles of prosecco. What I didn’t realise at the time was that my day was about to get more painful. Twelve hours after we packed up, the Prime Minister effectively declared the lot of us enemies of the party – and the

 Birmingham Checking in to my hotel room on the 18th floor, for the Conservative party conference here, I opened the door and bumped into a workman on a stepladder. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘They shouldn’t have let you in. All the water came through from the room upstairs.’ He was painting over the damage. Then he looked at me, recognised me and asked, ‘Hard or soft Brexit, then?’ I burbled slightly, not being happy with the distinction, but eventually said I thought ‘hard’ better described what was needed. The painter told me he read the Guardian and the Telegraph every day to ‘get both sides’. He reckoned ‘hard’, too: ‘It’s got

Theresa May’s speech was an attempt to seize the moment created by Brexit and Labour’s lurch to the left. She tried to set out a new centre-ground politics, promising to stand up to elites on behalf of ordinary people.  She attempted to nationalise Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister who presided over the creation of the NHS, hailing him as one of her inspirations and promised government intervention to fix the housing, energy and broadband markets. In political terms, the speech was clever. There are an awful lot of voters who will nod along with her criticism of a ‘sneering’ elite who view themselves as ‘global citizens’ and her demands

Under David Cameron, it was sometimes tricky to tell who was in charge at the DWP. Iain Duncan Smith favoured a softer approach to welfare reform while over at the Treasury, George Osborne’s interventions were more nakedly political. It all came to a head in March when IDS resigned after Osborne announced £4bn of cuts to disability benefits. That was just over six months ago and seems like a distant memory in the pre-referendum haze. Yet it’s rapidly becoming clear that under Damian Green, things will be very different at the DWP. As with other areas of Government, Theresa May’s work and pensions secretary has marked a signal departure with