Tories

Daily they drop into my email account — alongside the more obviously useful stuff about how I might elongate my penis or ensure it performs with greater fortitude than at present, and the charitable offers from women who live ‘nearby your house, Roderick’ and apparently wish to test whether or not those previous solicitations I mentioned have been acceded to with success. Alongside all that stuff are the fecund exhortations from a bunch of online campaigning organisations. Click democracy, a sort of spastic form of activism whereby you stick it to da man simply by pressing a button. They come, these missives, from the likes of Change.org and 38 Degrees. Sometimes shrill, sometimes cloying, almost always stupid.

Labour's verification process has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent weeks as more and more Tories have claimed they have successfully joined as a supporter of the party in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and 'condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness’. Labour insist that they have a crack team successfully weeding out non-Labour supporters from the genuine new joiners. This is a point that they seem rather keen to make known. Today the party's press office has tweeted the Tory MP Tim Loughton to tell him that his application has sadly been declined: https://twitter.com/labourpress/status/628912795862605824 While Loughton's actions have been criticised by members of Labour, former Tory MP Louise Mensch has also weighed in: https://twitter.

Over the weekend, CCHQ selected the four Tory candidates for London mayor who will proceed to an open primary in September. Playing it safe they opted for experience over celebrity, with Andrew Boff, Zac Goldsmith, Syed Kamall and Stephen Greenhalgh all chosen. This means both Sol Campbell and Ivan Massow have not been selected. While the footballer has been notably quiet since the news, Massow appears to be taking it less well. The businessman -- who is openly gay -- has issued a statement on his Facebook page in which he speaks of his disappointment. In this, Massow -- who once accompanied Margaret Thatcher to Tory conference -- asks if his history with the party over Section 28 may have held him back.

When Andy Burnham attended London Pride, the Labour leadership hopeful proudly sported a t-shirt which read 'never kissed a Tory'. While Mr S is yet to track down a Tory who found romance with Burnham, there are doubts that the same can be said for his wife, Marie-France van Heel. During Victoria Derbyshire's Labour leadership hustings this morning, Burnham revealed his wife's cross-party past: 'My wife and I have been together for 25 years but in the early days she was on Blind Date and she was the picker, and to add insult to injury she picked Will from Surrey, who ended up being the director of communications for the Conservative party.

After the newly elected SNP MP Phil Boswell gave his first speech in Parliament yesterday, he won praise from Henry Bellingham for a 'superb maiden speech'. Still, Mr S suspects there is room for improvement. With rumours abound that an SNP MP made a faux pas in their maiden speech yesterday, Mr S thought Boswell's effort merited further examination: https://twitter.

As one of the new intake of MPs in this Parliament, Johnny Mercer will be full of ambition for the five years ahead. However, judging by a video he appeared in ahead of the election, one of his aims appears to be achieving a high ranking on the Sexy MP website. Mercer has a starring role in a Dove Men shower gel advert which is currently being broadcast in America. While the video includes a scene in which he appears topless in the shower, the film is family friendly with the MP for Plymouth Moor View's six-year-old daughter also appearing on camera. Mercer is taking his new found fame in his stride. 'When they asked me, I thought "Why not, it will be a laugh",' he told the Plymouth Herald. 'It was really fun. They sent me and the girls to London for three days.

Despite the government planning £12bn worth of welfare cuts, it's still a case of no expense spared when it comes to Tory parties. Last night the Conservative Party Summer Party was held at the Hurlingham. The lavish bash saw the Tories celebrate their return to government with their rich donors, who in turn volunteered hundreds of thousands of pounds for a number of lots, including a copy of the EdStone: Although the event was supposed to be private, Mr S's colleague Fraser Nelson was on hand to report back on the lavish bash. He writes about the do in his diary in the forthcoming issue of The Spectator: 'Mind you, nothing much embarrasses the Conservatives nowadays.

Unfortunate timing for ambitious new Tory MP Alan Mak to be turned over by the Times today, after he was on the order paper to ask a prominent question at PMQs. Mr S's fellow diarist at the Times wrote this morning: 'Alan Mak (Conservative, Havant) has been an MP for only a month and already his self-promotion is getting up people’s noses. Bad enough to send his maiden speech to everyone in Downing Street, he then baggsed the seat behind David Cameron for last week’s prime minister’s questions and with it a brief TV appearance.' Now Mr S hears there was a concerted effort today not to let Mak take up his new found favourite spot before PMQs. A colleague laments: 'Mak hadn't managed to to bagsy his usual seat up the PM's backside for the first time today.

Privately, senior Tories admit that winning the EU referendum, by which they mean securing a vote to stay in on Cameron’s new terms, is the easy part. The more difficult challenge, they admit, will be keeping the Tory party from splitting over the issue. But this realisation doesn’t seem to be informing how the government is actually approaching the referendum hence the row over the attempt to lift the normal purdah restrictions for the campaign itself. Cameron should be bending over backwards to ensure that the whole process is seen as ‘fair’ and to ensure that everyone on the Tory  bench has to accept the result. For as one senior backbencher warns, ‘If the thing doesn’t appear fair, people aren’t going to accept it’.

David Cameron's recently departed speechwriter Clare Foges earned the affectionate nickname 'the Prime Minister's Larynx' for her work assisting Cameron with his public speaking, so her Times column today will make for some interesting reading for her former colleagues in No. 10. Despite the Tories winning a majority in the election, Foges, who used to work as an ice cream driver, has offered the Conservatives a shopping list on how they can 'reset their image' and shrug off their 'nasty party' tag. The poet, who has been working for Cameron since 2009, calls for the Department of Health to be made a cross party department - presumably by appointing both Burnham and Hunt, as well as suggesting Cameron makes National Citizen Service compulsory.

I suppose David Cameron had little choice but to offer a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union. How else could he have held his party together? Indeed, it is possible that he owes some part of his small majority to that promise. Nevertheless, it will all end badly. I think there is no plausible scenario in which it can end well for Cameron. Indeed, it is entirely possible that having begun this parliament with a majority he - or, rather, his successor - will end it leading a minority administration. The most important thing to remember is that perhaps a quarter of his backbenchers actually want the Prime Minister to fail. They have no interest in his cockamamie renegotation strategy.

Nigel Farage’s latest intervention—declaring that Ukip is ‘going to take the lead making the case for voting to leave the EU in the referendum—neatly sums up the dilemma facing the Out campaign. On the one hand, there’s a danger that if it doesn’t get moving now then the In campaign will have a massive, and possibly insurmountable, advantage by the time the vote is actually called. On the other, if Out is too closely associated with Ukip then it won’t be able to get the 50.1 percent of the vote that it needs to win the referendum. For while Farage might be quite brilliant at motivating the 13 percent who voted Ukip, he also alienates a lot of people too.

Given that Peter Hitchens' weekly column was absent from the Mail on Sunday the week before the general election, Mr S was glad to have the opportunity to hear his thoughts on the election at the Hay festival. Taking to the Telegraph stage this morning, Hitchens joined Johann Hari, David Aaronovitch and Bronwen Maddox for a panel discussion titled 'Election 2015: How was it for you?'. True to form, he began by criticising the Conservative government, claiming the Tories' majority win was down to 'lies and money'.

And so now we have to suffer the epic delusions, temper tantrums and hissy fits of the metro-left. They simply cannot believe how you scumbags could have got it so wrong last Thursday, you morons. You vindictive, selfish morons. That has been the general response from all of the people, the liberal middle-class lefties, who have cheerfully contributed towards making the once great Labour party effectively unelectable. You lot voted Tory out of fear — because you are stupid, stupid people. The Conservatives ran a ‘negative’ campaign and, because you are either simply horrible human beings, or just thick, you fell for it.

To appoint one Equalities Minister who voted against gay marriage looked sloppy, to do it twice looks frankly strange. Yet that is what the Prime Minister has just done. Education Secretary Nicky Morgan voted against same sex marriage in July 2013, though she claims she has subsequently changed her mind. Caroline Dinenage, the Gosport MP, who has just replaced Morgan in the Equalities brief, also voted against it. As one Tory MP ponders: 'When almost half the Parliamentary party voted for same sex marriage why can he not find an equalities minister who did?