Uk politics

I see that the polls have narrowed a bit, although I can’t see an earthly reason why they would have done so, given that Corbyn is as stupid now as he was six days ago. Except that people are perhaps feeling increasingly resentful that an election has been called at all, and dislike the arrogance and presumption behind it. This is the Brenda from Bristol tendency (or whatever the doolally old bat was called). But also that the Labour vote is a little more steadfast than perhaps the Tories thought. I have mentioned this before – and I may well be wrong and perhaps this really is the election where

Theresa May spent the weekend in Scotland and not even the civilised bit. The Prime Minister was posted to the wilds of Aberdeenshire, which are handsome and underpopulated but not exactly a commuter hub. Journalists grumbled about the remoteness of the location, well aware that inaccessibility was the point. May has not been campaigning in this election so much as touring the nation’s emptiest rooms, occasionally bringing along another borough councillor who will be elected to Parliament in five weeks’ time. The punters have been kept far away from the Prime Minister for reasons of security — political security. Party strategists have long memories. They remember the name Sharon Storer.

Theresa May has perfected the art of saying nothing in interviews. The most any journalist can hope for is a subtle shift in position, or an absence where a position once stood. She seems to think that, if you refuse to give the press anything, the public won’t care. Worse, she seems to be right – for now, at least. So it would have been with a heavy heart that Andrew Marr set off to see if he could try to draw blood out of the Prime Ministerial granite. Same for Robert Peston afterwards. A Theresa May interview means the recital or verbal formulae: ‘strong and stable’ here, ‘working families’

Trust Boris to dominate the headlines by reopening that most famous of books, Johnson’s Dictionary. Writing in the Sun, our effortlessly provocative Foreign Secretary swiped at Jeremy Corbyn with this colourful barb: ‘He may be a mutton-headed old mugwump, but he is probably harmless.’ Couched rather incongruously as the reflections of ‘the people’, this comment has left many laughing, but more still scratching their heads. In fact, there’s more to being a ‘mugwump’ than a throw-away jibe. The word comes from the original New Englanders, the Algonquians, for whom mugquomp meant ‘great chief’. It was a term of respect laden with connotations of nobility. But that presumably wasn’t what Boris

Journalists have hunted down Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, about Christian views of homosexuality. Originally, they asked him the wrong question, doctrinally, by inquiring whether he thought ‘homosexuality’ was a sin. This was an easy one for him to repudiate, since an involuntary disposition is not a sin. I forbore to point this out, since I didn’t want to make their persecution of poor Mr Farron any easier, but by the beginning of this week, they had realised their mistake and began pressing him to state whether gay sex was a sin. (The Times covered this with the surprising headline: ‘Farron shrugs off gay sex row to target veteran’s

Here they come, Tony Blair and his tragic chattering-class army. The former PM, whose rictus grin and glottal stops still haunt the nation’s dreams (well, mine anyway), is on the march with his pleb-allergic mates in business and the media. Blair and the Twitterati, linking arms, united in their horror at the incalculable stupidity of northerners and Welsh people and Essex men and women and other Brexiteers, their aim as clear as it is foul. They’re here to save us from ourselves. ‘Tony Blair is trying to save Britain from itself’, as one report put it. Excuse me while I pop an anti-nausea pill. Yes, Blair, the political version of

Corbyn – Labour may scrap Trident nuclear deterrent Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn occupied the prime slot on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, and he told Marr that he wants to see ‘a very different country’. But how different? He was asked what he would say to the captains of the Trident submarines about whether to use their missiles in the event of a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. ‘What I will be saying is that I want us to achieve a nuclear free world. What I want us to do is adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and take part in negotiations surrounding that, and crucially… immediately promote the

In this, as in all things, Paul Keating was right. It was the former Aussie Prime Minister, a Beethoven of political invective, who called his country’s Green Party ‘a bunch of opportunists and Trots hiding behind a gum tree trying to pretend they’re the Labor Party’. Keating’s acid scherzo could apply just as readily to our own Greens, self-appointed conservationists of righteousness. Caroline Lucas, their only MP, has been at the forefront of calls for a ‘progressive alliance’ between left-wing parties. On Wednesday, she wrote to Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron proposing ‘some form of cooperation in a handful of seats to create the best possible chance of beating the

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result