Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
There is, to put it mildly, a lack of candour in this election campaign when it comes to tax rises and spending cuts. The Conservatives are trying to force Labour into a game of Whac-a-mole over which taxes it would put up and which rises the party is happy to rule out. Whoever is in
Tonight Keir Starmer took another look at Labour’s poll lead, threw caution to the wind, and revealed his radical plans for the government he hopes to lead in a few weeks time. Only kidding. The Labour leader’s interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson didn’t reveal anything we didn’t know and Starmer won’t be obliging with
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Nigel Farage tried to claim at the start of Thursday’s TV debate that Reform was the real threat to Keir Starmer, given it has just passed the Conservatives in the polls (more on that here). Are they the new party of opposition? And what sort of tactics will the Tories use to try and claw back
Nigel Farage tried to claim at the start of Thursday’s TV debate that Reform was the real threat to Keir Starmer, given it has just passed the Conservatives in the polls (more from Katy on that here). Penny Mordaunt, of course, didn’t want to entertain the idea of her party being in opposition, but she
Keir Starmer has deliberately pursued a strategy of revealing as little as possible, boasting today that his manifesto didn’t contain any surprises. In between his verbal tic about his father being a toolmaker, Starmer has been least at ease in the TV debates, and it was in the first of these that he said more than
The latest NHS waiting figures are without question a problem for Rishi Sunak: they’re going up again for the first time in seven months. The performance data for NHS England shows that 6.33 million patients were waiting for 7.6 million treatments at the end of April, up from 6.29 people and 7.54 million treatments in
Rishi Sunak’s manifesto launch was necessarily defensive: the Prime Minister is trying to stem the losses in this election campaign rather than present an exciting vision of a new Britain. It was striking how much Sunak talked about Labour in his speech at Silverstone. Almost every Tory policy he referred to was immediately contrasted with
Rishi Sunak has started to move on from his D-Day blunder. He probably won’t recover from the electoral damage he caused himself, but he is now able to talk about other things. The question is what is it that he can talk about that will actually get the voters listening? This evening he gave an
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Just when you thought this election campaign couldn’t get any more tumultuous, Douglas Ross has announced he will resign as Scottish Conservative leader. He had lost the support of his colleagues – particularly those in Holyrood – following his decision to effectively take over a Westminster colleague’s constituency when that MP was seriously ill in
Just when you thought this election campaign couldn’t get any more tumultuous, Douglas Ross has announced he will resign as Scottish Conservative leader. He had lost the support of his colleagues – particularly those in Holyrood – following his decision to effectively take over a Westminster colleague’s constituency when that MP was seriously ill in
How is it possible that a seven-way debate between the main parties in this election was more civilised than the two-way stand-off between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak earlier this week? Tonight’s BBC debate was bizarrely better viewing. Sure, the party representatives interrupted one another, attacked each other, and flung about fake figures. But it
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Overnight, details of Labour’s manifesto were leaked. There are several new policies, but how surprising are they, and how will they land with voters? Elsewhere, Rishi Sunak has denied he planned to skip D Day events altogether since our episode this morning. Can the row get any worse? James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and
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It’s yet another gaffe for Rishi Sunak. At yesterday’s D Day anniversary celebrations when it came time for official photographs with Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, it was Lord Cameron, not Rishi Sunak, who did the honours for Britain. With the prime minister reportedly leaving early to do a pre-recorded political interview with
Rishi Sunak has just apologised for missing the international D-Day event in Normandy to fly back early to the UK for an interview with ITV. There has been a mixture of outrage and total bewilderment about why the Prime Minister chose to leave after the British event, putting foreign secretary David Cameron in his place,
Is Alex Salmond feasting on the misery of an SNP that, having hit its high watermark, is now having to work hard to hold onto its Westminster seats? Not at all, according to the Alba leader, who told Andrew Neil on Times Radio today that he was in fact trying to help the cause of
Labour has decided to lean into the £2,000 tax hike claim by the Tories, and turn it into a row about lying. Keir Starmer yesterday accused Rishi Sunak of ‘lying’, saying: ‘That’s why the choice at the next election is starker now than it was yesterday. It’s a choice between chaos and confusion, the sort of thing
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Last night, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer went head-to-head in the first TV debate of the campaign. They clashed on a variety of topics, including housing, the NHS, and immigration. But who came out on top? Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Megan McElroy.
The Tories have had their first good 24 hours of the election campaign. The £2,000 tax claim made by Rishi Sunak (which we crunch here) is dominating the chatter following last night’s TV debate, and the amount of energy Labour frontbenchers are putting into refuting it shows they feel Keir Starmer failed to squash it
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Some Conservatives have put their hopes on tonight’s TV debate as a breakthrough moment for the lacklustre and disorganised Tory campaign, but will it really be a gamechanger? James Heale talks to Isabel Hardman about why she’s sceptical, and to the pollster Chris Hopkins at Savanta about why the Tories just aren’t closing that poll
How should Rishi Sunak respond to the unwelcome insertion of Nigel Farage into the election campaign? The Prime Minister called the election for 4 July in part because he hoped it would wrong-foot Reform, but that hasn’t worked, with Farage electrifying the challenger party and near-electrocuting many Tory MPs who were already terrified of losing