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.
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[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thereturnofassisteddying/media.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman and James Cleverly MP discuss the 2015 Tory intake” startat=1121] Listen [/audioplayer]Time was when the Conservatives believed that a small majority — which puts a government at the mercy of backbench rebels — would be worse than no majority at all. They dreaded the prospect. But now, well into their third
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Nigel Farage is trying to block Suzanne Evans from becoming Ukip candidate for Mayor of London with a covert campaign to install a less threatening, loyal party colleague in her place, sources have told Coffee House. Ukip will select its mayoral candidate this weekend. Evans is the bookies’ favourite and the best-known outside the party.
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Labour is holding a meeting tomorrow morning with the different leadership camps to discuss how the party is dealing with infiltrators into its membership. The campaigns are particularly keen to find out the scale of the infiltration from each side – Tory and hard left – and how local parties are dealing with it. I
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Charles Moore asks in this week’s Spectator what the ‘right looks’ are for a leadership contender, comparing Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to Tory backbenchers to the appeal of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the Labour contest. The obvious answer, of course, is that the ‘right look’ involves wearing clothes for working in the House of Commons,
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Have you been duped by the cult of clean eating? In this week’s Spectator, Lara Prendergast and I delve into the murky world of ‘clean’ diets and Instagram goddesses. These diets are often based on a noble desire to eat more fruit and vegetables and cut out processed food. But they also involve a lot
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Greece has already had one election and a referendum this year. Now it’s going back to the polls again with Alexis Tsipras announcing his resignation and snap elections. Tsipras says he has a moral duty to go to the polls after securing Greece’s third bailout, arguing that ‘we did not achieve the agreement we expected before
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Some Labour party members are currently finding out that they can’t vote in the leadership election after all because they’ve been picked up as being insincere members. A number of them are furious about this, understandably, but what’s also understandable, perhaps, is that the party is struggling to consider them as sincere members given they
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Why is the Labour leadership contest so vile? It has been the bitterest, bitchiest battle that the party has experienced for a good long while, even though the last contest involved two brothers standing against each other in a very ill-humoured manner. Labour MPs are smarting that after years of fighting in the trenches for
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[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thecleaneatingcult/media.mp3″ title=”Isabel Harrdman and George Eaton discuss what happens if Jeremy Corbyn wins” startat=696] Listen [/audioplayer]Jeremy Corbyn’s close friend Tony Benn had five questions he always asked of those in power: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable?
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Why haven’t some Labour MPs ever met Jeremy Corbyn? Mr Steerpike picks up on the discussion between former Miliband aide Anna Yearley, and MPs Barbara Keeley and Lucy Powell about his non-attendance at PLP meetings and the fact that Powell has ‘never, ever met or spoken to him’. This is odd: Corbyn has been a
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Yvette Cooper has rounded on Andy Burnham this evening, demanding that the Labour leadership contender oppose Jeremy Corbyn or stand aside. Burnham gave a speech this morning that was widely reported as him snuggling up to Corbyn, in which he praised his rival’s ‘energy’ and said ‘I want to capture that and would involve Jeremy
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Why is Ed Miliband not intervening to stop Jeremy Corbyn? Some Labourites see the former leader’s silence on the issue as a dereliction of duty, and hope to increase the pressure on him to say something about the importance of not lurching further left. But sources have told Coffee House that he plans to say
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Government departments have started to prepare their staff for job losses ahead of this autumn’s spending review, Coffee House has learned. George Osborne wants ministers to cut as much as 40 per cent from unprotected spending pots, which means that departments are likely to shed staff – or even close. The Energy and Climate Change
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So, funnily enough, Gordon Brown’s speech about his party’s leadership election hasn’t been that well-received by some quarters of Labour. There are some interesting people who are inevitably claiming he’s a Tory, but what’s more interesting is the way it has gone down with Labour MPs. Clive Lewis, for instance, seems to be quite keen
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Gordon Brown has just given one of his saving-the-world-at-the-last-minute speeches. He was speaking just as the ballot papers for his party’s leadership election are being sent out, and in keeping with his other saving-the-world-at-the-last-minute speeches, particularly the one he delivered shortly before the Scottish referendum, it was a barnstormer. His main theme was the importance
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At least Andy Burnham is keeping us all on his toes with his leadership campaign. If you’d stopped paying attention to the Labour leadership election for a couple of hours, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Shadow Health Secretary thinks it is a bad idea to attack Jeremy Corbyn. This is what he
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The Conservatives are naturally very much enjoying the Labour leadership contest, and are starting to make use of it in the press, with Matt Hancock warning that Jeremy Corbyn would cost every working household £2,400. It’s the sort of thing the Tories were doing in the general election, slapping often rather arbitrary price tags on
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Even though Jeremy Corbyn has the Big Mo in this Labour leadership campaign, it is fair to say that Yvette Cooper has had a pretty good few weeks too. The Shadow Home Secretary managed to produce all her passion for her speech today in which she finally rounded on Corbyn, as well as rightly attacking
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While the Labour leadership contest is in a miserable state, other parts of the party are trying to get on with working out how it can recover in 2020. Two big questions are how to deal with Ukip and how to make Labour a winning force again in the South of England and I look at
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Will Tony Blair’s intervention into the Labour leadership contest really make a difference? The former Prime Minister argues in today’s Guardian that this is a far worse crisis for his party than the 1980s, and uses what Angela Eagle last night described as ‘apocalyptic language’ to warn members of the danger the party is in.