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.
It’s a measure of how weird the past few years in British politics have been that Keir Starmer’s claim that his Labour predecessor would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson has received so much coverage. Starmer made the comment during last night’s Question Time programme. It was a line that got blurted
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Last nights election Question Time programme was probably the best of the campaign in that it gave space for proper discussion while making all the leaders uncomfortable. None of the four men questioned over the two hour programme – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney – did badly. There were some good
Tonight’s election Question Time programme was probably the best of the campaign in that it gave space for proper discussion while making all the leaders uncomfortable. None of the four men questioned over the two hour programme – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney – did badly: in fact, given what a
12 min listen
If you’re a Twitter user, you might have seen more of Boris Johnson than usual. He’s been making videos to endorse selected candidates from his holiday in Sardinia. Might he make a bigger return to the election campaign? Is he the man that could save the Tories from Farage – and does he want to?
Should a candidate feel forced to pull out of public hustings events because of concerns about their safety? No, of course not, though that’s exactly what our current political culture has caused Rosie Duffield to do. One of her own Labour party colleagues, Lord Cashman, had the whip suspended after he suggested she was ‘frit
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
