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.
Today’s exchanges between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons following the Queen’s Speech showed how much difference confidence makes to a leader’s performance. While Corbyn will never be a scintillating orator – speaking for far too long and ending with a sentence that seemed to be aimed more at entering the Guinness Book
Tomorrow Theresa May will present a Queen’s Speech that doesn’t have the formal support of a majority of the House of Commons. Her negotiations with the DUP still haven’t concluded, with party sources this afternoon warning the Conservatives that they won’t be ‘taken for granted’ and criticising the way May and her team have conducted
Normally in the run-up to a Queen’s Speech, Westminster watchers wonder how radical the Prime Minister feels like being – and how much political capital they have available to spend. But of course this year’s Speech is rather different, because the Prime Minister has no political capital and the negotiations with the DUP haven’t concluded.
What can Theresa May put in the Queen’s Speech next week? The Prime Minister was always a cautious sort who wouldn’t put anything before Parliament that didn’t have a sure chance of passing – and that was when she had a majority. Now, she firstly needs to propose a set of bills that the DUP
One of the truisms that has emerged from this election is that maybe Gordon Brown was right to veer away from calling an early election after all. Pursuing a snap election turned out to be a grave error for Theresa May, and so perhaps the Labour Prime Minister was wiser than everyone gave him credit
Was Tim Farron’s resignation as Liberal Democrat leader inevitable? He seems to suggest so, saying in his striking resignation statement that it felt ‘impossible’ to be a political leader and live as a committed Christian. He spent much of the election campaign stuck in a strange political special of the Moral Maze, endlessly cross-examined about
‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment. It wasn’t just the pollsters and the
Normally after an election, the leader of the party that came second comes to the first meeting of their parliamentary party and promises an inquiry into what went wrong. As Katy reported from the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting last night, no such thing happened when Jeremy Corbyn spoke to MPs. He received a standing ovation
What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? No one has ever really known the answer to this question, and it doesn’t seem to be any closer to being resolved now that the election is out of the way, either. Sir Keir Starmer yesterday attacked the government for ‘simply sweeping options off the table before they even
When he was Prime Minister, John Major found his predecessor Margaret Thatcher to be an ‘intolerable’ backseat driver. Yet no matter how polite he has been to his successors as Conservative leaders, he hasn’t been all that helpful to the two who’ve ended up, by hook or by crook, becoming Prime Minister. Previously he has
The reshuffle announcements keep rolling miserably on, with Theresa May congratulating herself on people bothering to answer the phone to her. One of the new appointments is rather odd. Anne Milton has had a promotion from the whips’ office to the Education Department, which must be flattering for the sharp Guildford MP. But it’s not
Labour’s elections team expects the party to be left with just 140 seats after the election, The Spectator has learned. I understand from two very good sources that this working assumption developed by Patrick Heneghan, the party’s elections director, is based on the party’s private data. This could mean that 89 sitting Labour MPs lose their
That the Tories would enjoy this general election campaign and Labour would spend it alternating between abject misery and total panic was a given from the moment Theresa May announced she wanted to go to the polls. More of a surprise has been how uncomfortable the Liberal Democrats have looked so far. Tim Farron has
Mental health only made it into all three main party manifestos for the first time in 2015. Two years later, and it would be impossible to imagine any serious political party missing it out. In fact, the first line on the ‘mental health gap’ in the Conservative manifesto suggests that they’ve already accomplished their aims:
By the standards of a ‘normal’ election, the ITV televised leaders’ debate might have seemed like a bit of a waste of time. The most prominent politician present was Nicola Sturgeon, who is not standing in the General Election. But she does have some claim to opposition, given that her party is the most disciplined and effective
One of the complaints that allies of Jeremy Corbyn often issue is that his critics – whether in his own party, the media, the Tory party or the general electorate – tend to focus on the man, not his policies. His policies are, those allies argue, actually very popular with voters — when you test
Why do Conservative politicians love Ronseal so much? Theresa May tells today’s Sunday Times that the Ronseal slogan – ‘it does what it says on the tin’ – is her ‘political philosophy’. David Cameron spent years talking about Britain’s yearning for ‘a kind of Ronseal politics’, before describing the Coalition government as operating according to the
It’s that time of the year when politicians start posting pictures of groups of people smiling eerily while holding party placards and claiming that they’ve just had a ‘great response’ on the doorstep. For the uninitiated, this sounds as though the people opening their doors in each street are just thrilled to see said eerily
What a very boring election this is. The Tories are trying to keep their Prime Minister away from anyone who isn’t an android programmed to wave a placard about ‘strong and stable leadership’. Journalists from local papers are being kept in rooms to prevent them from – gasp – filming an interview with the Prime
At midnight, we won’t have any MPs. The dissolution of Parliament means that no-one who has sat on the green benches of the Commons for the past two years has any official status above their fellow candidates in the General Election. Some will return victorious for another five years (or until another advantageously early election).