James Kirkup

It’s said that when Iain Dale, overseeing last night’s Conservative hustings in Manchester, announced the news that Oliver Robbins, the senior civil servant in Theresa May’s Brexit team, was leaving his post and the Civil Service, many of the Tory audience cheered. https://twitter.com/shippersunbound/status/1145056962800959488?s=21 By doing so, they underlined several of the most striking, and troubling,

Everyone knows the story of how a small number of Conservatives will cast a vote that decides something of great and lasting importance. But the group of Tories is much smaller than you think, and they vote much sooner than you imagine: on Friday, in fact. I am not referring to the 160,000 members of

It’s not hard to work out the ‘lines to take’ that are being handed out from Boris Johnson’s team to his surrogates in politics and the media after the police were called to the flat he’s been living in. ‘It’s a private matter. It’s an invasion of privacy. The neighbour who taped the incident, called

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to look at recent media coverage of the Tory leadership race and conclude that Bois Johnson is a bit scared of Rory Stewart. Johnson’s fiends and surrogates have been training their fire on Stewart since the weekend, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. This started when Matt Hancock

In less than a month, Theresa May’s premiership will be history. If she is remembered at all, it will mainly be for Brexit. She took on a near-impossible task, made it harder (her misjudged ‘red lines’ from autumn 2016 will always haunt her), and finally failed at it. That had many consequences, not least the

Britain is not quite in the grip of Rorymania. He gave a properly impressive speech this week and he has spoken with honesty and clarity about politics and policy. But Rory Stewart isn’t going to be our next prime minister and it’s hard to see him remaining in Cabinet for much longer. He’s a hit

“Everything with a trade deal is on the table…so NHS or anything else, a lot more than that”. That was Donald Trump talking about a possible UK-US trade deal after Britain leaves the EU’s common trade policy. Cue political drama, headlines and Conservative leadership contenders trying to work out what to say when someone asks

Matt Hancock is the youngest of the candidates running to be Conservative leader but he’s starting to look like the grown-up in the room. At the weekend he published the outline of a Brexit plan that might just prove the basis for a way ahead that averts either economic or political disaster. The plan, as

The fact that the Confederation of British Industry is directly intervening in the Conservative Party leadership contest – to warn against a no-deal Brexit – should be remarkable, not least for what it says about how some business leaders now doubt the Conservative party’s instincts and sympathies. The fact that this isn’t bigger news says

Nigel Farage has been on the radio this morning, almost plaintively offering to be part of a Government team renegotiating the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. Maybe it’s a genuine offer in good faith. Maybe it’s a political wheeze, meant to make him and his Brexit Party sound like a proper, grownup organisation. And maybe it’s revealing

Pretty much all the bad things that people are saying today about Theresa May are true. She’s bad at politics, bad at communicating, bad at dealing with colleagues. She created the conditions that made her job as prime minister handling Brexit almost impossible. Her ‘red lines’ in the autumn of 2016 gave Britain almost no

The current Westminster consensus that Boris Johnson is the next Tory leader and prime minister raises all sorts of thoughts. Among them is to speculate about the sheer terror this consensus should strike in the man himself, given that Westminster consensus has been wrong about basically everything in the last three years.  For what it’s

Six years ago this week, I went to dinner with four friends. Three were journalists: James Lyons, Sam Coates, Tim Shipman. The fourth does something else; I’m not going to drag him into this tale. Dinner was in the Blue Boar, a cornerstone of Westminster entertaining and then, as now, the sort of place you

Let’s assume this really is the start of the last act of Theresa May’s premiership. Let’s assume too that her Withdrawal Agreement dies a fourth and final death in the Commons in early June. The Conservatives will then go looking for a new leader and prime minister. There are already no end of candidates.  But

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has launched an impressive new commission on inequality. What’s most impressive about the project is not the Nobel-winning array of commissioners, it’s the fact that the IFS is trying to broaden public and political understanding of what inequality is. And in so doing, it also describes a political trap that

The Tory leadership contest hasn’t formally begun but the shadow-boxing has been uninspiring. Brexit positioning dominates, leavened with a bit of backstory and personal colour: Dominic Raab’s kitchen, Michael Gove’s parental home in Aberdeen, Liz Truss’s Instagram account, Jeremy Hunt’s wife. And Boris Johnson keeping quiet, for some reason. To be fair, Rory Stewart’s simple

It can never be said enough that Twitter is not real life, and that it is a huge mistake to think that what goes on there is representative of politics, society or humanity as whole. I’m not sure about its overall impact on the world, but I sometimes think that British politics and journalism might

One of the many things that has been neglected in the Conservative Party because of all-consuming Brexit is a meaningful debate about markets and business. Confronted with a Labour leader offering a clear critique of capitalism as a “rigged” system and outflanked by Nigel Farage telling a remarkably similar story about big money financing a