John Connolly

The former Tory MP Dominic Grieve may have voted against the parliamentary recess for Conservative party conference, but that certainly hasn't kept him away from the action this week. The now independent MP showed up in Manchester yesterday, and this afternoon attended a 'Conservatives for a People's Vote' event at the aptly named (for a man with few allies inside the hall) 'Friends House' outside the conference area. As expected, the MP first used his platform to launch attacks on Boris Johnson's government. Grieve said reports that he and his Remain allies had sought help from the French to draft the Benn bill were a serious piece of 'defamation' and that Number 10 had overseen a 'culture war' and 'corruption of our political system'.

The Liberal Democrats have cemented their credentials as a fully-fledged Remain party this afternoon, after members at their conference in Bournemouth voted to make revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit their official party policy. The overwhelming majority of Lib Dem members at the conference voted to pass a motion, which called for the party to immediately revoke Article 50 if they win a majority at the next election. The motion reaffirms the party's support for a second referendum, but also adds a pledge to stop Brexit altogether, committing to: 'Revoke Article 50 if the House of Commons has not passed a resolution approving the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement one week ahead of the date on which the UK is due to leave the EU.

The former Labour MP Luciana Berger has announced today that she is no longer an independent in parliament and has joined the Liberal Democrats. Berger becomes the party's sixteenth MP in parliament, and is the second former Labour defector to join the Lib Dems, after Chuka Umunna made the jump this summer. In an interview with the Evening Standard revealing her decision to join the party, the Wavertree MP said that she was committed to stopping a 'catastrophic' no-deal Brexit and later said she had joined 'the strongest party to stop Brexit, fight for equality and a fairer country.

Boris Johnson has two big advantages: the ability to drive his opponents quite mad, and strikingly low expectations. Pick up a newspaper recently and you might have read that Britain is 'mortified' to have such a bozo foisted upon the nation by a handful of retired Tories. If that were the case, the opinion polls would show the Tories plunging in popularity. But instead, the reverse has happened. The Conservatives, so recently trailing the Brexit Party, are now comfortably ahead of everyone else. The honeymoon has begun. Three different sets of fresh polling conducted by YouGov, Opinium and Deltapoll (commissioned by the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Mail on Sunday) has recorded a large bounce in the Conservative party's ratings.

As a lifelong diplomat, it was probably the closest Sir Simon McDonald, the head of the UK diplomatic service, has ever come to publicly showing a sliver of emotion, when speaking to MPs today about the resignation of the Sir Kim Darroch. The head of the diplomatic service had been summoned by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to discuss the leaking of sensitive diplomatic cables to the Mail on Sunday, which were highly critical of the US President Donald Trump. Shortly before the committee, Sir Kim Darroch announced his shock resignation.

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are through to the final stage of the Tory leadership contest, after the results of the fifth round of voting were announced this evening. Michael Gove has been knocked out of the competition, after falling just two votes short (75 vs 77). Cries of foul play have followed, with suspicion that Team Boris "lent" several votes to Hunt. Boris Johnson managed to win 160 votes from his colleagues: the majority of MPs. But this is just three more than the previous round. Odd given that Sajid Javid scored 34 votes this morning, before he was eliminated. Did all but three of Javid's supporters move to Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove?

Earlier today, Rory Stewart said that he was in talks with Michael Gove's campaign team, to see if the Environment Secretary would drop out and combine forces with him to take on Boris Johnson. In the end though, it was Stewart who was forced to walk the plank - with even fewer votes than he picked up yesterday. Boris Johnson continued his dominance of the race, winning 143 votes, 17 more than the last round - so benefiting from the elimination of Dominic Raab. Trailing behind him were Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove, who received 54 and 51 respectively, and then Sajid Javid on 38 votes. Stewart only managed to reach 27 votes this time, losing ten backers since yesterday.

So much for Boris Johnson running away with this early. After the second round of voting amongst Tory MPs, he's still easily ahead. But the other votes are spread so evenly that no fewer than five of the candidates have made it through to the third round of the contest. Only Dominic Raab has been knocked out - his supporters are now likely to move to Boris, now the most Brexity candidate in the race. As was widely expected, Boris Johnson came top in this ballot, winning the backing of 126 of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Conservative party, but this was just 12 more votes than in the first round. There had been talk of him getting more than 150 today. He was followed by Jeremy Hunt who received 46 votes - just three more than last time.

MPs have voted to reject, by 309 votes to 298, an opposition day motion which would have attempted to stop Britain leaving without a deal on 31 October. The motion, put forward by Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable, Oliver Letwin and other representatives of the opposition parties, attempted to carve out a day in the parliamentary calendar on 25 June, when backbench MPs would have taken control of the House of Commons timetable. The backbench MPs would then have been able to put forward legislation which could have blocked a prime minister, such as Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab, taking Britain out of the EU without a deal against the wishes of parliament. The fact that this motion did not pass today is a blow to the opponents of no deal.

You would not normally expect a Tory leadership campaign launch to take place at a comedy-festival venue in the trendy Southbank of London. Nor would you expect it to be situated in a small circus-tent, with spotlights beaming on an elevated stage in the centre. Nonetheless, Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart strolled out onto the stage of the 'underbelly' circus-tent this evening to launch his bid to be prime minister, looking like a slightly sinister ring-master. Stewart's message to the several hundred people who had gathered to see him could not have been clearer: I am not your usual Tory candidate, and I can reach the kind of people who would never normally vote for the Conservative party.

It's official: the Tory leadership contest to replace Theresa May as Prime Minister has now begun. At 5pm today, the nominations closed for candidates to enter the leadership race before hustings and the first round of voting takes place this week. In order to narrow down an already crowded field, each candidate had to receive the backing of at least eight Conservative MPs at this first stage: a principal, seconder, and six other parliamentary colleagues who could remain anonymous. Despite this, ten candidates still managed to make it through to the next stage.

After a long night of counting, and an even longer campaign, the Labour party have been declared the winners of the Peterborough by-election. Lisa Forbes, the Labour party candidate, will replace Fiona Onasanya who was ousted from the seat earlier this year after she was convicted of perverting the course of justice. Forbes won 10,483 votes in the election, ahead of the Brexit party on 9,801, and the Conservatives on 7,243. In a speech celebrating her victory, Forbes said that the Brexit party's rejection at the ballot box showed that the 'politics of division will not win.' Tonight will be a disappointing result for the Brexit party candidate, Mike Greene, and the party's leader, Nigel Farage.

Arguably, the past six months could not have gone any better for the Liberal Democrats. At the beginning of the year, the party seemed cast adrift as voters continued to support the two main parties, and the newly formed Independent Group looked ready to usurp them as the party of Remain in the UK. But since the local elections in May, the Lib Dems have built up an impressive amount of momentum, as they rose to come second in the EU elections and have overtaken both Labour and the Conservatives in national polling. That momentum may hit a roadblock this week. On Thursday, the people of Peterborough will head to the polls, as they seek to replace the ousted former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya who has been found guilty of perverting the course of justice.

'We’re going to give this everything we’ve got until 10 o'clock on Thursday.’ There's only two days to go until the Peterborough by-election, and it's fair to say that Brexit party candidate Mike Greene is determined to win. In his campaign headquarters in Peterborough, the businessman, Secret Millionaire and former Tory supporter revealed he hadn't placed a bet on himself like Nigel Farage (his Mum told him to never bet against the bookies), but is 'confident', though not complacent, that the Brexit party can win here this week. Peterborough has always been a tightly contested marginal seat that has either voted for Labour or the Tories since the second world war.

Last night, there was shock across Westminster as a new poll by YouGov asking people how they would vote in the next general election showed that the Lib Dems were the most popular party in the UK. Of those asked, 24 per cent said they would vote for the Remain party, followed by 22 per cent for Nigel Farage's Brexit party, and 19 per cent opting for the Conservatives and Labour respectively. In a blog post introducing the poll, YouGov's political research manager, Chris Curtis, said that it was only the second time in 19 years that either Labour or the Conservatives were not in first place in a YouGov survey. The last time this occurred was in 2010, at the height of Nick Clegg's popularity following the general election debates.