Patrick O’Flynn

When did the scale of illegal immigration into the UK via Channel dinghies become a first order political issue for you? Perhaps you were, like me, outraged by the phenomenon from the start. If so, you will have been reassured by Boris Johnson’s declaration at the outset of his premiership that those coming in this

There is a sweet spot for party leaders in which two key conditions are fulfilled. First, the leader’s party is ahead in the polls. Secondly, the leader is more popular than the party. At the end of his first week in office, Rishi Sunak can at least be content that the latter of these conditions

What do you do when you are a prime minister presiding over a desperately difficult economic outlook riddled with features that are all but intractable in the short-term? Well, in Rishi Sunak’s case, you find other issues that might persuade people to vote for your party and convincing message-carriers to hammer home the approach you

‘At least I’ve been prime minister’ – those were the reported words of Liz Truss on realising that she had presided over so much chaos that she’d have to step down after just six weeks in office. It is most unlikely that our next prime minister would react to catastrophic failure in such a manner.

There is generally a basic problem to be overcome whenever somebody suggests two competing political egos come together to campaign on a ‘joint ticket’ – one of them has to be the boss. There is only one vacancy being fought over by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and it cannot be subject to a job

Had Boris Johnson simply wished to use the current vacancy for prime minister to remind us all of his superstar status then it would be mission accomplished already. The mere confirmation that the great blond bombshell was mulling an instant comeback transformed a prospect I likened a fortnight ago to the preposterous Bobby Ewing shower scene

To call it a shambles is an insult to the many perfectly respectable shambles that take place each day up and down this fine land. Yesterday’s performance across Westminster and Whitehall by the Conservative and Unionist party will surely be remembered for many years as the textbook example of the nadir to which a dysfunctional,

The Reform party, under its leader Richard Tice, invented Trussonomics before Liz Truss – launching an economic recovery plan in June which claimed to explain ‘how to grow our way out of crisis’. The core policy idea will be familiar to anyone who has followed the disastrous aftermath of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget

Liz Truss will not lead the Conservative party into the next general election, despite her rather hesitant claim to the contrary in an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason. There are probably now fewer than 20 Conservative MPs prepared to go into that contest with Ms Truss, or her alter ego Ann Droid, in charge.

Jeremy Hunt has no mandate to lead Britain. He couldn’t muster sufficient Tory MPs behind him to properly enter the last leadership contest. He was beaten overwhelmingly in the one before that.  He was a key part of the failed Theresa May administration that lost a parliamentary majority at a general election. He played no

Is Liz Truss the new Theresa May? A fortnight ago that question seemed unduly insulting to the Prime Minister. Now it seems unduly insulting to the Maybot, whose stage-dancing at Tory conference appears a triumph of liquid movement when compared to the curtsying of the Trussborg at royal audiences. Clumsy is as clumsy does, and Truss

It would obviously be ridiculous for the Conservatives to dump Liz Truss after just a few weeks and seek to re-install Boris Johnson as prime minister. To do such a thing would be akin to what the producers of the 1980s TV series Dallas did after realising they had made a horrendous mistake by killing off

Despite its leading lights having spent more than a decade spent promising us they will bring down immigration we can now say for sure that Conservative party is not going to do that. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are preparing to expand the number of economic sectors to be declared as suffering from labour shortages

In the Christian tradition, which allows for a protracted gap between death and burial, there is often time for initial feelings of shock and grief to give way to other emotions – fond recall, gratitude for the contribution of the departed. But a funeral always returns us to sorrow. And deep sorrow was the abiding

As republican protestors seek to disrupt the handing on of the title of head of state from one royal to another, we should appreciate that it is an obsolete system in the modern world. Not the monarchy, of course: it only takes one look at the mass outpouring of grief for the late Queen and the

The Queen’s fragile smile in the official photograph released as she waited to appoint Liz Truss as her 15th Prime Minister carries even more meaning now. Her Majesty clearly knew there would be no 16th and after a turbulent summer it must have come as a relief to know that the country was about to move

People used to understand that they were ageing when they noticed police officers in their neighbourhood looking unfeasibly young. Given that nobody ever sees a police officer on foot patrol these days, a new benchmark for startling youthfulness needs to be identified. After Liz Truss unveiled her top ministerial team yesterday perhaps ex-cabinet members could

Nobody knows what they think about Liz Truss. Not literally nobody – those of us with a wholly unusual level of interest in politics of course have our pet theories – but nobody in the sense of the broad sweep of the general public. As Tony Blair noted in his memoirs: ‘For most normal people,

The wholesale abuse of the United Kingdom’s asylum system has taken a novel, absurdist twist in the last few months. Recent years have seen thousands of young men predominantly from war-torn or extremely oppressive countries – such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – chugged across the English Channel from the safe country of France