Stephen Daisley

It’s over 150 years since John Stuart Mill called the Conservatives the stupid party and in every one of those years they have worked hard to live up to that assessment.  Grant Shapps’ abortive leadership coup is the latest example of Tory idiocy. After Theresa May did herself a mischief in Manchester, Shapps scarpered over to his colleagues and piped up that the emperor had no clothes. To which they replied: ‘Where have you been, Grant?’ Unfazed, Shapps then offered himself up as a replacement, out of selfless devotion to party and country. The party, once it had established who he was again, said 'nah, you're all right, mate'.

Boris Johnson came to Tory conference to do two things. First, he had to win back the Tory grassroots from the floccinaucinihilipilificating ways of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Moggmentum rises and falls with the willingness of the faithful to indulge blithe theatrical Toryism at the expense of sense and good judgement. Second, he had to address his own reputation for flippancy and remind the party that he can do serious when he wants to.  Whether he succeeded in achieving the former, we will see but he made a good effort on the latter point. It fell to Boris to remind Conservatives of their own fatal conceit — that of assuming the arguments against socialism had been won.

Are you considering a career in Labour politics but fear you may be left behind amid all the exciting changes the party is undergoing? Maybe you want to be a part of the Jez revolution but can’t get your head around the ever-developing terminology.  Perhaps you are eyeing up a safe seat but aren’t sure which paramilitary cell's endorsement would most impress the selection panel.  Help is at hand with this guide that takes you through the key terms of Corbynspeak.  Centrist dad: Anyone old enough to remember when Labour was a political party and not an evangelical tent ministry. Owns more than one pair of chinos and only uses Facebook to post ‘FFS’ with links to Owen Jones pieces. Centrist dads just don’t get how politics works in 2017.

The people’s flag is even deeper red in Scottish Labour, where the daggers are plunging in all directions amid a bloody leadership battle.  Interim leader Alex Rowley has been secretly recorded admitting he backs left-wing candidate Richard Leonard, despite promising to remain neutral in the contest. It comes barely a week after Rowley’s turn as Fife’s answer to Mark Antony at First Minister’s Questions, where a jeremiad against millionaires was widely interpreted as a veiled denunciation of Anas Sarwar, the centrist candidate and a chap with a bob or two million to spare.  The Rowley tape also contains a reference to ‘private discussions’ on the future of Kezia Dugdale, who has since departed as leader.

The SNP's Fiona Hyslop is not an obvious candidate to lead a cultural revolution. The Scottish Government's Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs is more Nicola Murray than Nicola Sturgeon. Hyslop has a permanent look of terror that someone might ask her a question but she’s harmless enough. Stick a few flags and a bowl of borscht in her office and tell her she’s at the UN and she’d be happy enough. Yes, she’s a bit clueless, pretty forgettable and has achieved almost nothing in eight years but it could be worse; she could be Mike Russell.  That’s why I’m not terribly worried about the latest tussle between the notions in her head and the outside world. To be sure, there is a chilling ring to the words.

A report suggesting that the £414m Scottish Parliament building could reach the end of its 'useful life' by 2060 - after just 45 years - provides the perfect metaphor for the state of devolution in 2017: a parliament that has been noticeably reluctant to use its powers in the last decade slapped with a ‘use by’ date. Irony can be awfully cutesy at times. The Scottish Parliament's problems don't begin and end with its building though. A poll by Panelbase gave voters an opportunity to declare themselves scunnered with the whole enterprise of devolution. Asked if, instead of independence or the status quo, they would rather shutter Holyrood tomorrow, 19 per cent of Scots said they are up for a return to direct rule from Westminster.

Twenty-nine years ago this month, the Vote Leave campaign got underway. Nigel Farage was still making his anti-establishment way as a City broker and a young Michael Gove was heading northwards to work on the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Instead, it was the founder of the movement who did the honours. Margaret Thatcher travelled to Bruges, to the College of Europe, the Europhile madrassa that has radicalised generations of youth to the cause of ever closer union. There in the belly of the beast she smartly explained why Britain was marvellous and wouldn’t it be better all round if the Continent was more like Blighty.

It is the gripe of every end-of-the-bar bigot you meet. ‘Look, I’m not saying there isn’t any racism but there can’t be as much as they claim. They exaggerate it. This isn’t me saying this, by the way. I know loads of black lads who say the same. They’re just milking it. It stands to reason.’ Place that paragraph before almost any Labour member and they would know exactly what they were looking at. They would call it textbook racism. The throat-clearing at the outset. The downplaying of the problem. The some-of-my-best-strawmen-are-black rhetorical device.

Say what you like about the Tories but cutting immigration by 100,000 in a single day is impressive. To think Jeremy Corbyn says this government isn't delivering. Until now, official figures put the number of students overstaying their visa in the UK at 100,000. An update from the Office for National Statistics confirms critics’ suspicions that that total was flawed. In fact, the Home Office notes, last year only three percent of foreign students were unaccounted for. That means roughly 3,000 overstayed. Skim-readers and those out for a political fight have branded this a ‘blunder’ but the facts are more complex. Access to emigration data in this area has only been available since the introduction of exit checks.

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and occasional first minister of Scotland, has come to a jarring realisation. After 31 years as a member of the SNP and three as the party’s leader, she has announced that she is not comfortable with the name 'Scottish National Party'. At the Edinburgh Festival, Sturgeon told Turkish novelist Elif Shafak:  'If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and chose its name all over again, I wouldn't choose the name it has got just now. I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.'  The problem for Sturgeon, it seems, was the worldwide upsurge in populist nationalism. This was causing confusion about the SNP's mission and motivations.

Before Trump or Farage, before Wilders or Marine Le Pen, there was Pauline. Pauline Hanson was the original rabble-rouser who disrupted the pieties of liberal multiculturalism. Along came this copper-topped fish ’n’ chip shop owner with her screechy, strangled sentences and her gut prejudices about immigrants, welfare wasters and Aborigines. Unexpectedly elected to Parliament in 1996, Hanson stunned her fellow MPs and much of the country by declaring in her maiden speech that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’. She is back in the news after wearing then tearing off a burqa in the Australian Senate. Senator Hanson, who leads the hard-right One Nation party, has made the veil her signature issue. It is a security threat. A public order concern.