Will Heaven

Exactly 100 years after (some) women won the right to vote, Ruth Davidson has joined calls for a posthumous pardon for jailed suffragettes – the militants who violently fought for that right. ‘Voting was a value judgement, not an intrinsic right,’ says Davidson. And that historic inequality is why she supports the pardon, no questions asked. Jeremy Corbyn agrees, vowing that his government would pardon the suffragettes. It’s a nice idea on the surface – it has #MeToo written all over it, doesn't it? – but there are a few reasons it should be resisted.

Did the 2007-08 financial crisis cause Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn? George Osborne's answer, 10 years on from it all, echoed Zhou Enlai on the French revolution: it’s too early to say. But at a Spectator event at Cadogan Hall, in conversation with Andrew Neil, Osborne defended not only his policies as chancellor, but also – by implication, and rather unexpectedly – Gordon Brown's. Looking back, he said, even if Britain wasn't particularly well prepared for the collapse of Northern Rock and all that followed that autumn a decade ago, there was nothing ‘radically different’ that could have been done to respond to the crash, either by him or his predecessor.

Theresa May must have woken up this morning wondering, for a split second, if yesterday was all just a very bad dream. The front pages will hammer home the reality of her situation – she was 'luckless', says one of the kinder headlines. But I wonder: how much did yesterday's shambolic performance have to do with bad luck, and how much to do with woeful preparation? May's ordeal, and especially her excruciating coughing fits, reminded me of a passage in Jonathan Powell's The New Machiavelli, a sort-of memoir about his time as Tony Blair's chief of staff.

There's a good reason ministerial conference speeches are often so achingly dull. Because such occasions are inevitably party political – featuring punchy attacks on Labour and so on – civil service policy experts and departmental speechwriters aren’t allowed anywhere near them, for fear of breaking various Whitehall codes. So the speeches are stitched together by the minister, his or her special advisers, and nervous party apparatchiks who are mainly focused not on policy announcements or the department’s agenda, but on making sure the Prime Minister’s team is kept happy. But though there was a faint whiff of that about David Lidington's speech earlier today, the justice secretary made a few points that are worth picking up on.

Sir James Dyson would make a good therapist for anxious Brexiteers. Everything about him is comfortingly precise — his manner and way of speaking, his owlish round glasses and blow-dried white hair. He exudes a Zen-like calm. What he has to say is reassuring, too. He is as sunnily optimistic about leaving the EU as he was before the referendum last year. ‘I am very confident,’ he says, ‘in our ability to negotiate trade deals outside Europe — with Japan, Australia, China, America and so on — because it’s very easy. It’s just us negotiating with them. It’s very, very straightforward and you don’t have to satisfy 27 other people.’ The implication is that a deal with the EU will be harder.

As the Brexit negotiations kicked off in Brussels yesterday, an equally delicate act of diplomacy took place in London at the Royal Courts of Justice, where David Lidington was sworn in as the new Lord Chancellor. Ceremony aside, this was a big political moment, involving one of the most important speeches of Mr Lidington's career so far. He faced a tough audience. Relations between the judiciary and the government had completely broken down before the general election, with the Lord Chief Justice going on the record to criticise ministers in brutally clear terms. So as I suggested last week, Lidington urgently needed to butter up the judges and reset relations with them.

We can't yet be sure what caused the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower. Early speculation, some of it expert, some of it not but based on eyewitness testimony, points to the cladding on the outside of the building, which was added during a recent £8.6m makeover. This, it seems, may have turned an ugly but safe concrete tower into a death trap. Nor do we have any idea how many people were killed in the blaze. Commander Stuart Cundy of the Metropolitan Police said at 11 a.m. today: 'Sadly I can confirm the number of people that have died is now 17. We do believe that that number will increase.' There are still 37 people receiving treatment, of which 17 are in critical care. Many people are missing, as all papers reported this morning.

It is hard to overstate the scale and intensity of the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey west London block of flats, shortly before 1 a.m. this morning. Pictures and video from the scene look like something out of a disaster movie. 'Inferno' is the Evening Standard's headline. At this early stage, six people have been confirmed dead – but the Metropolitan Police have said that 'we do expect that figure to rise'. At least seventy-four more are injured and have been taken to six London hospitals, with 20 'in critical care'. More than 100 families have been made homeless. The emergency services responded quickly and in large numbers last night – arriving on the scene within six minutes of the first 999 call, the Guardian reports.

Liz Truss, I think it's fair to say, was miscast as justice secretary. She was appointed only last July by Theresa May and demoted rather cruelly on Sunday night to be Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Truss is far more capable than her critics allow; but I would still argue that the job wasn't right for her. Before her move to 102 Petty France, she had been an impressive education minister under Michael Gove and – bar one excruciating speech – was said to be a very capable environment secretary. But justice was a bad fit. There are a few reasons for this. Whitehall whispers suggest that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, didn't think she was ready to run such a big department.

Pundits and pollsters have spent the last year trying to explain what the Brexit vote meant. Was it right-wing or left-wing? Was it about immigration or sovereignty? Was it a bit racist? They'll do the same for this election – trying to pinpoint where it all went so humiliatingly wrong for Theresa May. But to me one answer, even so soon after shock result – and before we've been able fully to analyse the results – stands out by a mile: the dementia tax.  There are five reasons, I'd argue, why it ruined Theresa May's election campaign and may have been the key factor in destroying her parliamentary majority. 1.

Until last night, I always felt uncomfortable seeing police with guns on the UK’s streets. It’s just not very British, I used to think. But after I had the misfortune to be on London Bridge in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, I’ve changed my mind. I was in an Uber with my wife heading south over the Thames. We saw one victim on the pavement, another in the road; the driver pointed out yet another up ahead. Soon people started running across from the Borough Market end of the bridge talking about ‘stabbings’. A black cab driver shouted at us: ‘It’s Westminster all over again.

The Prime Minister says there is no such thing as ‘Mayism’, only ‘good, solid Conservatism’. Fine. But let’s examine just how ‘good’ and ‘Conservative’ her party’s new policy on social care is, unveiled earlier today. The Tory manifesto says, in effect, that people who need care in old age will have to pay for every penny of it – no matter how big the costs – if they have more than £100,000 in assets, which will be protected. Payment can be deferred until after death, but there’s no escaping it. If you have a home worth, say, £216,000 (the national average), own it outright, and need to be looked after for a long time, you may have to cough up £116,000.

Theresa May's snap election, scheduled for 8 June, was unlikely for three big reasons. Holding off until 2020 would allow the Tories to take advantage of boundary changes that come into force in 2018. There's a fixed-term parliament act, which is a major complicating factor (Labour will probably have to back a vote in the Commons to allow this election to take place at all). Most of all, she staked a large chunk of her credibility on not U-turning on her decision that there wouldn't be one. Until this morning, her reputation for unwavering unflappability looked justified. Here are five occasions on which the Prime Minister personally, or her staff, denied that there were plans for an election.