William Atkinson

I have little interest in what Keir Starmer will say in the Commons later today. I’ve only been in political journalism for four years, and I’m already onto the fall of my fourth prime minister. The death drawls of a premiership have a familiar and tedious air; whatever Starmer says about l’affaire Mandelson, the original sin was appointing an old chum of the world’s most famous nonce as our man in Washington. The exact details of who knew what when are secondary to that mistake. The Prime Minister’s speech will allow for various itches to be scratched.

Is Shabana Mahmood ‘one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had’? Tory MP Edward Leigh thinks so. The Father of the House lavished praise on the Home Secretary in the Commons yesterday after Mahmood announced a ban on the annual al-Quds Day march. He isn’t the only right-winger to fall for Mahmood. Many have failed to clock how unpopular Mahmood has become with her own party Since her promotion to the Home Office, Mahmood has focused on restricting immigration, lengthening settlement periods and requirements for long-term migrants, limiting refugee status, offering money for voluntary departures and banning visas from certain countries.

Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch is reportedly planning a ‘root and branch’ shadow cabinet reshuffle. Those most at risk are said to be her top team of Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. For Lam, there are plenty of reasons to defect to Nigel Farage’s party The intention, the Daily Mail suggests, is to promote younger MPs ‘to energise the battered Tory brand’. Stride is said to ‘lack energy’, Patel ‘reminds voters of record levels of migration’, and Philp is believed to ‘no longer [be] fully focused on the job at hand’. None of these is a surprise.

Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick Until a year or so ago, Poilievre was the Prince Across the Atlantic – a punchy and pugnacious Conservative would who had united his party around a popular and populist message of more housebuilding, tackling inflation and championing those working-class voters that Canada’s Liberals had taken for granted for too long. He built a hefty lead over Justin Trudeau and topped the polls among young voters.

Being a mildly Celtophobic Tory from Metro-Land, I’m an unlikely Welsh nationalist. Aside from once sharing a Christmas dinner with Cerys Matthews, I’ve few ties to the Principality. Nonetheless, last week I found myself at the conference of Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales. If Wales did become independent, it would be a tragic loss, born from neglect My interest was piqued by last October’s Caerphilly Senedd by-election. Despite the confident assertions of Reform outriders that Nigel’s boy would walk it, Plaid won handily. Naturally, the London press rushed to interview the losing candidate, ignore the victor and forget the whole affair.

If Kemi Badenoch makes a speech during a war with Iran, does anyone hear it? Following the Gorton and Denton by-election – but seemingly before President Trump had decided to set fire to the Middle East – the Conservative leader had intuited that it was time to outline her party’s new approach to our fraught multi-racial democracy. For now it is all buzzwords and no bite Emphasis on multi-racial, not multicultural. Badenoch said she had seen what a true multicultural society looked like while growing up in Nigeria: a country divided, despite a shared skin colour, by religion, culture and priorities. A country that she had left to come to a Britain defined by fairness, the rule of law and a tolerance for minorities, especially Jews.

‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Keir Starmer seems to have mirrored Juliet after deciding to move on Chris Wormald on as Cabinet Secretary. Yet the young Capulet was asking not where her lover was, but why he must be Romeo – a Montague. ‘Deny they father and refuse they name’, she implored, so that the pair could be together. With Antonia Romeo widely expected to be Wormald’s successor, a similar chorus of 'whys?' seems to be pricking up across Whitehall.

As per J. M. Barrie, one either believes in fairies, or they don’t. I take a similar approach to Rory Stewart. To his legions of Rest is Politics listeners, the ex-Tory MP, bedroom-squatter, and Afghanistan-botherer is a sage – as right-wing a voice as their timid and tiny middle-class minds can handle, successfully neutralised by co-hosting with 45-minute enthusiast Alistair Campbell. But to me he is a charlatan: another over-educated Balliol boy with a far higher opinion of himself than his public record merits. The example of his Dominic Cummings comments is a case in point. He is a charlatan: another over-educated Balliol boy with a far higher opinion of himself than his public record merits For those unfamiliar, a Stewart rant from June last year about the former No.

Much like Alan Partridge, Kemi Badenoch hopes to have bounced back. After an unsure start to her first year as Tory leader – hopeless interviews and PMQs showings, and a local election shellacking – she now seems to be on a roll. Her two recent set piece speeches at conference and responding to the Budget were successes, her parliamentary performances have been more assured, and she can now get through an interview without declaring war on her ethnic enemies. The Conservatives are no longer spiralling towards fourth; her personal ratings have ticked up to the dizzying heights of -14. For the first time since Badenoch became leader, I feel a faint twig of optimism For those of us of a Kemi-sceptic disposition, this is quite distressing.