Theresa May has discredited the managerial approach to politics: the idea that you can find your way through a difficult problem by mastering the detail and working out a sensible compromise. She thought her Brexit compromise was sensible, but it infuriated people on both sides of the argument, who reckoned it fell far short of […]
“The Conservative Party is in greater turmoil today than ever before in its long history.” So says Lord Lexden, the party’s official historian, in a letter to the Times. He adds that Theresa May has ‘completely lost’ the party’s confidence ‘both in and outside parliament’, and he asks the 1922 Committee to change the rules for […]
For the cross-party talks on Brexit to succeed, the Labour party has to split. And anyone who watched Michael Gove’s brilliant winding-up speech on Wednesday night in the No Confidence debate will have been reminded that Labour is already split. Few Labour MPs believe Jeremy Corbyn is fit to be Prime Minister, and many of […]
If only we could see it, the Iranians attempting to cross the Channel in small boats are paying us a compliment. They have decided they would rather try to make a new life here than in France or Germany or Sweden. They are risking life and limb, and paying large sums of money, in order […]
In order to understand why Theresa May’s predicament may not be quite so hopeless as the press now assumes, it is worth trying to think one’s way into the mind of a third-rate Conservative MP. This unfashionable figure in his late fifties is realistic enough to know that he is more or less completely unemployable […]
Amid careless talk about the greatest constitutional crisis for a hundred years, we are in danger of forgetting that the Brexit drama is good for Parliament. What is said in the Commons, and how MPs vote, actually matter. A friend of mine who commutes from Colchester to London by train said that on Tuesday, for […]
It’s an insult, and in any case it’s not enough. With those words, a Unionist politician of an earlier generation denounced an American offer of financial support for the Northern Ireland peace process. If Theresa May’s problem with the DUP were just about money, it would be soluble. The trouble is that it is about […]
How wonderful to hear of a surge in applications to join the Conservative Party. The defeatist, conventional wisdom is, or until recently was, that the days of mass membership organisations are over. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters showed that is not quite true, and are doubtless one reason why people are joining the Tories. “When bad men […]
