Westminster has an open secret. Almost everybody knows that the triple-lock is ultimately economically unsustainable. And yet no party on the right wants to touch it for fear of electoral suicide. That doesn’t make it any more sustainable.
I’ve tried to give a totally honest, and fair appraisal as to why a centrist Labour friend and myself have the same view as one publicly shared by the leader of Reform, that Keir Starmer is simply not up to the job. We don’t hate him, we just think there’s nothing there.
The word from many of the more senior Conservative Party officials campaigning across the country is that in some areas the loses could be pretty bad, but in others – London gets mentioned a lot – there could be brighter news.
Easter had always been more central to the Christian church than Christmas since 380 AD. The thing is, the messages we’ve had broadcast to us this year – minus one from the King – have been less doctrines of faith, and more dockyard fighting.
Whether any politician, and any party, have the verve and ambition to match the ethos and motivation within a moon mission, to get actual delivery and without standing up and offering hollow monologues, really remains to be seen.
81.2 per cent of responders back Badenoch in saying she’d have granted use of our bases from the start of operations. 62.3 per cent say they backed the US and Israel striking the Iranian regime. 92.8 per cent back the UK spending more on defence, and faster.
There’s a shift in the debate, for those in Reform and Conservatives, who are willing to have it. More are, and mercifully without the wearisome ‘screaming’ at each other that marked the start of hostilities. It’s not a deal, it might mark a ceasefire.
Starmer tried to be the more moral, more principled, more straight, more genuine option to get to be Prime Minister but it was a façade built to appeal to the widest possible section of an ultimately fragmented network of niche wishes.
Today, arguing the rights and wrongs of the Middle East’s problems, especially if those rights are Palestinian and the wrongs anybody with the remotest connection to a being jewish, is made both virtuous and acceptable in a newspaper and our wider public discourse.
If we can all find a way to choose candidates and foster MPs who are skeleton and even closet free, and just a bit more ‘normal’ to a majority of the electorate, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves a favour. We’d be doing everyone a favour.
Nobody sane likes war, and those that do seldom fight them. Badenoch isn’t itching to ‘do war’. She’s advocating defending British interests, and if you think Starmer hasn’t damaged those then you are living in an isolationist virtue bubble.
43.7 per cent of members said it was likely there would be more defections of senior Tories and 12 per cent highly likely. Which begs the question: of those 57 per cent, who exactly do they think it might be?
The Conservative leader is literally leading from the front, with one of her highest results in our league table. But the ‘Badenoch bounce’ remains about her, and getting any translation into a rise for the party is still gruelling ongoing work
Churchill fought a war having argued for years that Britain was economically and militarily unprepared. Starmer is trying not to fight a war arguing via his Chancellor that never before has so much been promised for defence. For so little return when it matters, it seems.