Our political class is paralysed because the wider nation has not yet decided in what direction it wishes to be led.
Gorton and Denton is stony ground for the Conservatives. If we’re nowhere near to recovering the Red Wall, then this contest offers no hope at all. So, from our point of view, what would be the best of all realistic outcomes? The Greens?
Budgets are big, long, detailed things by their very nature. There are some successes buried there, if we look hard enough. However, the best news from the budget was arguably in what it didn’t do, more than what it did
Here is the counter argument to Hague: housing is not stuck because we’ve run out of theory – it is stuck because we let people with no sectoral experience design rules for those who do.
Kemi Badenoch tells ConservativeHome’s Editor Giles Dilnot, what Conservatives can expect at Conference, how she understands frustrations with where the party is, how she feels about defections, Reform and Labour, and what her plan is to get back to government.
The Conservatives’ focus on Farage is letting the LibDems, with all their contradictions, incoherence and 72 MPs, off the hook.
Any hopes that the EU would, in the light of the Ukraine war, see us as an ally rather than a recalcitrant province, have evaporated. Eurocrats have gone home with everything they wanted. Mission accompli. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Blair wrote in his memoirs, the ideal line of attack against an opponent was “low-key… I never made it overly harsh. I always tried to make it telling. The aim was to get the non-politician nodding. If any of these low key charges comes to be believed, it is actually fatal.
One can hardly deny the chronic instability at the top of our party, but for the most part this hasn’t been caused by the rivalrous presence of an oven-ready successor.
Despite their efforts to date, the leadership has not yet convinced party members. 47 per cent of our PopCon panel believe that the internal reform of the party is going either quite or very poorly, while 42 per cent don’t know. Only 1 per cent of our panel considered the internal reform to be going very well.
As lovely as my three years at ConservativeHome have been, I can’t say that I leave the Tory Party in a better state than I found it. If only you knew how bad things really are.
It is only 6 months since we suffered the worst general election defeat in the history of the Party and the infrastructure of that party is crumbling in many places and non-existent in more. The sheer enormity of the country’s challenges are even greater, and more complex than the past. All of these are an unprecedented challenge for Kemi Badenoch.
Only when the Conservatives understand that opposition is a waiting game can they make progress in returning to government.
It is the monarchical nature of the Conservative Party that so often causes the party in Parliament to drift away from its supporters outside.
Our government has calculated that enfranchising 1.5 million teenagers will deliver more Labour votes but they might just go to the far left or Reform.