Conservatives are switching to Labour. Evidently, a significant proportion of Tory voters are switching to Labour (as every opinion poll tells us) but also Tory politicians. The defection of an MP from one main party to another is rare. There have only been eight since a young Winston Churchill moved from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 but three in this parliament alone (Christian Wakeford, Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke). It is not just current MPs. Some commentators were struck by the sight of Nick Boles, an influential minister under David Cameron, introducing Rachel Reeves before her speech on the economy last week. Other former ministers – such as Claire Perry O’Neill and Anna Soubry – have said that they ...

Labour drops policies when they jeopardise victory – or to put that more charitably, it strives to be as close to voters’ concerns as possible. For a political party 14 years out of power, you can understand the rationale. This was one reason behind the U-turn on the £28bn of green spending. Labour strategists foresaw Tory attack lines that Labour would raise taxes to pay for it. By dropping the policy, they closed down that risk and took a big step towards the Conservatives. With the £28bn junked, the question became: what next? Eyes turned towards Labour’s New Deal for Working People, a tranche of measures to improve workers’ rights. Labour MPs anxiously predicted its demise, as did some union leaders. Amid ...

When Lucian Freud convinced the late Queen Elizabeth II to sit for a portrait in 2000, her reaction to the final piece, after 18 months of meetings with him at St James’s Palace, was to say, “I've very much enjoyed watching you mix your colours.” If you’ve seen the portrait, you’d know that that reply was a prime example of her inimitable grace. The painting, by an artist who was then considered the greatest living British painter, is 9 inches in height, and less than flattering. Robin Simon, the editor of the British Art Journal, wrote in the Sun: “It makes her look like one of her corgis who has suffered a stroke.” Or, as the newspaper’s front page declared: ...

Hopefully this is the most depressing statistic you will read today: in 2022-23, people in the UK spent a cumulative total of seven million hours, or 798 years, on hold to HMRC, according to a report published this week by the National Audit Office (NAO). This is a torment Dante could not have imagined. Eight centuries of hot-eared boredom, an epoch of chirpy jazz riffs that would, laid end to end, stretch back to the time of Genghis Khan. HMRC’s hold music was created from samples in 2007 by the Telephony Standards Team, a group that has since disbanded. Its members remain anonymous but they are, according to some estimates I made using Spotify, now a larger part of the UK’s ...

With all the tension in the run-up to the local elections and the anti-climax that followed, you’d be forgiven for thinking the shadow Tory leadership contest was on pause. All sorts of names were floated as potential replacements for Rishi Sunak in the weeks leading up to 2 May – Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat – but speculation fizzled out once it became apparent that, though the results had been dire for the Conservatives, they would not be switching leaders again this side of an election. The Tories may have resigned themselves to fighting the upcoming election with Sunak at the helm, but the fight to succeed him after the fact continues. And the candidate in the spotlight right now ...

One thing that defines Keir Starmer is an aversion to navel-gazing. At present, journalists introspecting on Labour’s behalf seem captured by the idea that Starmerism is a repudiation of Blairism. As the director of a “Starmerite” think tank, I think that idea is misguided and self-defeating. It gets New Labour wrong and it gets Keir Starmer’s Labour wrong. New Labour was about bringing Labour back to working people. Philip Gould was its architect in spirit and temperament. He and his colleagues made Labour reckon with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. This ensured the party lived and breathed the hopes and values of ordinary people. Tony Blair remains Labour’s most electorally successful leader – something that ...

Good maternity care “is the exception rather than the rule” in England, according to today’s report from the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on birth trauma. For the millions of women who have given birth over the past decade and more, this will come as little surprise. When I wrote about my own traumatic birth in a cover story for the New Statesman last month, I was overwhelmed with the responses I received. Strangers – and close friends – were exceptionally kind to me. But I was overwhelmed, too, to learn how many women had received such poor treatment: some had suffered the worst fate imaginable – their babies had died or experienced life-changing harm; others, like me, had suffered appalling birth injuries, and ...

Metro mayors have become an immovable feature of British politics. The vision that George Osborne outlined as part of his Northern Powerhouse project in 2014 is being expanded and entrenched. Labour wants new metro mayors across the country. Despite lower turnouts at this year’s local elections, the incumbents are establishing themselves as a counterbalance to the centralised Westminster system. As one senior Labour aide told me, “The model is here to stay and that devolution agenda is something that Keir feels very strongly about.” Andy Burnham in Manchester took up the anti-Westminster mantle during the Covid-19 pandemic when he theatrically opposed the government’s tiered lockdown system. Andy Street, the former John Lewis CEO and West Midlands mayor, became the flag-bearer for ...