In the past month, I’ve asked three government ministers to describe the Conservative vision for the country five years from now. One laughed awkwardly. Another said they didn’t know. And a third descended into an unintelligible garble of abstract nouns. Even when I ask for some basic principles, answers elude them. Part of the problem, I’m told, is they don’t think it’s worth setting out their vision because voters won’t listen. And the only way to rebuild the requisite credibility is to deliver on Rishi Sunak’s five priorities (I won’t bore you with the list). The problem with that strategy is Sunak’s five priorities are proving harder to achieve than most observers (myself included) initially thought. Migrants continue to cross the Channel ...

Sport as a personal quest is not an original subject. The quest is why people play games in the first place; to find out how good they are. Sport as an examination of the national character is more difficult, for nations are untamed beasts, composed of many conflicting elements. In our hollowed-out culture, scarred by emotional excess, football has become a national pageant. Pity then the young men selected to speak for the nation with their feet. Laden with riches from their teens, many are unable to spell patriotism, never mind define it. Yet define it they must, for the benefit of fellow citizens who cannot imagine a life without football and the exultation it brings. James Graham, who has established a ...

George Orwell’s memorable take on Dickens, “rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles”, didn’t really fit the Conservatives – until recently, that is. For most of its history, the party – run by relatively pragmatic leaders unconstrained by rank-and-file members and fuelled by no-questions-asked donations from business backers – might as well have been precision-engineered to win elections. Meanwhile, very few of the Tories we used to love to hate ever proved sufficiently nasty (or sufficiently comical) for us to call them to mind decades after they’d departed the scene. But all that has changed. The architectural rot set in when, at the turn of the century, the then-leader William Hague persuaded his colleagues to award the final say in leadership contests to the grassroots. And it ...

There were some interesting nuggets in a new publication from the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies on voters’ views on “freedom”. The report, written by the veteran American pollster Frank Luntz (who I interviewed last year), finds that while the UK is less fanatical about freedom than the US, it remains one of the most important principles to people, alongside fairness and security. Prosperity matters most from a national perspective, and opportunity matters least from all perspectives. In many ways, the report finds that Labour voters are more freedom-loving than Conservative voters. For instance, 29 per cent of Conservatives would limit the right to protest in order to prevent disruption, compared with just 15 per cent of Labour voters. But the positive ...

Where is the left’s energy and animating purpose? It is currently in power in much of Latin America and in major western countries such as the US, Germany, Spain and Australia. The UK Labour Party has a good chance of returning to government next year. But the Spanish socialists are set to lose next month’s snap election and Germany’s Social Democrats are polling behind both the centre-right Christian Democrats and, in some surveys, the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland). Joe Biden is far from assured re-election, while Labour faces an uphill struggle to win an outright majority of seats in Westminster. Once again it seems the left’s forward march is halted, stopped in its tracks before it has really got going. Part ...

Keir Starmer’s Labour is becoming increasingly bold when it comes to Brexit. With the referendum’s seventh anniversary on Friday, the shadow foreign secretary David Lammy today (20 June) reiterated the party’s promise to improve relations with the EU. Since 2016, much has changed. Labour is well ahead in the polls – around 20 points. Economic growth is minimal, the cost-of-living crisis continues to bite and inflation remains high. Just last week, Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, put the blame for inflation squarely on Brexit. “There’s no joy in saying, well, ‘we told you so’ because people are having to live with that reality,” said Carney, who was put under pressure to resign from the governorship when ...

A few days before the 1997 general election, I phoned Michael Forsyth, then the Conservative Scottish secretary. “Anything doing?” I asked him. The world and its auntie knew the Tories were hours away from being kicked out of government – Forsyth knew it better than anyone – but he couldn’t resist one last piece of mischief. “If we’re re-elected, I’m going to bring back grammar schools to Scotland,” he told me. I was young and green, and excitedly rushed in to tell the editor about my explosive scoop. He laughed. The “story” didn’t run. There comes a time towards the end of governments when they largely cease to matter. Declarations that would once have caused shock and controversy, and perhaps have dominated the ...

The House of Commons voted overwhelmingly last night (19 June) to endorse the Privileges Committee report that found Boris Johnson flagrantly misled the House. His former MP’s pass on to the Westminster estate will be withheld. Few defended him. Some condemned him. Most absented themselves. The Conservative Party was split last night over its response to the Privileges Committee report. One minister made eager noises at the prospect of voting against their former leader as they crossed College Green. But not many MPs were this enthusiastic. The Conservative benches were sparsely populated (I counted 28 MPs from the press gallery), despite the chamber being air-conditioned against the heat, a rare luxury in the Palace of Westminster. So why did 225 Tory MPs not ...