First he got treated to a joyride in an RAF Typhoon. Then he threw a lavish party at Chequers. Then he missed a Cobra meeting called to plan for the worst heatwave on record. And that was only week one of the interregnum. Soon Boris Johnson will be off: to all intents and purposes he has checked out of all responsibilities while the government is obliged to obey the "caretaker principle", initiating no major actions. It should feel like a relief after two and a half years of relentless bluffing, lies and chaos. But it doesn't. The caretaker principle was designed for the short periods of predictable uncertainty: after a no-confidence vote, during an election, and during the formation of a government ...

Today (18 July) the UK may experience its hottest day ever. It is near-universally acknowledged that climate change has its fingerprints all over the heatwave. People will die because of the extreme heat. Climate models predict these temperatures will become the norm in summer if climate change is left unchecked. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide levels continue to rise and António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, will warn today that the world is heading for "collective suicide".  Yet only 4 per cent of Conservative Party members put reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 in their top three priorities, according to a YouGov poll for the Times, and not one of the candidates trying to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister appears to give a hoot ...

The 2019 election seemed like a genuinely transformative moment in British politics. Once rock-solid Labour seats from Blyth Valley to Sedgefield fell to the Conservatives like nine-pins as people in the so-called Red Wall voted Tory for the first time in their life. We seemed to be living through a lasting political shift or one of those “sea-changes” in British politics that Jim Callaghan once talked about. Voters in towns where Tories were once deeply distrusted were prepared to put their faith in the Conservative Party in return for the promise that decades of economic and social decline would be addressed and reversed. These new voters felt comfortable supporting the Tories because they had moved from their economically liberal comfort zone and made ...

There is so much that is unedifying about the Conservative Party’s leadership contest: the candidates’ refusal to confront inconvenient truths, their fantasy promises, pandering, shapeshifting, infighting, evasion of scrutiny and failure to address the country as a whole. All that is bad enough, but David (sorry, Lord) Frost’s latest intervention is beyond nauseating. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he has launched a vicious attack on Penny Mordaunt in a bid to boost Liz Truss. He did so, he claimed somewhat incredibly, because “many have asked what I think”. He continued: “My direct experience of working with [Mordaunt], as my notional deputy on EU issues in 2021, was that she was absent on parade. She did not master the detail in the negotiations, ...

There is a fact at the heart of reality TV that absolutely everybody knows and yet somehow absolutely nobody acknowledges: it’s not real. If you watch an hour of someone’s day that has been sculpted and sliced and squeezed in between advert breaks, then the reality of that reality has been lost. You don’t really know what happened on that day. You don’t really know why someone acted the way that they did. Sometimes we glimpse how manufactured these shows are. In an interview with the tabloid magazine Closer in June, the 2020 Love Island contestant Shaughna Phillips claimed producers asked her to have a conversation with another female contestant over and over again until it became increasingly confrontational (initially, Phillips ...

The Conservative leadership contest had barely started when a single issue – where the candidates stand on the definition of a woman – sprang to the top of the agenda. Some commentators were surprised or disapproving, arguing that it's a marginal issue compared with the soaring cost of living, inflation or the war in Ukraine. Of course there are wider issues that matter, but to say other issues loom large does not mean we cannot debate gender at all. Indeed, unlike the Labour leadership, leading Tories clearly sense widespread discomfort about changes to language and public facilities that have happened with next to no consultation. And the prominence of the issue in the current contest suggests it is going to be ...

When news broke this month that a ten-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after being raped, right-wing politicians and media personalities went into overdrive to discredit the report. Now that there's been an arrest, however, conservatives have moved on to attacking the doctor who performed the medical procedure, in a way that is reminiscent of the targeting of George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who was murdered in 2009 by the anti-choice extremist Scott Roeder. On Wednesday police announced the arrest of Gerson Fuentes, 27, for the rape of the girl. Right-wing commentators pivoted to questioning how they could have got it so wrong – and decided that the child's doctors were at fault. It’s ...

The Conservative leadership race is dividing observers, as moments of suspense often do, into optimists and cynics. And on the question of what the winner will do about climate change, the divide is proving especially pronounced. For green optimists within the Tory party and beyond, the fact that environmental protection is popular with the public is seen as a safeguard against backsliding. No future leader, when it comes to a national vote, they claim, would risk ignoring the fact that 78 per cent of Conservative voters support preserving the world for future generations, according to research by the centre-right think tank Onward.  They stress the achievements of past Tory governments, such as enshrining in law the policy to emit no more greenhouse ...