There was a bounce to Rishi Sunak’s demeanour as he stepped up for the final PMQs of the year. The Rwanda bill, on which he has staked his premiership, cleared its first hurdle in the Commons last night, with the much-feared rebellion from the Tory right ending with not a single MP voting against. The real fight, of course, will come in the new year when the details of the bill are thrashed out and Sunak is pressured to fulfil promises he made to toughen it up. And one could argue that it was a significant error of judgement for the Prime Minister to allow the issue of Rwanda to become so prominent in the first place. But today Sunak ...

It has happened at last. Two months after the Polish elections, Donald Tusk was elected prime minister by the Polish parliament yesterday (11 December) after Mateusz Morawiecki’s incumbent government lost a confidence vote in the Sejm, the parliament's lower house. The Law and Justice party (PiS)'s eight years in power are over, for now. There are high expectations for Tusk from Brussels and other European capitals, but he will be inheriting many problems from his predecessors – and is also unlikely to be as accommodating as the European Union may be hoping. However, the tone of the dialogue between Poland and the bloc will no doubt change. Its government's anti-German obsession will end, for instance. But can Tusk deliver a ...

The backdrop to Keir Starmer’s speech today (12 December) could not have been more illustrative. While the Labour leader spoke in Buckinghamshire castigating the Conservative Party for allowing internal skirmishes to override its responsibilities as a government, Tory MPs ferreted around Westminster, deciding whether to put Rishi Sunak’s leadership at risk by voting down his Rwanda bill in the Commons this evening. Starmer’s decision to deliver a speech away from Westminster was a smart way of showing that Labour will govern in the national interest. Whereas the Tories cannot even manage their own party. They are making it easy for Starmer. “While they're swanning around, self-importantly, with their factions and their star chambers, fighting like rats in a sack, there's a ...

In the wake of Brexit and the 2019 election when millions of working-class voters abandoned Labour for the Tories, there was much talk about a realignment of British politics. After years of right-wing economics and left-wing social reform, the new direction of travel would be “left on the economy” and “right on culture”. Gone were the days when both main parties offered little else than more market and greater individualism allied with a privatising, outsourcing state and less social solidarity. As prime minister, Boris Johnson declared the end of fiscal austerity and promised a generation of state-driven levelling up of "left behind" places. “F*** business” and “take back control” were the watchwords of this nascent post-liberal era. Yet it was a ...

This was a surreal day to watch Rishi Sunak at the Covid inquiry. The current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom giving evidence about his role as chancellor during the greatest national emergency in recent history should have been a blockbuster event. Instead, it was something of a side show. While Sunak faced the indefatigable Hugo Keith KC in that drab Paddington hearing room, the real drama lay three miles south, in Westminster, as the government’s flagship Rwanda plan was eviscerated by the European Research Group’s “star chamber”. The news that the band of right-wing Tory MPs instrumental in destroying Theresa May’s Brexit deal had rejected the Rwanda bill – a piece of legislation that declares the African country a safe ...

In the period between spring 2017, when Theresa May called an unnecessary election and promptly lost her majority, and summer 2019, when she finally lost her job, the then prime minister got into a strange habit. Every few weeks, when her Brexit strategy hit yet another roadblock, word would go round that May was to make an intervention. The lectern would come out, rolling news crews would cut to footage of the closed door of 10 Downing Street, and everyone in the bubble would collectively hold their breath. A change of strategy? A resignation? Another snap election? What could we glean, from the choice or position of the lectern? What did it mean? Then finally, perhaps 45 minutes later than we’d ...

In an alternate, preferable reality the SNP government would this week have announced a major rethink of Scotland’s disgracefully failing education system. Ministers would have been embarrassed by the results of the latest Pisa study, which show the nation’s schools are continuing their long-term decline in maths, science and reading. Jenny Gilruth, the Education Secretary, would have called an emergency press conference to promise urgent action: “It’s clear that as things stand we are failing to provide the quality of education our children deserve and need. The Curriculum for Excellence is not fit for purpose, as the Pisa data proves, and must be rethought from the bottom up. If Holyrood cannot deliver a decent education system, if it can do nothing ...

Since the resignation of Robert Jenrick, the UK government has divided the role of immigration minister into two. Tom Pursglove will now serve as minister for “legal migration and delivery” and Michael Tomlinson as minister for “illegal migration”. These changes expose how crucial it is now for the Conservatives to separate the two – legal and illegal migration – in voters’ minds. In a press conference explaining his new measures to push through the Rwanda deportation scheme, Rishi Sunak opened by emphasising that his own immigrant parents “came here legally”. As the record net migration figure of 750,000 for 2022 shows, this Conservative administration is relying on high immigration to keep the economy ticking over. The new Home Secretary James Cleverly’s recent ...