This Deputy Speaker election is going to be fun
- 4 Oct 2013
Just as things were getting rather dull in politics, my old mate Simon Burns resigns a junior transport minister to throw his hat in the ring to replace poor old Nigel Evans as a Deputy Speaker. Nigel is one of the most decent people that I know and I really hope that he will ...
Why Boris will have to get off his leadership bike
- 1 Oct 2013
No doubt Louise Mensch was a perfectly adequate MP for Corby, but lecturing the Tory Party from the comfort of New York on how to win elections via a SUN column seems rather off world. The latest gem from planet Mensch is that the way Cameron gets an outright majority is to pu...
McBride of Dracula has posed some awkward questions for the Emissary from Planet Fuck
- 21 Sep 2013
An old friend, Michael Boulter, the professor of Palaeontology who discovered the lost continent of Atlantis, (honest!!!) asked me over lunch a couple of days ago what the point of Party Conferences was. I was stumped for an answer. He then suggested that in the Middle Ages pe...
Vince Cable is playing a very dangerous game
- 18 Sep 2013
Poor old Cleggy really doesn’t have much choice in offering his party as the coalition makers. He can hardly argue for a Commons majority with a straight face so he is wise not to try. But it is rather daft to pretend to cosy up to Labour after his comments that they “wrecked”...
The Ashcroft poll could be a gift to the Tories
- 15 Sep 2013
As is often the case Michael Ashcroft has done the Conservative Party a great service. His alarming opinion poll published in the Sunday Telegraph this morning that there is a UKIP surge in those marginal seats where the Tories have the smallest majorities has led to the usual...
This will be Miliband's Costa Concordia conference where the captain was too incompetent to land in the lifeboat.
- 13 Sep 2013
The next three weeks will be a terrible time for political journalists. Can you imagine having to endure the quirkiness of the Lib Dems, the despair that is Labour and the sphincter rattling horror of the swivel eyed Tory loons in full anti Cameroon rant? And there are the spi...
Parliament did not assert its authority last night it showed itself to be weak, afraid and self indulgent
- 30 Aug 2013
There were no winners in yesterday’s vote, only losers. The Coalition, the Opposition, Parliament and most tragic of all, those innocents who will be murdered by the Assad regime. I went into the Commons to watch the debate and read it all in Hansard this morning. On the terra...
Ed Miliband's road to Damascus
- 29 Aug 2013
There will be much cheering by the Labour left today. Red Ed has out manoeuvred Cameron and thrown NATO plans to singe Assad’s moustache into chaos. Milibanders, now an endangered species, will spin this as a sign of his strength and guile. The truth is that it is testament to...
It is time for the civilised world to assert its moral authority over the Assad regime
- 28 Aug 2013
The difference between being a leader or a statesman is the ability to take necessary decisions that are unpredictable, unpopular but necessary. David Cameron was right to lead world opinion on the invasion of Libya and right to fly in the face of opposition from his own party...
Burnham's cry for help and the first Blooms of mysogeny by the Kippers
- 11 Aug 2013
This has been a weird week in the bare knuckled roller coaster ride of politics. Nobody should have been remotely surprised at the Godfrey Bloom’s Bongo Bongo land sly little wink to racism. Yet his well known view that women of child bearing age shouldn’t be employed should b...