Last night’s vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz should have unnerved America. It proved that the spares are better than the duo running for president. Compared with the presidential debate, when Kamala Harris baited an irascible Donald Trump for 90 minutes, this ranked as a Socratic dialogue. The VP picks actually talked about policy and didn’t shout at each other. Vance’s comment - “I appreciate what Tim said about Finland!” - summed up the tone. In a campaign which has been anything but, at one-point Walz described their differences as “philosophical”.   The Harris team have so far used Walz like a campaign’s mascot, warming up crowds with his Donald Duck smile and affected high-school coach demeanour. He’s done ...

It’s fair to assume that, when the 1922 Committee and board of the Conservative Party were hammering out the details of the leadership contest, they did not expect the speeches on the final day of conference to be dominated by foreign policy. They probably didn’t expect the field to be so open by this point either.   I was watching Kemi Badenoch being interviewed by the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson on Tuesday afternoon, when an audience member put her hand up to nervously say she’d just had a breaking news alert on her phone that Iran had started bombing Israel.“So what would be your response as Tory leader?” Nelson asked. Badenoch, whose focus has been more on domestic politics than some of ...

There is no such thing as truly objective morality, but there are some moments in life where we encounter such clear distinctions between right and wrong that we know we must be close. It feels like an objective statement to suggest that shooting a gun through the window of a busy shop, for instance, is a worse than say, throwing paint on a building. These things are both crimes, but it would be an absurdity to claim that non-violent vandalism should be punished more harshly than a potentially deadly attack. But other factors and biases may skew some of our objectivity: irritation that the paint was thrown by a self-important protester or empathy that the shooter was mentally ill or ...

It should not be possible to sum up the entirety of a party conference – the atmosphere, the big themes, the rhythm and rapport of politicians and delegates alike – in a single poll finding. Nonetheless, YouGov has come close. Asked what they think is the main reason the party lost the 2024 general election, Tory members offer a varied range of suggestions. Infighting and disunity come top, picked by 16 per cent of respondents, with failure to tackle immigration a close second on 12 per cent.  Two things are clear from this poll. First, three months after the Conservative Party’s worst-ever defeat there is no consensus about what went wrong, with no answer garnering more than a sixth of the votes. Second, immigration ...

The victory of Austria's hard-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in the country’s parliamentary election is a shocking result, even in the wider context of Europe’s populist surge over the past decade. Despite its historic win the FPÖ, founded by former Nazis in the 1950s, might struggle to find coalition partners willing to let its leader, Herbert Kickl, run a government. But it would be disingenuous to downplay its triumph in a country with Austria’s history. The result was not a shock. The FPÖ had been outpolling the centre-right governing Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) in the weeks before the election, and had been in first place for over a year, according to Politico's Poll of Polls. FPÖ had also been a junior partner in government ...

A working single mother of two, a survivor of domestic violence, a career dedicated to helping others as a teaching assistant in local schools and a campaigner for women and girls and those living in poverty: it’s difficult to think of someone who is a better match for the traditional values of the Labour Party – a party that claims to have been “formed to give ordinary people a voice and improve lives.” That someone is Rosie Duffield, the now independent MP for Canterbury. She resigned from Labour at the weekend, delivering an excoriating attack on Sir Keir Starmer in the process. “You repeat often that you will make the 'tough decisions' and that the country is 'all in this together',” Duffield ...

The Conservatives lost the election because they failed to control immigration. That is the closest thing to a consensus at the party’s conference.  “We did betray people,” declared Neil O’Brien MP, one of the Tories’ foremost policy thinkers. Speaking at a fringe event hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies on "taking back control" he added: "We promised again and again at every election since 1992 that we would cut the numbers and then we increased them to a record level.” (Net migration reached a record high of 764,000 in 2022.) By the time of the election, only 8 per cent of the public approved of the government’s handling of immigration and Labour enjoyed a comfortable lead on the issue. O’Brien, a ...

Labour’s conference did not resemble that of a party which recently won an election. The Conservatives’ conference does not resemble that of a party which recently lost one. Keir Starmer’s plummeting approval ratings – a poll shows a 45-point drop since July – have given the Tories hope as they assemble in Birmingham. A shrunken party draws comfort from an ever more volatile electorate. If Labour can recover from a landslide defeat in a single term, they ask, why can’t we? Negative answers to that question surround you at Tory conference. The party knows it suffered an emphatic defeat – the worst in its 190-year history – but it is not yet ready to absorb the full implications.  Its four leadership candidates offer ...