Taking the collective mood of Britain in 2024 is an exercise fraught with danger. There is little shared popular culture anymore, and national identity is something we feel anxious probing, let alone expressing. And so, in this vacuum, we are pitched a series of vague but unifying moments. The Euros? An Oasis reunion? But nothing ever quite seems to stick.  Still, yesterday a piece in the Guardian tried to bring us all together, and succeeded - in provoking a unified onslaught of contempt. “BritishCore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons” set out to demonstrate that the “true joy of British culture lies in its everyday banalities”. By lunchtime it had become a viral phenomenon. And, instead of defining a ...

Back in August, parts of Westminster became fixated with the narrative that Sue Gray, Downing Street’s chief of staff, was at war with Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s head of political strategy. I was sceptical, it somehow felt too convenient – an attempt to recreate the Blair-Brown feud by proxy.  I asked Labour aides across government what was really going on. “It’s not Sue vs Morgan; it’s Sue vs everyone,” I was repeatedly told. As I first revealed on 28 August, special advisers are unionising over pay and other grievances. After an exhausting election year, many were outraged to discover that they would be paid less than in opposition and less than their Conservative predecessors. This had the effect of challenging two competing narratives: that the struggle ...

This week, Keir Starmer made a big step towards closer working with the European Union. Cue cheers and applause from centrists around the UK? Absolutely not! The Prime Minister was actually bombarded with criticism. All those who see the UK prospering with closer ties to the EU should have been celebrating. Instead, they had a problem with Keir Starmer becoming too closely associated with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (who is from a very different political tradition to the Labour party). It is one of the hardest truths of successful foreign policy that you don’t get to choose the politics of the leaders you meet and negotiate with. That’s a matter for their domestic politics. Though, diplomats who have seen ...

It’s hard to imagine any political leader enjoying their party’s conference more than Ed Davey in Brighton this year. The Liberal Democrat leader continued his track record of eye-catching stunts (who could forget the rollercoasters, paddle-boarding and bungee jumps of the election campaign?) by arriving at the seaside conference venue via jet-ski. He has spent three days basking in his party’s electoral success, surrounded by party members and delegates – far more than in previous years, I am told – who are positively euphoric. When we meet in his room at the Grand Brighton Hotel the day before his keynote conference address, brilliant sunshine streaming through the windows and a sweeping view of the sea, Davey gives off an air of intense ...

Keir Starmer used his first major interview as Prime Minister over the weekend to declare that he was willing to be “unpopular”. In view of early opinion polling that might be just as well (Starmer’s net approval rating has fallen to -21). Unpopular is certainly an accurate description of the planned cuts to winter fuel payments (introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997). Back in mid-August I revealed that ministers were opposed to Rachel Reeves’s decision, that lifelong Labour voters were abandoning the party, and that usually loyal backbenchers were furious (“as a standalone cut, it’s almost suicidal,” one told me). Matters have not improved since then. The story is dominating the headlines – crowding out more popular government policies – and Labour ...

The House of Lords is in some ways similar to the Cresta Run, the toboggan track that has since 1885 thrilled wealthy visitors to the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz. Both were established to give the aristocracy something to do, and in both arenas, it seems all that is needed is to be the right sort of person to get in; gravity will do the rest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they can attract some of the same people, such as Clifton Hugh Lancelot de Verdon Wrottesley – a big name, both literally and figuratively, in the worlds of tobogganing (he has won the sport’s Grand National 17 times) and inherited political power. Baron Wrottesley is one of 92 hereditary peers whose role in ...

There is no shortage of parties blamed in the final report of the Grenfell inquiry: “dishonest” companies, the “indifference” of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and every government from 1991 to 2017. But no administration is subject to fiercer criticism than that of David Cameron. The inquiry, chaired by the former court of appeal judge Martin Moore-Bick, states that by 2016 the Department for Communities and Local Government was “well aware” of the risks posed by flammable cladding but “failed to act on what it knew”. Instead, “the government’s deregulatory agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the Secretary of State, dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, ...

Priti Patel is out of the race to be the next Tory leader. In the stuffy (but decidedly not crowded) Committee Room 14, where the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs hosts its meetings, the results of the first round of MP voting were announced with very little fanfare as follows: Robert Jenrick: 28Kemi Badenoch: 22James Cleverly: 21Tom Tugendhat: 17Mel Stride: 16Priti Patel: 14 With all the usual caveats that it is impossible to predict much at this stage due to the arcane nature of the process (as I wrote earlier today), there are some interesting takeaways from this initial insight into how Conservative MPs are feeling. The most immediate is that the right of the party has clearly coalesced around its preferred ...