Fielding an audience of Sun readers should be home turf for a Conservative leader: flash your fiscal discipline, flaunt your Euroscepticism, and get your law and borders out. But it’s hard to imagine Rishi Sunak ever picking up a copy – he seems more of a Forbes or Harvard Business Review man. Working this crowd is symbolic of his broader challenge: how to charm Red Wall voters and hold the 2019 Conservative coalition together? He was up against the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole, a genial host who manages to be burly and jaunty – a prop-forward with a cheeky grin and a sharp post-match suit. He had Sunak on the back foot from the off with the election betting scandal. ...

The American newsroom is beset by anxious handwringing: slowly it seems the Brits are coming for every top job. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Bloomberg News and the Associated Press are all now helmed by redcoats. Plenty of these appointments have been met with internal consternation (American suspicion of the Brits is an under-reported phenomenon), but none as much as the attempted appointment of the Telegraph’s Rob Winnett as editor of the Washington Post. The Post’s British CEO, Will Lewis, was already struggling to court the affection of his newsroom. With his bid to impose Winnett’s Fleet Street sensibilities on the place, he may have jeopardised his entire mission. Hiring Winnett should have been Lewis’s crossing the Delaware moment: Winnett is ...

For at least a decade, social media has played host to a particular stylistic affectation – we might call it “Brits online”. To be a Brit online is to perform a sort of relatable, makeshift crapness – the recreated inner world of a GCSE student on a rainy geography trip, or of someone curing a hangover at Greggs. On the open plain of the English-language internet, which springs from America’s flashy and ahistorical Silicon Valley, one must set themselves apart. Now we are in the midst of the first TikTok election, and the warring parties have fallen into the clutches of the very British meme. When it isn’t vlogging from the battle bus (Brits on tour!) the @uklabour TikTok account communicates ...

The most remarkable takeaway from BBC's Question Time leaders' special was that Rishi Sunak didn't punch anybody. He looked very much as if he wanted to, clashing snippily with audience members (at one point getting shouts of "shame!" from those who disagreed with him over the European Court of Human Rights). But, he didn't actually whack a voter. As this disastrous election campaign careers on, the Prime Minister has developed what can only be described as an angry smile - both very angry and very smiley. He is under extreme pressure and must be close to blowing up. That he hasn’t lost it in public so far is a major endorsement for Hinduism. Sunak pitched particularly hard and most effectively to ...

Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England and slayer of prime ministers, has just announced that the Bank will not be cutting interest rates just yet (the Bank rate is being held at 5.25 per cent) despite yesterday’s announcement by the Office for National Statistics that inflation has returned to its target level of 2 per cent. In doing so, Bailey has deprived Rishi Sunak of his last chance to take credit for some decent economic news before the election on 4 July. Not that a rate cut would have changed the outcome of the election. Most people either understand that reducing inflation is the Bank’s job, not the Prime Minister’s, or don’t understand that but also don’t feel any ...

Brexit is the unspoken issue of this general election campaign. The Conservatives won the last election on “getting Brexit done” but now avoid drawing attention to what few consider to be much of an accomplishment. Nigel Farage seems to have reached a similar conclusion.  Labour wants the backing of those who supported Leave – “hero voters” they call them – as do the Liberal Democrats. To be fair, the latter have a policy to rejoin the single market but would rather not talk about it. In each case, there is a plausible political case for avoiding the topic but it is very odd. Brexit has redefined our politics and hugely affected the economy.  Nor will it be possible for political parties ...

If anyone was in any doubt about what matters most to the SNP amid the various severe and generational crises facing Scotland, its general election manifesto immediately sets them straight. Its very first page states, in slightly screamy point size, “VOTE SNP FOR SCOTLAND TO BECOME AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY.” There is also, however, an early indication of John Swinney’s attempts to restore the public image of his ailing party, with a promise that the subsequent pages contain “moderate left-of-centre policies” – the equivalent of a supermarket ingredients label. This message, this shift, is vital to the SNP’s pitch, and was re-emphasised by Swinney at the launch, when he said that “we are a moderate, left-of-centre party in the mainstream of Scottish ...

Labour and the Conservative Party are refighting the 2015 election. Yesterday, both parties once again polished off their clichés of economic rectitude: Environment Secretary Steve Barclay warned of an impending Labour “tax raid”; shadow Treasury minister Darren Jones diagnosed a “gaping black hole” in Conservative fiscal plans. The goal is to demonstrate an unshakeable commitment to spending constraint. The result will be a failure to repair public services or to restore national prosperity, condemning the country to a full two decades of decline from the 2008 financial crash onwards. Even Labour’s modest tax policies, delivered as ever in the language of caution and hedge, will not change this. The planned increase of £8.5bn would fund its new spending commitments on education, ...