You couldn’t make it up. Or, rather, you could – but if you did everyone would think you’d been watching too much The Thick of It. After weeks of the Conservatives trying as hard as possible to turn the question of whether Angela Rayner should have paid £1,500-£3,500 in capital gains tax on the sale of her house nine years ago into a major story, a Tory MP comes along and demonstrates what a real political scandal looks like. The tale of Mark Menzies has it all. Money – in the tens of thousands, on multiple occasions – allegedly taken from campaign donations. A 3am phone call to an elderly campaign activist demanding the urgent transfer of funds. Menzies has previously ...

Politics is a rough game. In few other careers are you subjected to such a level of scrutiny. Your opponents are anxious to expose a mistake; journalists will relish every stumble; social media will be ready to pile in. To survive at the highest levels, politicians need a thick skin. But an imperviousness to criticism is not a natural state of affairs. What is needed are coping mechanisms to help dismiss criticisms that might otherwise be wounding. The easiest, most straightforward coping mechanism is to dismiss the motives or understanding of your critics. This is often an essentially tribal argument – your critics are wrong, and their criticisms are invalid because they are part of the other tribe. This approach also has ...

If David Lammy becomes foreign secretary after this year’s election, he will face tricky diplomatic terrain. Britain’s foreign relationships have been tattered by a tortuous exit from the EU. The Global South is angry about the unfair Covid vaccine rollout and Britain’s support for Israel. A Donald Trump presidency would inject uncertainty into America’s security guarantee for Europe. Yet the biggest change, as Lammy all but admits in a 4,035-word essay for Foreign Affairs, is Britain’s relative decline. He writes: "When former prime minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street 27 years ago, the British economy was larger than India’s and China’s combined. The United Kingdom still administered a major Asian city, Hong Kong, as a colony… Today, the global order is messy ...

Brussels Nigel Farage has never looked more satisfied. Europe’s hard right was handed a gift today when the police tried to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Farage was speaking as the police arrived to deliver a public order notice which said they had 15 minutes to shut down the conference.  The order came from the local Socialist Party mayor Emir Kir who tweeted that the “far-right is not welcome” and explained that he banned the conference to ensure “public safety”. The police said one reason for the order were reports that counter-protesters were planning on attending the venue. There was no public disorder within the venue itself. Organisers have said that they are challenging the order in the courts.  Nonetheless, a small ...

Here’s a thought experiment: if you really believed the world as you knew it was in peril, and that it was your purpose in life to avert catastrophe before it was too late, what would you do? How would you go about convincing everyone else – normal, sensible people who aren’t too worried about the end of the world, thank you very much – to listen to you? How would you grab their attention? If you are Liz Truss, the answer is to write a book. Not just any book: a memoir-cum-manifesto, published a mere 18 months after she was forced from office in disgrace, with the grandiose title Ten Years to Save the West. Much-hyped despite the embarrassingly low advance fee ...

Liz Truss is fatally self-aware. She has spent her time out of office recording her flaws with painstaking accuracy. Extracts from her book Ten Years to Save the West, which is published today, establish why she succumbed sooner than a lettuce. To understand why Truss was so poorly equipped to reside in No 10, remember that the prime minister must command a majority in the House of Commons. When she became PM, the Tory party was fractious and bitter. Removing leaders had become a habit. Some Conservative MPs made it known that Truss was anathema to them. They viewed her as fringe and crazed. As John Rentoul reminds us, Rishi Sunak won the most support from MPs. But it was the ...

The Prime Minister is expected to address the House of Commons later to update parliament on the RAF’s role in the Middle East over the weekend. British Typhoons intercepted Iranian drones that were heading for Israel. The attack was Iran’s response to an Israeli strike on its consulate in Damascus on 1 April. The Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, confirmed on the media round this morning that the RAF’s main job was to backfill American jets that were on a mission against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The British government did so at the Americans’ request. Cameron echoed President Joe Biden’s message that Israel should, in the context of international relations, “take the win”. Both the British government and the US are ...

The stakes in the controversy surrounding Angela Rayner’s tax affairs have soared. The Labour deputy leader has said she will resign if the police find that she has committed a criminal offence. The move comes after Greater Manchester Police reopened an investigation into whether Rayner broke electoral law by giving the wrong address as her primary residence. This is a separate issue to the accusation that she did not pay the correct amount of capital gains tax on the sale of her house in Vicarage Road in 2015. The police have reopened the investigation after they said Tory MP James Daly complained about their handling of the case. In a statement Rayner said: “I’ve repeatedly said I would welcome the chance ...