Dr Craig McCann

Labour: losses everywhere. Reform: good gains made by burning thru ~£8mn (10x what you usually spend on locals) yet did worse than last year. Conservatives: progress on last year, losses in counties set to be abolished but best London results since 2006. Read more below👇 in my Telegraph article where I explain why, despite the setbacks, I'm encouraged with our results this week. The Conservative Party is rebuilding steadily, seriously and with purpose. We are not asking people to forget the past but to judge us by what we do next.

Polls are now open for the local elections! Vote Conservative to Get Britain Working Again 🇬🇧

Happy St George’s Day. Be proud. Fly the flag 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

This annoys all the right people.

Once again today the BBC online news website described Hezbollah thus: "Hezbollah are a Shia Muslim political and military group in Lebanon which has been involved in a series of conflicts" Really? Hezbollah is proscribed in its entirety as a terrorist organization in the UK under the Terrorism Act 2000. Membership, support, or flying the group's flag is a criminal offence. This covers both its military and political wing. There is no ambivalence. What is wrong with the BBC?

Great news. Although I am surprised the vote was that close.

The Home Secretary should be commended for recognising the importance of this issue and taking steps to address it. Although there is still a lot to do. It is a credit to the Official Opposition that they are acting in the national interest in supporting this approach and not indulging in the ridiculous party politics of others, as well as Labour MPs.

More than 100 Labour MPs are fighting the Home Secretary’s efforts to bring down immigration. My message to Keir Starmer is - don’t water the reforms down, the Conservative Party will back the Government in the national interest to make sure this gets done.

In full: @KemiBadenoch's powerful speech about the growing threat of separatism in Britain and how we deal with it.

Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great. Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensible candidate standing in Gorton and Denton, and it was Charlotte Cadden - a former chief inspector of police, a mother, a woman who fought for single sex spaces and dignity for women and girls. While the other parties race to the bottom, Charlotte embodies the new Conservative Party. This result shows Keir Starmer’s premiership is finished. He lost authority a long time ago, a mere hostage at the mercy of a divided Labour Party that cannot decide who to replace him with. He has lost the support of his voters, his MPs and the country. He is in office but not in power. If he had any integrity he would go.

@NotThatBigIan One of the many plates I’m spinning is putting together a book proposal exploring the leftist ideological capture of our institutions. “Being Good trumps Doing Good” is now the front runner for a title. Bless you Ian! 👍🏻

I'm always wondering which is worse - the immense cognitive dissonance of saying things you don't believe out of political necessity or actually believing them. But either way, on the left, being 'good' always trumps doing good.

Only one side of this debate has been extreme. Only one side has issued threats. Only one side has tried to hound people out of their jobs, silence dissent, and intimidate those who ask difficult questions. I fought for Hilary Cass to be put in the House of Lords when I was Secretary of State because I understood the weight of what she’d done and the storm that could engulf her. Though I did not agree with every line of her report (serious people rarely agree on everything), I recognised courage when I saw it…and courage calls to courage everywhere. One of the things I disagreed with Dr. Cass on, was allowing puberty blocker trials to go ahead. Conservatives will continue to oppose them. When things go wrong, it is not doctors who get the blame. It is politicians. So much of what has gone wrong in politics is politicians too scared of a backlash when they’ve got tough choices to make. They outsource all responsibility to outside experts who necessarily look at issues through a single (and often narrow) lens. If we are going to fix the many things wrong in our country, we are going to need politicians with the judgment, resilience and intelligence to tackle VERY complex problems with difficult trade-offs. That’s what I’m recruiting for in a renewed Conservative Party because we are the only ones who can and will do things properly.

@afneil “Things that didn’t happen” for ten points.

A message from the Land of Fantasy.

Too right.

An utterly disgraceful decision and indicative of the #LowTrust society we are slipping into.

Thank you Neil for again highlighting this issue on behalf of Epping residents. This Government is simply not doing enough to close the Bell Hotel and it is one of many.

Denying your electorate a by-election is cowardice. We see it time and again from Reform.

Absolutely right.

@ThomasEvansAdur The timings have been interesting. At the very point the Government needed a distraction, Reform obliged. Braverman’s announcement on Monday displaced Starmer’s blockage of Burnham’s leadership bid from the headline top spot.

@CraigJJMcCann 100% Tories put in the effort in the Commons whilst Reform miss key votes trying to destroy the Conservatives outside the Commons. I maintain there is more to this than meets the eye Why is there a strong effort to gain a defection when something damaging happens to Labour?

Why would the Conservatives stand down candidates to a party that has pledged to destroy them? Why would the Conservatives stand down candidates to a party that has been tapping up it's elected representatives? Why would the Conservatives stand down candidates to a party that has had its members subjecting the leader of the opposition to racist abuse? Why would the Conservatives stand down candidates to a party that has bemoaned standing down candidates previously but would never respect anyone doing it for them? Genorosity isn't the above. It's scummyness.

Yesterday, the Conservative team in Parliament delivered a masterclass in how experience and teamwork can defeat bad policy. Thanks to the combined efforts of Priti Patel, Lords True, Callanan, Keen, and Wolfson, along with our defence, legal and foreign policy teams in the Lords and Commons, we forced Labour to pause its reckless attempt to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Labour's stupid surrender deal would have cost the British taxpayer £35 billion and weakened a vital UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean. This wasn’t the work of one speech or one person. It was the result of deep experience across the Conservative benches -people who understand how parliament works, how the law works and will knuckle down to get stuff done. I'm so proud of my team.