Hugo Stephens

The Conservatives will win the next general election. Kemi Badenoch is now the most popular leader. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. One year and I think the Conservatives will be leading the polls.

I stand by it: Liz Truss would’ve been one of the best Conservative PMs if she’d actually been given the time to deliver.

Hermer should be sacked, struck off and prosecuted. Damn right I support the veterans don't you?

I agree. Mandelson's behaviour was scandalous, but the amount of time that those in the SW1 bubble are devoting to the tedious business of how he was appointed shows just how skewed their priorities are. Most voters don't give a damn about this bureaucratic 'process' stuff.

The Olive Branch. The Hostage. The Calculation. On the most damaging day of his premiership, Keir Starmer found time for one more act of self-preservation. While 335 Labour MPs were voting to protect him from an independent ethics inquiry, he was privately offering Angela Rayner a return to Cabinet. The timing tells you everything about his priorities. The offer has nothing to do with strengthening the government. The Telegraph's own reporting makes the calculation explicit. A Cabinet post would effectively bar Rayner from challenging Starmer for several months without appearing cynical to her supporters. He is not offering her a job because she is the best person for any ministerial role. He is offering her a job to neutralise her as a leadership threat. The olive branch is a pair of handcuffs. Rayner resigned in September 2025 after the Prime Minister's independent ethics adviser found she had not met the highest possible standards of proper conduct following a stamp duty scandal involving an underpayment of £40,000 on an £800,000 flat in Hove. The property arrangement involved NHS compensation money held in trust for her disabled son. HMRC is still investigating her tax affairs. Starmer's offer of a Cabinet return is reportedly contingent on that investigation being closed in her favour. A government that has spent weeks insisting on proper process in the Mandelson affair is preparing to return to Cabinet a minister whose comeback depends on a tax investigation concluding favourably. The consistency is striking. The wider leadership picture is no more reassuring. Wes Streeting is among those being discussed as a potential successor. Streeting, as Health Secretary, gave instructions in October 2024 to press ahead with transferring half a million GP records to Biobank despite objections from GPs and privacy campaigners, at precisely the moment Chinese access to that data was under active security service scrutiny. The Biobank breach this week, the 198th known exposure of that data since last summer, occurred on his watch and against warnings he chose to override. His connection to Mandelson runs deeper than ministerial proximity. Streeting was among the figures in the network around Mandelson that shaped the culture in which the Washington appointment was conceived. Replacing one compromised figure with another is not renewal. And the Burnham and Rayner pact being discussed adds a further dimension. A Blair-Brown style arrangement in which Rayner supports Burnham's leadership bid in exchange for eventually succeeding him is the politics of the machine room, not the national interest. The question of what Britain needs from its next Prime Minister, clarity on China, accountability for the decisions documented in the Mandelson affair, a genuine reckoning with the network of relationships that placed a failed vetting candidate in Washington with Strap Three clearance - is not being asked by any of the figures positioning themselves for the succession. Starmer survived Tuesday. He whipped his MPs to vote against an independent inquiry into his own conduct. He secured Rayner's vote by dangling a Cabinet job. He watched his own ambassador's candid assessment of his political mortality leak to the Financial Times on the same evening. Sir Christian Turner described him as touch and go. Fifteen of his own MPs defied the whip. More than fifty abstained. The offer to Rayner is not a sign of strength. A Prime Minister confident in his position does not need to buy his former deputy's loyalty. He earns it. What Starmer is doing is managing his survival one transaction at a time, placing party before country at every juncture, and hoping the arithmetic holds long enough for the story to move on.

Do you agree?

We have the most unpopular Prime Minister in history. A strange soulless man, a Process drone enlivened only by his own sanctimonious. Yet, Starmer is Labour’s best candidate for the job. How did Britain sink that low?

Labour MPs are going to try and get rid of Starmer. He’s absolutely toxic now. If he acts true to form he’ll call a snap general election just to spite them, and most of them will lose their seats.

The EU might not have the UK rejoining on their radar right now, but Britain should. Brexit has done incredible harm to our economy, which would have been far more resilient if we’d remained a member. Trump has shown just what he thinks of the special relationship. We can no longer rely on them. Our future is European. 🇪🇺