Conservatives

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork.

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Most policy areas are toxic for the prime minister, but his education gambit is on a par with my idea of a free cactus for all

Dreams of high office can come true… however daft

Brexiters lament the fact that Big Ben will not ring for Brexit. But isn’t being thwarted just how they like it?

The Catholic church in Ireland lost power by flouting the morals it prescribed. The Tory government risks a similar fate

It is not news that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings treat rules with contempt. But there is one rule even they might be expected to obey, because it is crucial to the maintenance of power. Never, ever, make the people who place their faith in you feel like fools.

Or, to put it another way, never let the people who think they are making a sacrifice realise that in fact they are the sacrifice. Before breaking this rule so flagrantly, Johnson and his consigliere would have done well to consider the fate of what used to be one of the most powerful institutions on these islands: the Irish Catholic church.

Last week, Boris Johnson, with his paintbrush and easel at his holiday villa in Marbella, touched up his self-portrait as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, another bodysnatcher, Johnson’s Brexit tsar, David Frost, was also in sunny Iberia. In Lisbon on Tuesday evening, he channelled the intellectual father of modern conservatism, the 18th-century Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke.

Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”. His speech was entitled, in imitation of a famous Burke pamphlet, “Observations on the present state of the nation”.

Ministers are portraying themselves as victims of a deal they created for Northern Ireland. A classic blame-shifting strategy

Forget, for the moment, the technical details of the Northern Ireland protocol bill that seeks to renege on Britain’s commitments under its withdrawal agreement with the European Union. Forget – as the British government itself has done – old-fashioned principles of conservatism such as telling the truth, keeping your word and obeying the laws you yourself have made.

Rishi Sunak can begin to make Britain a serious country again by trying to make the NI protocol work. But will he?

Last week, amid all the turmoil in the Tory party, there was a brief flurry of interest in the emergence as a candidate for prime minister of the man more than one British reporter referred to as “the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis”. Lewis was not the Northern Ireland secretary. He wasn’t even the previous holder of the office – he was the one before that.