Patrick O'Flynn

Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express

Yesterday

18 Oct 2022

Liz Truss will not lead the Conservative party into the next general election, despite her rather hesitant claim to the contrary in an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason. There are probably now fewer than 20 Conservative MPs prepared to go into that contest with Ms Truss, or her alter ego Ann Droid, in charge. So she will be dispensed with, as even she must realise in those moments when a little bit of self-awareness creeps into her psyche. This being so obviously the case means the necessity to dump her at ultra-high speed has oddly receded. Jeremy Hunt is in total command of economic policy, sending reassuringly brutal messages to the money markets about his plans for the public finances. As such, there is no overwhelming imperative for Sir Graham Brady and his new 1922 Committee executive to arrange the Truss execution in a hurry.

Sunday

16 Oct 2022

Who voted for Jeremy Hunt to run Britain?

Jeremy Hunt has no mandate to lead Britain. He couldn’t muster sufficient Tory MPs behind him to properly enter the last leadership contest. He was beaten overwhelmingly in the one before that. He was a key part of the failed Theresa May administration that lost a parliamentary majority at a general election. He played no role in the Boris Johnson administration that won it back with plenty to spare (a victory from which the Conservative mandate to govern still flows). Yet in a round of interviews this weekend, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer simply ripped up the economic agenda of Liz Truss. He mocked and then buried the PM’s vision of dynamic unfunded tax cuts. He pulled the rug from under her Commons pledge that the Government will not cut public expenditure.

Friday

14 Oct 2022

The spectacular fall of Liz Truss

Is Liz Truss the new Theresa May? A fortnight ago that question seemed unduly insulting to the Prime Minister. Now it seems unduly insulting to the Maybot, whose stage-dancing at Tory conference appears a triumph of liquid movement when compared to the curtsying of the Trussborg at royal audiences. Clumsy is as clumsy does, and Truss is now in a class of her own when it comes to political miscalculation. At least it took May a year to get fully found out in that catastrophic general election campaign of 2017. Truss has managed it in little more than a month. Seeking to impose the agenda of Gladstonian liberalism on the 21st century UK economy – but with a dash of Reaganite fiscal daring thrown in for good measure and almost no mandate – has turned out to be both politically and economically unsustainable.

Saturday

8 Oct 2022

A Boris Johnson comeback is ridiculous – but not impossible

It would obviously be ridiculous for the Conservatives to dump Liz Truss after just a few weeks and seek to re-install Boris Johnson as prime minister. To do such a thing would be akin to what the producers of the 1980s TV series Dallas did after realising they had made a horrendous mistake by killing off Bobby Ewing: writing a script for the next series in which the assassination was depicted as a dream had by his wife Pam. The Tories would be asking the British electorate, in effect, to observe Boris walking out of the shower, into his luxuriantly wallpapered boudoir and telling a dumbstruck Carrie: 'I’ve got to go and talk to Rishi about the economy. I say, are you OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.' Totally ridiculous, credibility-shredding, shark-jumping stuff.

Sunday

25 Sep 2022

How will Truss tackle immigration?

Despite its leading lights having spent more than a decade spent promising us they will bring down immigration we can now say for sure that Conservative party is not going to do that. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are preparing to expand the number of economic sectors to be declared as suffering from labour shortages and thus permitted to bring in both skilled and unskilled workers from abroad. Not only this, but they are also pushing for a trade deal with India that will involve 'open access' immigration arrangements. In his watershed financial statement in the Commons on Friday, Kwarteng included immigration in a list of areas where barriers to economic expansion were going to be removed by new policies to be announced in the coming weeks.

Monday

19 Sep 2022

The Queen’s funeral was a fitting send off for Elizabeth the Great

In the Christian tradition, which allows for a protracted gap between death and burial, there is often time for initial feelings of shock and grief to give way to other emotions – fond recall, gratitude for the contribution of the departed. But a funeral always returns us to sorrow. And deep sorrow was the abiding emotion today at the state funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The applause that rang out along parts of the route when her body was conveyed back to Buckingham Palace – or the friendships that sprang up in the queue to see her lying in state in Westminster Hall – were rightly seen as flowing from the Queen’s genius at holding and bringing people together. She told us in the depths of the covid pandemic that we would meet again and in the interval between her death and her funeral many of us did.

Wednesday

14 Sep 2022

The sorry state of republicanism

As republican protestors seek to disrupt the handing on of the title of head of state from one royal to another, we should appreciate that it is an obsolete system in the modern world. Not the monarchy, of course: it only takes one look at the mass outpouring of grief for the late Queen and the goodwill towards the new King displayed by all mainstream political leaders to realise that is in rude health. But republicanism. Imagine for a moment that a new British republic is about to be born. The presidential election has reached its final round of voting. Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage have been edged out in previous rounds, leaving a straight head-to-head between Sadiq Khan and Boris Johnson. The winner will, for the next five years, embody the British nation state, speaking for all of us at important moments in our shared national story and in return being shown the utmost respect when he turns up to open a new school or preside over a grand ceremonial occasion.

Saturday

10 Sep 2022

The end of the Elizabethan age

The Queen’s fragile smile in the official photograph released as she waited to appoint Liz Truss as her 15th Prime Minister carries even more meaning now. Her Majesty clearly knew there would be no 16th and after a turbulent summer it must have come as a relief to know that the country was about to move from a caretaker premier to a full-time one. Her audience with Ms Truss would prove to be the last significant act of a monumental reign lasting 70 years. And it meant that in her final days she could look back on the improbable promise she gave her future subjects on the occasion of her 21st birthday in 1947 and know she had fulfilled it in every respect. 'I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service,' she had said, never imagining that just five years later she would take over as monarch and reign for seven decades.

Wednesday

7 Sep 2022

Truss is in a stronger position than Thatcher – for now

People used to understand that they were ageing when they noticed police officers in their neighbourhood looking unfeasibly young. Given that nobody ever sees a police officer on foot patrol these days, a new benchmark for startling youthfulness needs to be identified. After Liz Truss unveiled her top ministerial team yesterday perhaps ex-cabinet members could serve the purpose. Because Dominic Raab (48), George Eustice (50), Grant Shapps (53) and Priti Patel (50) have just joined the bulging ranks of former cabinet ministers to have moved from young thrusters to backbench elders with, in one or two cases, no discernible period of achievement in between. At least nobody can say that the line-up chosen by Truss is 'male, pale and stale'.

Tuesday

6 Sep 2022

The issue that will win or lose the election for Liz Truss

Nobody knows what they think about Liz Truss. Not literally nobody – those of us with a wholly unusual level of interest in politics of course have our pet theories – but nobody in the sense of the broad sweep of the general public. As Tony Blair noted in his memoirs: 'For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.' That is, in fact, a pretty good description of the last month of a Conservative leadership race that tested the appetite for politics of even the nerdiest among us. Not since John Major’s rapid rise-without-trace to succeed Margaret Thatcher has a new arrival in 10 Downing Street been more of a mystery to voters. So don’t believe polls purporting to know how people will react to her premiership.

Saturday

20 Aug 2022

Don’t write off Michael Gove

No senior politician has ever possessed a talent for upsetting prime ministers to match that of Michael Gove’s. David Cameron unfriended him after the EU referendum, having believed Gove had assured him he would campaign for Remain only to see him mastermind the triumphant Leave operation. While Boris Johnson was forgiven for his front-of-house Brexit role, Gove was forever damned. Theresa May then left him out of her first cabinet as a calculated rebuke for his spectacular betrayal of Johnson during the 2016 leadership election by which time a ‘Game of Thrones’ mentality appeared to have completely overtaken him. Johnson himself last month fired Gove from the cabinet before he could resign, with Downing Street sources describing him as ‘a snake’.

Tuesday

16 Aug 2022

The Channel migrant crisis will make or break Liz Truss

Liz Truss has been clear about her key selling point throughout her leadership campaign. At its launch she boasted: ‘I can lead, I can make tough decisions and get things done.’ And her whole campaign has amounted to variations upon that theme – ‘I do what I say I will do’, ‘I’m somebody who gets things done’ – in TV debates, hustings with members and personal appearances. So Liz Truss – not the slickest communicator but gets things done: that’s the offer which Conservative members are buying into in droves. Of course, Boris Johnson was once the ‘getting things done’ go-to guy. Or at least the ‘Get Brexit Done’ candidate. And that was the problem. Once Brexit got done and the obsessively focused Dominic Cummings left his side, Johnson proved fairly useless at the implementation side of things.

Sunday

14 Aug 2022

What should Rishi Sunak do next?

The old English nursery rhyme The North Wind Doth Blow asks 'what will poor robin do then, poor thing?' about the impending onset of cold conditions. As he faces up to the prospect of a heavy defeat in the Tory leadership contest, we are similarly entitled to wonder what will poor Rishi do then, poor thing? And Rishi Sunak is clearly already thinking about that because he has begun framing the most benign possible interpretation of the causation of his impending defeat, telling the BBC’s Nick Robinson that he would rather lose honestly than win by stoking up unrealistic expectations. When he was questioned at Thursday night’s Telegraph hustings in Cheltenham on whether he might duck out of the Commons and go back into business, he gave a reply about being honoured to represent the people of Richmond for so long as they would have him.

Wednesday

10 Aug 2022

Why Rishi Sunak shouldn’t quit

We are in the depths of silly season. The perfect time, then, for the Conservative party to be choosing a new prime minister on our behalf. The latest especially silly twist to the plot is the idea that Rishi Sunak, the almost certain loser, should somehow 'quit' the Tory leadership contest right now to enable Liz Truss to be installed earlier than 6 September. Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British army, has said Sunak should step aside to avoid a 'trouncing' and let Liz Truss crack on with the challenges facing Britain. Given that ballot papers with his name on alongside that of Truss have already been issued – and many thousands of them presumably returned – it is unclear how this quitting could actually take effect.

Saturday

6 Aug 2022

How ‘taking the knee’ spoiled football

Premier League footballers 'taking a knee' came in at the tail end of the 2019-20 season, when stadiums were empty because of the first Covid lockdown. Thus were the game’s moneyed elite spared having to initiate the fad in front of full houses. By the time supporters returned it was a fait accompli, normalised by endless self-righteous newspaper columns and political speeches on air by TV football pundits. Only one view of the matter was permitted. Any supporter who expressed dissent about the gesture of support for the Black Lives Matter campaign risked being branded a knuckle-scraping racist. Given that the gesture emerged in the United States as a show of outright rejection towards society – and given that British BLM supporters were at the time merrily defacing the Cenotaph and Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square during their 'mostly peaceful' riots – this demand for universal acquiescence was outrageous.

Monday

1 Aug 2022

Why can’t we enjoy England’s football win without politicising it?

Not everything has to be politicised all the time. Some things are just news. Often bad news, such as an erupting volcano or a motorway pile-up. But just occasionally there is a brilliant happening that defies all but the most obsessive hunters of snark or seekers of negative political agendas. The England women’s football team winning the European championships by beating Germany in front of a full house at Wembley yesterday must qualify as one of those. Let joy be unconfined. It certainly was down on the south coast where I was on Sunday. Heavily tattooed balding men with bull terrier gaits wore their England shirts with pride and punched the air in delight, just as they would have done had the men’s team won a big final (we can dare to dream).

Saturday

30 Jul 2022

The triumph of Truss

This week has seen a dramatic development that has taken the Westminster Village by surprise: Britain suddenly has an identifiable successor to Boris Johnson. Liz Truss is going to become our third female prime minister at the start of September. What was expected by many to be a tight race between her and Rishi Sunak, which could sway one way and then the other before being settled by a knife-edge vote among grassroots Tories, has turned into a one-sided competition. On every conceivable metric, Truss has steamrollered Sunak since they were confirmed as the final two in the race just ten days or so ago – polling of the membership, performances in televised debates and hustings, the orderly laying-out of a consistent agenda, senior endorsements, bookies’ odds and lately even ratings among the public at large.

Thursday

21 Jul 2022

Why I’m coming round to the idea of Prime Minister Truss

The prospect of Liz Truss becoming the United Kingdom’s third female prime minister is antagonising all the right people. Almost the entire Remainer establishment – including state-sponsored leftist comedians, professors of European studies, AC Grayling, senior figures at the Times newspaper, Irish government insiders – is recoiling at the thought. It is only partly as a result of this that I find myself thawing towards her – if not quite warming – and hoping she defeats Rishi Sunak when the votes of the wider Conservative membership are counted in early September. This is a U-turn on my part. Anticipating this contest as a distinct possibility I wrote a somewhat prophetic piece for this site in December which concluded as follows: ‘If Tory MPs and grassroots members are asked to choose between their Chancellor and Foreign Secretary to take up the reins next year then he is their best bet by far.

Wednesday

20 Jul 2022

Kemi Badenoch will be the new Tory leader’s secret weapon

There was an unmistakable whiff of an Addams Family portrait about the cabinet photocall that marked the final gathering of Boris Johnson’s top team. Surrounding the departing Prime Minister were many ministers who will have suspected that they are not going to be in the same ministerial positions, or perhaps any ministerial position, when 10 Downing Street is under new management. To what extent, for example, can Nadhim Zahawi put together any kind of economic agenda, given his disastrous first fortnight as chancellor? His first few days in office saw him pledge an arbitrary tax-cutting timetable before his leadership hopes promptly collapsed amid reports that his own tax affairs were under investigation. Those Johnson arch-loyalists Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg may reasonably suspect their continued shelf-life as major frontbenchers depends entirely on Liz Truss emerging triumphant from the leadership contest.

Saturday

16 Jul 2022

Liz Truss was the biggest loser of last night’s debate

Enid Blyton made a lot of money out of the Famous Five. Maybe she could have invented a brand called the ‘Infamous Five’ that would have made her even more. But the Unfamous Five is a name that might have struggled to bear box office fruit. Yet the glories of the British constitution are about to deliver one of five little-known people – none of whom has a substantial political following of their own – into the office of prime minister. One out of Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat is about to become the political leader of the nation. Constitutionally, there is no issue about any of them taking over the mandate that the Conservative party won under Boris Johnson in December 2019.

Monday

11 Jul 2022

Could Sunak implode?

There are few positions so perilous as being the frontrunner in a party leadership contest. Just being the heir apparent when no contest is happening is dicey enough, with the incumbent leader usually highly susceptible to murmurings from courtiers about your alleged manoeuvrings against him. But once the race is actively underway things get even more dangerous. You become the contender everyone else needs to destroy before the decisive round of voting gets underway. Them’s the breaks right now for Rishi Sunak, the golden boy with the silver tongue who kept many people’s businesses afloat and the economy out of a long-term slump during the pandemic. He is easily the bookies’ favourite to take over from Boris Johnson and has a comfortable lead in MP endorsements as well.

Sunday

10 Jul 2022

The case for Kemi

At the very top end of politics there is a vital distinction that is underappreciated whenever the case for change is being assessed. It is the difference between plausible and compelling. Tony Blair in his pomp was the latter, Gordon Brown never more than the former.Margaret Thatcher had only to be plausible to win the 1979 election against a broken Labour Party. But once she had overseen the liberation of the Falkland Islands in 1982 she became compelling and two further election wins followed, each by a landslide margin.The case for leaving the EU became plausible after the Lisbon Treaty was steamrollered through without a promised referendum to be swiftly followed by a crisis in the eurozone which highlighted its basic design flaws.

Wednesday

6 Jul 2022

There is no way out for Boris Johnson

Just after 6 p.m. yesterday it seemed like the Boris Johnson regime was in total, house of cards style collapse. Sajid Javid resigned as Health Secretary during a televised act of contrition by the PM over his handling – if that’s not too indelicate a word – of the Chris Pincher affair. Five minutes later Rishi Sunak quit as Chancellor. Their aides briefed that the two moves had not been coordinated. Nobody believed this. Outside the Marquis of Granby public house near Smith Square – the Tory tribe’s favourite Westminster watering hole – groups of right-wing think-tankers and researchers for Conservative MPs – avidly scoured social media for updates. Inside the pub the TV was switched to rolling news and as the throng awaited more big-name departures from the government, it seemed all over.

Monday

4 Jul 2022

Starmer should never be allowed to forget his Brexit betrayal

Keir Starmer has set down Labour’s Brexit red lines: if his party wins power, he will not take the UK back into the EU’s single market or customs union, nor will he restore freedom of movement with the bloc. Instead, in a speech today, he will pledge to ‘break down’ the ‘fatberg of red tape’ that Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has created for British businesses and he will get the Northern Ireland Protocol working too. As the bulk of the UK’s political media credulously reports this preposterous posturing, interpreting it as a setback for pro-Europeans in Labour, presumably the expectation is that pro-Leave voters in marginal Red Wall seats will make their peace with the party and further turn against Johnson’s ailing Tory regime.

Monday

27 Jun 2022

How the Tories can bin Boris

There are not very many good things to say about the Conservative party in Parliament these days. Barely a month seems to pass without one of their number being exposed as some kind of pervert. Others among them seem far more interested in plotting their own ascents than in delivering sound public administration or working out what they actually believe in. But one of the good things to say is that Sir Graham Brady seems like a sensible chap, running the all-powerful backbench 1922 Committee in a calm and mature fashion. One supposes that Sir Graham must sometimes look at the most likely course of events around Boris Johnson’s party leadership and despair. For after the by-election defeats of last week it seems certain that new plots to oust the Prime Minister will emerge and that they will be strongly resisted.

Friday

24 Jun 2022

Tories shouldn’t bin Boris yet

If only they had waited until today. Had Tory MPs cleared the threshold for a confidence vote in Boris Johnson this morning – amid the smouldering embers of two blazing by-election defeats – rather than earlier in the month, then he would surely be toast. As it is, all that the Prime Minister’s many critics in the Conservative parliamentary party can do is seethe and wait a while for another opportunity to topple him. As someone determined to continue in office, Johnson is able to do so unchallenged until 6 June, 2023, absent of an emergency change in 1922 Committee rules. Some Tory MPs will now push for such a change. Indeed 1922 Executive member Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown has already gone public with the suggestion that there will be an imminent discussion about the case for it.

Tuesday

21 Jun 2022

Boris versus the unions

In politics, a leader sometimes needs to be ruthless and mean, patiently soak up the public opprobrium directed his way and wait until most people see that his stance was correct and necessary. When it comes to the state of the economy, and the pressures of inflation in particular, this is where we have got to. Simon Clarke, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, appears to understand this. He has offered no concessions to trade unions and public sector workers demanding higher pay to insulate themselves against price rises, both current and future. Instead, this week Mr Clarke told the public sector plainly that they won’t be getting wage rises to keep up with inflation and must therefore take lower living standards on the chin.

Tuesday

14 Jun 2022

Is Boris willing to make the Rwanda plan work?

Priti Patel’s first go at deporting migrants to Rwanda is turning before our eyes into one of those answers from the TV quiz show Pointless – when you see the on-screen counter drop remorselessly towards zero. At the time of writing, the counter for the number of migrants to be flown out to Rwanda is down to seven – from an original list of 130. While Home Office officials continue to insist their chartered plane will take off tonight with at least some migrants on board, other parts of government do not seem so sure. So we could still be about to witness a completely pointless answer. There is no doubt who ministers would like to see cop the blame if that happens, even if the plane takes off carrying just a handful of deportees rather than the 130 originally envisaged: ‘leftie lawyers’ who have deployed ‘every trick in the book’ to spring their clients from the flight, often on contrived human rights grounds.

Sunday

12 Jun 2022

Will the government stand up to mob rule?

A very big week is in store for the government’s strategy to tackle illegal immigration with all eyes on the planned first air transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, due to take place on Tuesday. Whether the flight takes off at all and how many migrants will be on board is yet to be seen. But the policy has already attracted strong adverse commentary from leading lights in Britain’s unelected establishment, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the heir to the throne. But another struggle over the enforcement of immigration law is being waged at ground level, with the springing up of networks of local activists seeking to prevent immigration enforcement officers accompanied by the police from detaining illegal immigrants to facilitate their deportation.