Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

 With his party embracing a ‘unite or die’ outlook, the Prime Minister summoned the straightest of bats to quell any hint of Tory psychodrama Source - Daily Telegraph - 28/03/23 Link The Prime Minister will have been delighted with Steve Brine’s observation, at Wednesday’s Liaison Committee, that he is “gaining a reputation as a problem solver”. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that Mr Brine, the Tory MP for Winchester and former health minister, has been “ready for Rishi” for longer than most, tweeting gushingly after Mr Sunak’s interview with Andrew Neil during last summer’s leadership race: “That is how to be across the detail and be the grown-up in the room.”) But to be fair to the sometimes Book at Bedtime-ish premier, he did appear to be wearing his big boy pants as he faced a grilling by MPs from all parties on what his Government has been up to since he entered Downing Street on October 25 2022. Much has been said and written about the contrast between the Prime Minister a...

 UK will join forces with 11 other CPTPP countries with access to $10 trillion market Source - Daily Telegraph 29/03/23 Link Britain is poised to join an Indo-Pacific trade pact in a major post-Brexit win, as the economy pivots away from the European Union. The Government is expected to shortly announce that Britain has become the first non-founding member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Joining the partnership would give businesses easier access to markets worth a combined $10 trillion. Ministers will hold meetings this week with counterparts in various Indo-Pacific nations to put the finishing touches to a deal. The CPTPP, which was formed in 2018, currently covers 11 countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. CPTPP members account for 13pc of global domestic product (GDP) and 15pc of global trade. The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "Negotiations have...

 Regulated part of the business to be placed into insolvency if deal cannot be reached Source - Daily Telegraph - 28/03/23 Link Royal Mail bosses have threatened to put the loss-making postal service into administration as talks with striking union chiefs become more fraught.  The company has warned that it could place the regulated part of the business – which has a legal duty to deliver post to every address in the country – into a special form of insolvency if a compromise deal cannot be reached.  Bosses have previously claimed the business is losing £1m a day, with strikes so far by the Communication Workers Union (CWU) blamed for pushing it into a £295m operating loss in the first nine months of its financial year. The threat to put the postal service into administration, which was first reported by the Guardian, is understood to have come as the CWU is poised to announce further industrial action. A Royal Mail spokesman told The Telegraph that the company had explai...

Conservative Democratic Organisation to hold first gathering for grassroots activists in Bournemouth on May 13 Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/03/23 Link Backers of Boris Johnson aiming to “take back control” and “save” the Tory party will hold an inaugural conference in May. The Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), a pressure group created after Mr Johnson and then Liz Truss were ousted from Downing Street, will hold its first gathering for grassroots activists in Bournemouth on May 13. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries, two of Mr Johnson’s staunchest supporters, will give speeches alongside Priti Patel, the former home secretary. The event is scheduled to take place the week after the local elections, when some projections suggest the Tories will lose more than 1,000 seats after a year of infighting and instability. Advertising the event on its website, the group wrote: “Are you ready to take back control? We certainly are, and we look forward to welcoming you to the CDO Confer...

Unionists can breathe a sigh of relief as flawed politician who lacks Nicola Sturgeon’s prowess is elected First Minister Source - Daily Telegraph 27/03/23 Link Supporters of the Union can breathe a sigh of relief. Humza Yousaf’s election as Nicola Sturgeon’s successor means Scottish independence is even less likely than it was a matter of weeks ago. Mr Yousaf may have been Ms Sturgeon’s preferred choice, but he is a flawed politician who lacks her leadership and communication skills and inherits a party that is, by its own admission, in a “mess”. Mr Yousaf, 37, has boldly pronounced that he expects to achieve independence within five years, but he has been vague about how he will go about it. Polls show that support for independence has not increased significantly since the 2014 referendum. Pete Wishart, the SNP’s longest-serving Westminster MP, has said it is time to be “honest” and admit that “independence is more or less off the table in the short-term future”. The Conservatives an...

The French public’s rage isn’t just over pension reform, but over a state that is no longer able to deliver what people expect Source - Daily Telegraph - 25/03/23 Link More than the figures themselves – nearly 500 police officers injured, the same amount of arrests, firemen battling almost 1,000 blazes on France’s eighth day of action last Thursday – it’s the embrace of guerrilla-levels of violence by a radicalised fringe of protesters that doomed King Charles’ state visit to France. What started last autumn as the expected pushback against a relatively unambitious reform of France’s national pensions system – Emmanuel Macron’s second attempt since 2019 – has morphed into what the French call a jacquerie, after the warlike peasant revolts of the Middle Ages. Television analysts will discuss at length the iniquity of raising the pension age by two years, in a country where life expectancy has soared by 15 years since the system was set up in 1945. School-age adolescents, the posher the ...

 Will it really do the party any good to go back down this 1970s rabbit hole of taxing the wealthy merely on the basis that they are wealthy? Source - Daily Telegraph - 24/03/23 Link It's the easiest trick in the political book: to point an accusing finger at an opponent and suggest they should be paying more tax. Ordinary people pay a larger marginal tax rate than the Prime Minister, after all – think of the children! In the Labour Party such rhetoric is expected and welcomed. No MP ever became less popular with the comrades for suggesting that the wealthy should pay more than they already do, and the fact that they already pay a disproportionate level of income tax is rarely acknowledged. So Angela Rayner was performing her John Prescott tribute act yesterday by offering a scathing analysis of the Prime Minister’s “much delayed” tax return (if Rishi Sunak’s is much delayed, how do we describe Keir Starmer’s, which was published a day later?).  Labour cannot afford to be comp...

 The whole thing was at times engaging theatre, but did it change any minds?   How much does Johnson actually want the top job back?   It's not impossible to imagine Johnson triumphing in a ULEZ-themed by-election Source CAPX 23/03/23 Link   Such has been the pace of British politics over the past year that yesterday’s long-awaited showdown at the Privileges Committee felt like a relic from another age. Boris Johnson, front and centre; the minutiae of the Covid regulations, trawled through in tortuous detail. It could scarcely have felt more like a relic of a vanished age if they’d all been smoking. Were those of us who watched the whole three hours and change mad, in a coma, or back in time? Mostly the former, unless armed with the excuse of professional obligation. The whole thing was at times engaging theatre – thanks largely to Johnson’s distinct failure to keep his cool – but what did it change? Nobody who has followed this story this long, and is sufficiently e...

 As a Tory rebellion on Windsor Framework fails to arrive, Brexit’s poster boy struggles to take back control of his political future Source - Daily Telegraph 22/03/23 Link It is almost 30 years since the Maastricht rebellion reached its peak in the spring/summer of 1993, precipitating the eventual demise of John Major’s government and paving the way for the 2016 EU referendum. Followers of Conservative politics couald therefore be forgiven for wondering how on Earth it had come to pass that one of those veteran Eurosceptics, Sir Bernard Jenkin, should find himself – three decades later – seemingly trying to bring down the man who finally “got Brexit done”. For as the long-standing Tory MP for Harwich and North Colchester grilled the former prime minister on whether or not he had lied to Parliament over partygate, the distant sound of a fat lady singing could be heard slowly permeating through the corridors of power. When he resigned as prime minister, Mr Johnson hinted at making a...

 Labour leader has a unique pension deal despite attempts to abolish lifetime allowance Source - Daily Telegraph - 21/03/23 Link Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of hypocrisy after it emerged that he has a unique pension deal from his time as Director of Public Prosecutions which allows him to avoid tax on his savings. The Labour leader has pledged to force other wealthy savers to be subject to a cap on their pension savings and on Tuesday night led a Parliamentary attempt to overturn the centrepiece of Jeremy Hunt's Budget. However, The Telegraph can reveal that under a special arrangement with the Government, Sir Keir's pension from his time as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) is exempt from tax rules he would apply to other workers who save more than £1m. Sir Keir has criticised Mr Hunt for holding a “huge giveaway to some of the very wealthiest” by abolishing the lifetime allowance for all pension pots.  The Chancellor's policy will mean that pensioners can save m...

 Source Daily Telegraph 21/03/23 Link Boris Johnson has attacked the "absurd and unprecedented" partygate claims made against him as his evidence to the Privileges Committee was published. Mr Johnson said he believed it was clear from the committee’s investigation that "there is no evidence at all that supports an allegation that I intentionally or recklessly misled" the House of Commons. He accepted the Commons "was misled by my statements" on partygate but when those statements were made "they were made in good faith". Mr Johnson questioned the impartiality of the committee’s investigation as he accused it of adopting a "highly partisan tone" in the interim partygate report it published at the start of March. The former prime minister criticised the committee over a suggestion that he should not have based his Commons statements on advice received from his advisers. He said: "The Committee also now appears to be alleging that it ...

The party has long been able to defy the laws of political gravity. But its chaotic leadership contest could mark a turning point Source - Daily Telegraph 20/03/23 Link Unionists are having a cheery time, for a change. The apparent meltdown of the Scottish National Party in the immediate aftermath of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation announcement has caused much delight among those who oppose the break-up of the United Kingdom. And who can blame them? It has been a grim period in Scottish politics for anyone who doesn’t support the nationalist movement. Let us enjoy the moment, while it lasts. But as the cod psychologist in an early episode of “Friends” once famously said: “I wouldn’t want to be there when the laughter stops.” To be fair, the laughter may never stop, or at the very least it may continue for a very long time, perhaps even long enough for a pro-UK majority to assert itself in the Scottish Parliament and banish for at least a generation the prospect of independence. But give...

PM set to unleash ‘defence dossier’ that he believes will debunk claims he deliberately misled Parliament, say allies Source - Daily Telegraph 18/03/23 Link Boris Johnson is preparing to unveil “bombshell” evidence that he believes will exonerate him over partygate, according to his allies. Ahead of a grilling by the House of Commons privileges committee on Wednesday, the former prime minister’s legal team is finalising its defence to claims that he knowingly and deliberately misled MPs about lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street. His “bombshell defence dossier”, as his friends call it, will include messages from Mr Johnson’s advisers sent shortly before he spoke in Parliament advising him that no Covid rules had been broken in Number 10, The Telegraph understands. “It contains new evidence that helps his case,” a source close to Mr Johnson’s defence team said. “His case is that he told Parliament what he believed to be true at the time. There is documentary evidence which will ...

The DeSantis takeover just hasn't materialised – Trump still leads, and he's got a powerful message for discontented Americans Source - !Daily Telegraph - 14/03/23 Link Donald Trump was not already beyond the pale, his behaviour on 6 January 2021 made sure that he became so. He will not and cannot return for a second term. For goodness sake, even his former vice president, Mike Pence, has denounced him, telling an audience of political journalists: “What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.”  That just about sums up the view this side of the Atlantic, not just on the Left but among most conservatives, too. Trump, once widely seen as a grave threat to the world, has all but disappeared off our radars because we cannot conceive of how any decent human being could possibly vote for him following the manner of his departure from office last time around. What support he retains, we like to believe, is on the fringes of US politics. ...

 These signs suggest a series of policy announcements designed to make voters feel better about themselves before polling day in late 2024 Source - Daily Telegraph - 16/03/23 Link The words "general election" were not included in Jeremy Hunt's Budget 7,700-word speech on Wednesday. Yet they might as well have been, given the way that so many of the measures seem to come to fruition later next year, when the UK is almost certainly heading for the polls. An election was certainly on the mind of Mr Hunt when the Chancellor turned up at Wednesday night's 1922 Committee meeting to brief his Budget measures to backbench Tories. "I shall be talking about the way this is going to help them with an election," Mr Hunt told reporters as he entered the committee room to speak to them. All the signs in the Budget are pointing towards a series of policy announcements designed to make voters feel better about themselves before polling day in late 2024.  Take the billions o...

 The party's hatred of wealth has made it hellbent on complicating retirement planning Source - Daily Telegraph 16/03/23 Link There’s a growing inequality in Britain, a widening gulf between those who have to save prudently for their own retirement, and those who can sit back and rely on the taxpayer. This retirement wealth divide will next month widen even further when public sector pensioners pick up a double-digit pay rise while those forced to rely on investment growth continue to see their pots get battered by economic uncertainty. The beginning of this new pension injustice can be traced back to Labour chancellor Gordon Brown’s decision to strip dividend tax credits from pension schemes, which helped trigger the demise of employer-guaranteed "final salary" retirement deals in the private sector. Jeremy Hunt’s radical shakeup of pension allowances in yesterday's Budget went someway to address that by scrapping the limit on tax-free savings – the pernicious lifeti...

 Spring Budget summary: free childcare expansion, lifetime allowance abolished Source - Daily Telegraph 15/03/23 Link The UK economy Announcing the latest predictions by the OBR, Mr Hunt said improving global conditions and actions taken by ministers after Liz Truss's disastrous mini-Budget meant the UK is now expected to avoid an economic recession. He said that GDP is now expected to contract by just 0.2pc in 2023, down from a gloomier prediction of 1.4pc in November. After that, the economy is expected to grow every year to 2027, including: 1.8pc in 2024; 2.5pc in 2025; 2.1pc in 2026; and 1.9pc in 2027. Unemployment is also not expected to rise by more than one percentage point, while record inflation is expected to come down dramatically. Mr Hunt said the OBR now forecasts it will fall from 10.7pc at the end of 2022 to 2.9pc by the end of 2023. This means the Government will meet Rishi Sunak's target for reducing inflation, he said.  Energy bills support The Government’s E...

 Humza Yousaf is playing to an impatient mob. He risks becoming a victim of his own short-sighted opportunism Source - Daily Telegraph 13/03/23 Link For or a brief, optimistic moment, a sense of mature calm seemed to have descended on the SNP. The two front runners in a leadership election triggered by the unexpected resignation of Nicola Sturgeon appeared to have learned an important lesson from their predecessor: don’t promise something you can’t deliver. Whatever the reasons behind Sturgeon’s departure, incessantly promising a rerun referendum on independence, even though it was out of the scope of the Scottish Parliament to decide, was a constant feature of much of her tenure. It’s hard to believe that Sturgeon herself was oblivious to the law as set out in the Scotland Act, but she behaved as if she had never read it. And most of her members were only too happy to follow her along that road to nowhere – or to the doors of the Supreme Court, where all her promises were exposed ...

At the second reading of ‘deport the refugees’ bill, Home Secretary said she was 'subject to most grotesque slurs' by 'out-of-touch lefties' Source - Daily Telegraph - 13/03/23 Link Britain faces three existential threats: Russia, China and Gary Lineker. The PM was in California to sort out the first two, signing an exciting new nuclear submarine deal. The Aussies will provide the subs, the Americans the latest atomic technology, and Britain will be manufacturing the digital watch worn by the captain. Alas, this was overshadowed by Mr Lineker’s pre-emptive strike, withdrawing his labour from Match of the Day and triggering a wave of walkouts across the corporation. The problem is that if every socialist downs tools at the BBC, you’ll be left with Match of the Day hosted by Gyles Brandreth and Basil Brush. So Tim Davie caved in and Gary agreed to return to work with no fuss - because this was never about him - just an understanding that every time he appears on screen, t...