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1 month ago | 
conservativehome.com | Patrick Maguire |Gabriel Pogrund |Andrew Gimson
GET IN: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel PogrundWe Brits, being rather slow on the uptake, may not yet realise the country has been taken over by Irishmen.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
How gloomy the massed ranks of Labour MPs look as they listen to their leader (see their faces in the picture above). Sir Keir Starmer has not the faintest idea how to cheer them up by giving them a glimpse of the sunlit uplands towards which they would like to think he is leading them. The PM is stuck in a trap of his own making. Today he told his MPs yet again about the £21 billion black hole left by the Conservative Government, and the many other ways in which it wrecked the country.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
Sir Keir Starmer was pale, indignant, at times deeply emotional. The House watched him strain every sinew as he defended his good name. Often he was heard in silence, for the gang rape of young girls is not a subject which lends itself to heckling.
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Dec 30, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
Kemi Badenoch has a capacity, not often evinced by Sir Keir Starmer, to illustrate what she is saying by reaching out for the vivid and unforeseen example. When I interviewed her for ConHome in December 2017, the year she was elected to Parliament, I asked her to name her heroes. She replied: “I always name Airey Neave and Margaret Thatcher.”A majority of Tory MPs would most likely say Thatcher, but Neave was wonderfully unexpected.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
The Prime Minister wags his finger! He wags a finger from each hand! His dignity, his very probity, are being called into question, and this he cannot tolerate. But he will have to tolerate it. Kemi Badenoch pointed out to Sir Keir Starmer that he “played politics with the WASPI women,” and this hurt him, for he could find no way to show that he had not played politics with the WASPI women. How gloomy the non-WASPI women sitting on either side of him, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves, were looking.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
If Sir Keir Starmer were still at school, his least favourite lesson would be at noon each Wednesday. This is when Kemi Badenoch pours scorn on his work in front of the whole class. She never even gives him credit for trying. She is quite plainly prejudiced against him, and drags up all sorts of things from his past which she says he got wrong. This week she claimed he signed some letters calling for foreign criminals to be allowed to stay in this country.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
OUT: How Brexit got done and the Tories were undone by Tim ShipmanTim Shipman’s latest book, the final volume in a quartet devoted to British politics from the 2016 referendum to the present day, is 900 pages long. Is it possible, one wonders before opening it, to have too much of a good thing? In this case, the answer, rather unexpectedly, is “no”. Shipman’s method is to “give everybody a fair shout”, as he put it when interviewed by ConHome in November 2016.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
The best joke at PMQs was told by the first Labour backbencher to speak, Olivia Bailey (Reading West and Mid Berkshire): “Can I welcome the swift and decisive action the Government is taking to secure our borders…”How the Conservatives laughed. The Labour Whips really ought to supply their troops with ammunition which does not blow up in their faces.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
The builder who is fixing the foundations sounds week by week more glum. There is an undertone of grievance in Sir Keir Starmer’s voice. Over and over again he draws our attention to the complete hash the last lot – a cowboy outfit called the Conservatives who kept sacking their chief executive – made of the job. These incessant reminders of how over the last 14 years everything has been ruined have a lowering effect on the spirits.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Andrew Gimson
“What is the Government doing to bring down inflation?” It was the first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions of Alex Burghart, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, deputed by Kemi Badenoch to stand in for her because Sir Keir Starmer was on his way back from Brazil, where the nuts come from. A good opening question, brief and hard to answer, as inflation has just risen. Angela Rayner, standing in for Starmer, had the wit not to try to answer it.
