Gaza 1) Ceasefire talks to continue while Israel strikes Hamas in Rafah “Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has said a proposal for a new Gaza ceasefire is “far from Israel’s basic requirements” but negotiations will continue. His comments came after Hamas said it had accepted the truce terms offered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. “The ball is now in Israel’s court,” an official in the Palestinian group said. Overnight, Israeli forces and tanks were seen near the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza, reports in Israeli media said. Earlier, Israel’s military carried out air strikes on Rafah, on ..read more

Until now, a simple driving force las lain behind the Green Party’s onward local election march: NIMBYism. The blue-haired hippies of the pronoun police have allied with the grey-haired adversaries of intergenerational fairness to turn chunks of Middle England lime. Many a solar farm has cheerfully blocked to keep onside the Outrageds of Suffolk, Hertfordshire, et al. Yet this time, Britain’s least interesting major party has discovered a new cause to bandwagon on: Gaza. I imagine residents of Rafah currently have more on their minds than shutting English coal-fired power stations, scrapping T ..read more

David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation, a Conservative peer, and author of ‘The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future‘. Cutting the surge in legal and illegal migration is one of the Government’s priorities. An urgent report on overseas students from the Migration Advisory Committee is due to be published shortly before the next set of migration statistics. The plan appears to be to announce another toughening up of the overseas student regime to offset another big migration figure. Real migration is understandably and rightly a highly charged political iss ..read more

James Sunderland is the MP for Bracknell. He chaired the Armed Forces Bill Select Committee in 2021 and chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Veterans and the Armed Forces Covenant. The first duty of any government is the defence of its people. This fundamental dictum tends to be forgotten during extended periods of international calm when domestic imperatives take priority and the case for increased military spending is difficult to make. Even now, as a full-scale war rages in Europe and multiple threats proliferate across the globe, some regard defense as a distraction, consuming scar ..read more

Sean Woodward stood down this week as Leader of Fareham Council. I have just ended my tenure as Fareham Borough Council Leader of 25 years and a councillor for nearly four decades, winning 15 consecutive elections. Unlike many of my Conservative colleagues, 1,600 over the last 12 months, I ended at a time of my choosing, a choice which many politicians don’t get. I decided four years ago that the Hampshire County election of 2021 and the Fareham Borough election of 2022 would be my last, knowing Fareham would be having an all-out election due to boundary changes so it seemed a natural endpoint ..read more

Huw Davies is Deputy Chairman of the South Wales East Conservatives. David TC Davies, the Welsh Secretary, has recently stated that he would be relaxed about a potential coalition between Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Conservatives in the Senedd. I believe this would be a strategic mistake for Tories in Wales, and would have untold unfortunate consequences for the future of the United Kingdom. Some within the Welsh Conservatives need to stop treating Plaid Cymru as just another party. They are the same as the SNP and Sinn Fein: they desire the destruction of the United Kingdom. Plaid wants an inde ..read more

Sunak says Britain ‘faces a hung parliament’… “Britain is heading for a hung parliament, Rishi Sunak has claimed as he urged Tory MPs to end their divisions and “come together” to take on Labour. In his first comments since the full extent of the party’s local election losses became clear, the prime minister admitted that the results had been “bitterly disappointing” for the Conservatives…However, Sunak seized on a projection…that suggested if Thursday’s results were replicated in a general election, Labour would fall short of enough seats to win power. Sunak conceded for the first time that h ..read more

Amidst an absolutely torrid set of results for the Conservatives, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how much worse it could have been: imagine if Reform UK had polled an extra 118 votes in Blackpool South, and snatched second place. Oh, the meltdown there might have been. But whilst it would have been a field day for the press, the difference between second and third place (especially when the winner took 59 per cent of the vote) is immaterial. Much more concerning, from CCHQ’s perspective, is the simple fact of the Reform performance. Before the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-election ..read more

As research by the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Policy Exchange has shown, Conservatives are still heavily under-represented when it comes to appointments to public bodies. ConservativeHome has regularly highlighted some of the appointments to these bodies, and encouraged subscribers to apply, and we will continue to do so. As well as checking out the appointments that we highlight, we would also encourage all those subscribers with an interest in offering their expertise to public bodies to sign up to the free Cabinet Office email alert service. Here is the link for the se ..read more

David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary, and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election. By Friday, we could all make our preliminary assessments of the various elections held on Thursday, even if many of the results had yet to come in. I certainly had a go. My initial views were that it was a very bad set of results for the Conservatives suggesting that a heavy general election defeat is on the cards but that there probably was not going to be an attempt by Tory MPs to remove Rishi Sunak; holding on to second place in Blackpool South and Ben H ..read more