AboutArticles by John Rentoul

If Streeting saves NHS he could easily be our next PM

16 Sep 2024

Keir Starmer is following the Tony Blair model for fixing the NHS. He takes advice from Blair himself, and has brought back two of the people who were key to...

Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Tory PM

15 Sep 2024

When Kemi Badenoch said at the launch of her Conservative leadership campaign that the party had “talked right but governed left”, many people were puzzled. What did she mean? Well,...

Jenrick must be cautious if he’s playing the Trump card

06 Sep 2024

We have been here before. I had to come to the defence of Tower Hamlets, the east London borough where I live when, earlier this year, Paul Scully, the otherwise...

Oprah Winfrey was not Oprah, she was Orpah

02 Sep 2024

We opined last weekend on the allegation of cronyism in some of the new government’s civil service appointments. “The Tories doth protest too much, methinks,” wrote our commentator. Thanks to...

Starmer and Reeves face big test of their relationship

01 Sep 2024

Most Labour MPs were “OK with it”, I was told, when Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced she was cutting the winter fuel payment to pensioners. They accepted the argument, put...

Starmer needs to lighten gloom and tell uplifting tale

30 Aug 2024

It looks as if Keir Starmer realised that he had overdone the doom and gloom in the weekend briefing about the Conservatives leaving the country in “rubble and ruin”. He...

Reeves’s impossible choice: broken tax promise or ‘austerity’

26 Aug 2024

This time last year, Rachel Reeves said she had “no plans” to raise any taxes apart from the small increases, including VAT on school fees, that she had already announced....

First words give grounds for optimism in our new MPs

12 Aug 2024

Of the 335 new MPs elected last month, 139 have made their first speeches in the three weeks that the House of Commons was sitting before the summer recess. I...

Considering he’s a populist, Farage is terribly unpopular

09 Aug 2024

Nigel Farage’s first reaction to the riots was to tell Keir Starmer he was wrong to blame them on the “far right”. It was striking that the leader of Reform...

Reeves is making tough decisions — but they are right ones

04 Aug 2024

Keir Starmer said he was going to have to make tough decisions if he won the election and he has been true to his word. When Rachel Reeves, the new...

John Rentoul

Chief Political Commentator, The Independent; visiting professor, King's College, London.

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