AboutArticles by John Rentoul

Twitter has turned me into an optimist

04 Dec 2022

I love Twitter, and I am not embarrassed to say that I spend a lot of time on it. It has made my life better; I think it has improved...

We shouldn’t move on from disasters of ‘party democracy’

14 Nov 2022

The insouciance with which some Conservatives have walked away from the wreckage of the shortest premiership ever is surprising. Iain Duncan Smith wrote an article saying that Liz Truss was...

Rishi Sunak makes mistakes, but gets big things right

30 Oct 2022

Rishi Sunak makes mistakes under pressure. Despite the calm manner, he is a surprisingly inconsistent politician. When he was chancellor he presented a spring statement in March that was denounced...

Conservative Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister is the most shocking reversal of fortune in recent British politics

25 Oct 2022

The surprise of Rishi Sunak’s comeback was briefly obscured by the even greater audacity of Boris Johnson’s attempted comeback. Fairly early on in the previous Conservative leadership election, it was...

Johnson bottles it — again — clearing the way for Sunak

24 Oct 2022

It was all too predictable. Indeed, it was predicted, because Boris Johnson has done it before. In 2016, winded by his betrayal by Michael Gove, he pulled out of the...

Things can only get worse for Liz Truss

09 Oct 2022

Usually, the market in political commentary overshoots. Every other week for Tony Blair was his “worst week ever”, as Alastair Campbell used to say. Gordon Brown was written off and...

Starmer can afford to be polite to Truss for a key reason

18 Sep 2022

What goes on behind the speaker’s chair in the Commons, away from the cameras, tells us a lot about the state of politics. Soon after Buckingham Palace announced that doctors...

Why Truss could be a successful prime minister

21 Aug 2022

My first assumption about Liz Truss was that she would crash and burn as a candidate for the Conservative leadership. My second assumption was that she would crash and burn...

Case for Liz Truss as prime minister of United Kingdom

24 Jul 2022

Sometimes the only way to test an argument is to write the opposite, as Boris Johnson once did. My prejudice is that Rishi Sunak is better qualified to be prime...

The Conservatives face their wrong brother moment

17 Jul 2022

Is this going to be the Conservative Party’s David Miliband moment? It looks as if the final two candidates will be Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, with the main uncertainty...

John Rentoul

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

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