Adam Bienkov

    Political journalist

    politics.co.uk

  • Where's Ken? Sadiq Khan distances himself from former mayor

    It’s become increasingly hard to distinguish whether it’s Zac Goldsmith or his predecessor, Boris Johnson, who is running to become the next Conservative mayor of London. Pictures of the incumbent are sprinkled liberally across Goldsmith’s campaign literature and the Richmond MP rarely lets a minute pass without referring to Boris during interviews and campaign appearances. If Goldsmith is serious about moving into City Hall then hanging onto the coat-tails of the celebrity incumbent is one obvious way of getting there.

  • Jeremy Corbyn's Falklands comments have surrendered the next election to the Tories

    Most of the reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Marr yesterday has focused on his comments about Trident and his suggestion that the UK’s nuclear submarines should be retained but without nuclear weapons on board. Most other major developed nations do without such an apocalyptic arsenal and there’s no reason why the UK shouldn’t either. As even Tony Blair admitted in his autobiography: “On simple, pragmatic grounds there was a case either way [for keeping Trident].

  • Away from the reshuffle, Corbyn quietly dismantles Cameron at PMQs

    Jeremy Corbyn’s performance at prime minister’s questions today was his best since he became leader. By contrast Cameron came across as flippant and even childlike in his responses. While Corbyn asked questions about pump capacity and flood compensation, Cameron answered with embarrassing Shakespeare gags about the Labour reshuffle.

  • The promises Boris Johnson has broken as mayor

    As Boris Johnson prepares to leave City Hall, eyes inevitably turn to his record as London mayor. Big investments in cycling and the Tube have been delivered as have his commitments to scrap the Western extension of the congestion charge and build a “new Routemaster”. Promise: When Boris Johnson became mayor he promised to totally eradicate rough sleeping on the streets of London by 2012, saying that “It’s scandalous that in 21st century London people have to resort to sleeping on the streets”.

  • Letwin is a dinosaur, but racism still lurks in British politics

    You wait for years for a Conservative party race row and then two come along at once. On the face of it, the comments made by David Cameron’s policy chief Oliver Letwinare by far the most serious. New papers unearthed under the thirty year rule reveal advice given by Letwin to the then Thatcher government arguing that employment programmes aimed at black communities would merely boost the “disco and drug trade” and “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops”.

  • SNP takes credit for global fall in car thefts

    This can be seen clearly in Scotland where the SNP now regularly sends out press releases congratulating themselves for their “crucial role” in everything from George Osborne’s defeat on tax credits, to the success of international climate change deal negotiations. A good example came this morning when the party sent out a press release praising the “remarkable” fall in motor vehicle thefts since the party first took control in Scotland. Now it’s true that there has been a huge drop in the number of vehicles stolen in Scotland since 2006.

  • The bad news ministers tried to bury

    A particularly cynical government tradition has developed in recent years. On the last day of the parliamentary term, just as MPs head back to their constituencies, the government deliberately releases a deluge of inconvenient reports and statements, in the hope they will be buried from political and media scrutiny. Yesterday, ministers dumped no fewer than 36 written statements, many of which would have constituted big news stories in their own right, had they been released when Parliament was still active.

  • Locked in cold war. Can Labour really go on like this?

    From reading the recent coverage of Labour’s internal problems, you might assume the party was in a state of bloody civil war, but the reality is quite different. At last night’s parliamentary Labour party meeting, only around 40 MPs and peers bothered to turn up. There was a short debate about Heathrow expansion, but there was little controversy and Jeremy Corbyn didn’t even turn up.

  • The mask slips: Oldham result brings out the real Nigel Farage

    Whenever things are going badly for Ukip, Nigel Farage’s cheeky chappy persona slips, and a rather more snarling and unpleasant character is revealed. Before last night, Farage predicted that Ukip would come “within a few hundred votes” of Labour in the seat and could even win it. In the end they fell short of victory by over 10,000 votes with Labour significantly increasing their share of the vote from last May.

  • 'Dave Force One' is another step towards a governing class cut off from the people

    David Cameron announced today that he plans to spend £10 million on a new ‘Air Force One’ style jet to be used both by himself and other ministers. The government claims the retrofitted RAF plane will save them money in the long-term. The government currently spends large amounts on chartered flights, including ones they don’t even use.

  • Jeremy Corbyn attacked for showing too much respect to the dead

    It’s got to the stage now where Jeremy Corbyn can literally do no right. Yesterday the Labour leader appeared at the Cenotaph to pay his respects to the fallen victims of war. Dressed appropriately, with a red poppy on, Corbyn bowed his head and left a wreath.

  • Boris Johnson's 'plain-speaking' reputation hides a slippery politician

    Where has Boris Johnson gathered his reputation for being ‘plain speaking’ from? The London mayor was asked questions on everything from the war in Syria, to civil liberties, to 24-hour travel on the Tube and he didn’t give a straight answer to a single query. This is a classic Boris tactic.

  • The big political victories already chalked-up by Jeremy Corbyn

    Both the national press and large sections of his own parliamentary party have so far been heavily critical of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. As a result he has not received the kind of honeymoon bounce in the polls that almost every new political leader would normally expect. There was some muttering when Jeremy Corbyn used his first conference speech to call for the Ministry of Justice to withdraw their bid to provide a prison training programme to the brutal Saudi Arabian regime.

  • Stop and search: Will the real Theresa May please stand up?

    There is a unfortunate irony to Theresa May’s call today for the police to increase the diversity of their officers. The latest Home Office statistics show that ethnic minority officers make up just 5.5% of the police force in England and Wales. The situation is even worse in London, where ethnic minorities make up just 11% of police officers, compared to 40% of all Londoners.

  • The rise of the SNP is based on emotion, not reason

    Nicola Sturgeon is by any measure the most successful politician in British politics. The SNP’s landslide victory in this year’s general election turned Scotland into a one-party state. At next year’s Holyrood elections, Sturgeon looks set not only to win a third term for her party but to actually increase her majority.

  • Labour can win as an anti-austerity party. They can't win as a shambles

    It’s important to say from the outset that George Osborne’s fiscal charter, which compels the government to keep a budget surplus, is an economic and political nonsense. When Alistair Darling proposed a similar idea under the “Fiscal Responsibility Act”, it was rightly laughed out of court by Osborne as “vacuous and irrelevant”. As many pointed out at the time, no government can bind it’s successor, so Darling was essentially legislating in order to compel himself to do what he would have done anyway.

  • What does Tristram Hunt really know about connecting with voters?

    Social media is disconnecting the Labour party from the majority of voters, Tristram Hunt suggested in a speech last night. The MP, who resigned from the shadow cabinet following Jeremy Corbyn’s election, claimed Labour’s digitally-based “new politics” of “Twitter-led mobilisations” and “perennial demonstration,” was making the party lose touch with the electorate. Now this may well all be true, although quite why Hunt believes he has uniquely escaped this brainwashing influence from his own 'hyper-engaged’ 38,000 Twitter followers isn’t entirely clear.

  • Boris Johnson shows why it's far too early to count him out

    Over my years covering London politics I have watched literally hundreds of speeches by Boris Johnson. Whether he’s speaking to a room full of Sikhs, or the Conservative party conference, the message and the jokes are almost always the same. As ever with Boris, the speech was mostly about himself and his own ambition.

  • The Super Furry Animals on fighting the 'smug' Tories, Welsh independence and Jeremy Corbyn

    It’s telling that the main stories from this year’s Conservative party conference have been about what has taken place outside the conference 'safe zone’ rather than inside. Whether it’s 80,000 anti-austerity protesters marching on the streets, a small number of anarchists spitting at delegates or Jeremy Corbyn packing out Manchester cathedral, it’s been the Tories’ opponents who have grabbed the headlines, rather than the Tories themselve.

  • Five reasons why Zac Goldsmith will be difficult for Labour to beat

    Zac Goldsmith was today chosen as the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, with a whopping 70% of the vote. Just 9,000 people took part in the ballot, fewer than half of the number who took part in the previous contest which selected Boris Johnson and a tiny fraction of the numbers who have joined Labour in London since May. This does suggest that enthusiasm for the green-minded Goldsmith among Tory members is not quite as strong as the headline percentage suggests.