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The foreign secretary has opened up a commanding lead over the former Chancellor as the long campaign gets underway Yesterday, Conservative MPs voted to send both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss through to the final stage of the party’s leadership contest. One of them will now be selected to replace Boris Johnson by the party membership in a ballot running from 4 August until early September. Earlier this week, our figures suggested that Truss would beat Sunak in a hypothetical head-to-head by 19 points. Now, with the final two announced and the summer campaign just beginning, a new YouGov poll...

Another chapter was added to the dark comedy of democratic destruction that is British politics last week when the House of Commons finally voted in favor of holding a General Election. This was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fourth attempt to gain support for what appears to be the only way Parliament will resolve their deadlock over Brexit. Dubbed by radical Leftist and outspoken anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn as a “once-in-a-generation chance to transform our country,” this snap election will take place on December 12th, and will be the first election held in December since 1923. While the British public are no...

Practice what you preach doesn't appear to be an ISIS strong suit. Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh are British citizens who not only pledged their allegiance to ISIS, they traveled to Syria, worked with Jihadi John and came out at the end praising him as "the most loyal, honest and upstanding friend." Jihadi John is the famous savage who beheaded hostages, including American journalists, on video for the world to see. In 2015, he was killed in a U.S. drone strike. But while Kotey and Elsheikh preach iron fisted rule under Islamic Law for the rest of the world,...

British diplomat Rebecca Dykes, working at the UK embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was found dead along the side of a road early Saturday morning. Authorities are saying Dykes was murdered after finding her dead body tossed to the side of a major roadway over the weekend. It is believed Dykes had been at a party on Friday night and left by herself around midnight. The woman’s body was found alongside the Metn highway. Forensics suggests she died at 4:00 am Saturday morning. British ambassador Hugo Shorter issued the following statement.  The whole embassy is deeply shocked, saddened by this news. My thoughts...

In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union -- in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court? Would you accept an American Union that granted all the peoples of Central and South America and Mexico the right to move to, work in, and live in any...

LONDON -- Set aside for a moment the violent incidents associated with people claiming to act under the authority of their Islamic faith and consider instead what passes for normalcy. Some in Britain would like to elevate to the level of wide-scale acceptance Sharia law, an Islamic legal system predicated on the religious tenets of Islam. "A number of Sharia councils operate in the UK to offer resolution to disputes," writes The Express, but currently "they have no jurisdiction in criminal matters." Not yet, anyway. There is a campaign underway to make a UK suburb Britain's Sharia-law zone. "Former archbishop...

LONDON -- Wisdom can often be found in unexpected places. During debate in the House of Commons on whether Britain should join the U.S. and Russia in bombing ISIS targets in Syria, Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary of the liberal Labour Party, delivered a speech that approached Winston Churchill in its vision: "And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in...

LONDON -- It's remarkable how often British and American politics resemble each other; often only the accents differ. Following a disastrous defeat at the hands of Prime Minister David Cameron's Tories, the Labour Party appears ready to elect as its next leader one Jeremy Corbyn, a hardcore leftist, self-described socialist and member of Parliament, who recently compared ISIS to the U.S. military and has called the terrorist group Hamas a "friend." Corbyn also wants to renationalize some British industries and increase taxes on "the rich," who are already paying more than half their earnings in income taxes, as well as...

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Since his party's impressive election victory in May, Prime Minister David Cameron is moving quickly to fulfill his campaign promise to ensure welfare benefits are no longer a way of life for many of his fellow citizens. Instead of open-ended benefits for the unemployed, the government, beginning in April 2017, will require young people between 18 and 21 who don't have jobs, but are collecting welfare, to attend three-week "boot camps" to prepare them for work in a rapidly improving economy. If they refuse, they will be denied benefits if they are unemployed for six months....

In 1935 George Dangerfield published "The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914," a vivid account of how Britain's center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve. The Liberal Party had appeared impregnable. Its cabinet in 1910 included Herbert Asquith (in the midst of the longest consecutive prime ministership since the Duke of Liverpool's and until Margaret Thatcher's), and the future wartime leaders David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. But after 1910 the party never won an election again. What got me thinking about Dangerfield's delightfully written book were political developments here and in Britain...

WARWICK, England -- When it comes to debates the Oxford Union, which bills itself as the "world's most prestigious debating society," remains the gold standard. Begun in 1823, The Union, in modern times, has hosted debates that have included such luminaries as Ronald Reagan and the Dalai Lama. The Oxford Union debates produce useful information. The same cannot be said for U.S. presidential debates. Next week, 10 Republican presidential candidates will gather on a stage in Cleveland, Ohio, behind podiums like "Jeopardy" contestants. With so many candidates having so little time, little useful information will be dispensed. More likely the...

LONDON -- It is an old debating point: Do the times make the man, or does the man make the times? In the case of Winston Churchill, whose death 50 years ago Saturdaythe British are remembering with more than nostalgia, it is both. The times in Churchill's case were both World War I, in which he served as a battalion commander, and World War II, which he helped win for Britain and America. By the standard he set, all political leaders since -- with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan -- are mere pygmies. Yet, even they...

Fifty years ago this Saturday, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died at age 90. Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian, and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of Britain's nuclear deterrent. But he is most renowned for an astounding five-year-tenure as Britain's wartime prime minister from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was voted out of office not long after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Churchill took over the day...

A British author, residing in the United States for the past 30 years, created a small firestorm earlier this week with his candid observations that modern-day Americans have been duped by the government into accepting a European-style march toward socialism because we fail to appreciate the rich legacy of personal liberty that is everyone's birthright and is expressly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Os Guinness, the author of more than a dozen books defending traditional Judeo-Christian values and Jeffersonian personal liberty, argued that we should embrace individual liberty and personal dignity and reject...

Nov. 4 was a national vote of no confidence in Barack Obama. Had a British prime minister received a vote like this, he would have resigned by now. The one issue on which all Republicans agreed, and all ran, was the rejection of Obama. And by fleeing from him, some even refusing to admit they voted for him, Democrats, too, were conceding that this election was about Obama, and that they were not to blame for his failures. Yet, though this was a referendum on Obama and his policies, and though both were repudiated, some pundits are claiming that America...

No matter how the vote turns out on Thursday in Scotland, either for independence or continued union with Britain, the disintegration of the Old Continent appears almost inevitable. Already the British government has conceded that, even if the Scots vote for union, Edinburgh will receive greater powers to rule itself. Cheering for the breakup of the U.K. are Catalans and Basques, Bretons and Corsicans, Tyroleans, Venetians, Flemish, all dreaming of nations of their own carved out of Spain, France, Italy and Belgium. Europe's secessionists have waxed ever stronger since the last decade of the 20th century when the Soviet Union...

LONDON -- British politics has a familiar look to Americans, with a center-right Conservative Party and a center-left Labour Party resembling America's Republicans and Democrats. Britain's parliamentary system, however, presents a contrast with the U.S. Constitution on the surface. A prime minister whose party has a majority in the House of Commons can pass any law he or she likes, since members of Parliament almost always vote on party lines. The House of Lords can delay or amend legislation, but can be overridden by a Commons majority. The monarch theoretically has a veto, but it has not been exercised for...

In recent times, British and American politics have often flowed in parallel currents. Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister in 1979 was followed by Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980. As Charles Moore notes in his biography of Thatcher, the two worked together, albeit with some friction, reversing the tide of statism at home and ending the Soviet empire abroad. They seemed to establish British Conservatives and American Republicans as their nation's natural ruling parties. In time, Democrats and Labour responded. Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" politics prevailed in 1992, and Tony Blair's New Labourites, adapting Clinton's strategy, won the...

In the runup to an attack on Syria, some disenchanted voters were thinking, "This wouldn't be happening if we had elected Barack Obama." On Saturday, they got a welcome surprise: They did elect Barack Obama. That would be the Obama who opposed George W. Bush's aggressive interpretation of presidential war powers. "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," Obama said in 2007. But once in the White House, Obama suddenly grasped the attractions of being free...

The first volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, covering her life up to Britain's victory in the Falklands, is out. It takes its place among the finest political biographies of all time. Thatcher gave Moore full access to her papers and to all her friends and relatives, on condition that she never see the book. It was a wise precaution. Moore is a conservative, more traditionalist than Mrs. Thatcher (as he always calls her) and broadly sympathetic to her causes. But he was able to get frank responses from relatives, friends, and colleagues that might never have...