May appears to warm to Gove’s views on combating terrorism
Theresa May seems to have come round to Michael Gove’s way of looking at how you deal with the threat of terrorism. That’s not how she is putting it, but some of her arguments, delivered at the Whitehall headquarters of the Royal United Services Institute today, closely matched those deployed by Mr Gove in government. To take on terrorism, you need to address intolerance and extremism within pockets of certain Muslim communities, not just focus on law and order issues.
That’s surprising given that Mrs May pretty much went to war with Mr Gove when they were both in the coalition government. She opposed his “draining the swamp” approach, a Whitehall fight that ended up in her then special adviser (now joint chief of staff), Fiona Hill, losing her job. Mrs Hill watched the proceedings today from just above Theresa May’s head this morning.
Theresa May, as is her wont, didn’t engage with that idea when it was put to her in a question from Nick Watt from Newsnight at the press conference. But the adoption of arguments she fought against in government will revive the view amongst some that Mrs May and her team in the past and to this day take up some of their positions in opposition to the old Cameron regime inner circle and not always for purely intellectually coherent reasons.
There were rumours at the beginning of this campaign that Mrs May’s team might have a list of the remaining Cameroons and former Osbornites still lurking in the jungle of government who would be cleared out in a post-election reshuffle.
It sounds as though we ‘ll know soon enough if Theresa May wins on Thursday just how inclined she is to purge such forces. Talk is that the PM will, if elected, start a reshuffle on the senior jobs on Friday morning.
That makes you think at least one of the senior office holders is on the move and the most vulnerable cabinet minister looks like being Philip Hammond.
Jeremy Corbyn has been making three stump speeches in the north east of England today. My colleague, Michael Crick, asked the Labour leader something a lot of people have been wondering about: why he keeps going to places his party already holds comfortably (one of the speeches today was in Blyth Valley, Labour majority in 2015: 9,229).
Mr Corbyn dismissed it as a “totally absurd question” and said students come from all over the region to hear him at his venues. He promised a big surprise on Thursday and in some of his rallies today has sounded quite relaxed and mildly euphoric.
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