Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
29 min listen
Freddy speaks to the diplomat and author Dennis B Ross, who worked under presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton. He was a special advisor on the Persian Gulf. They discuss the escalation of tensions in the Middle East and the flack that Joe Biden has come under for his response. Can the US still claim to be able to shape events in the Middle East? And what comes next?
11 min listen
Sunak’s top team is considering another ban: smartphones for teens. A consultation is due to begin this month that will question whether children need a smartphone, and if social media should require age verification. Could the debate bring the party together? Also, there’s another suspension in Westminster. Mark Menzies has been suspended after claims he made a late night call to ask for money to pay off ‘bad people’. He strongly disputes the claims. Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale. Produced by Megan McElroy.
31 min listen
This week: the usual targets First: Trump is on trial again – and America is bored rather than scandalised. This is his 91st criminal charge and his supporters see this as politicised prosecution. As an American, Kate Andrews has seen how the law can be used as a political weapon – so why, she asks, is Britain importing the same system? In less than 18 months, the police have been sent to investigate Rishi Sunak for his seat-belt, Nicola Sturgeon for campaign funds, and Angela Rayner over her electoral registry: each time, the complainant is political and the process is the punishment. Kate joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson
There have been months of near-radio silence on the status of the SNP police probe — until now. Peter Murrell, former chief executive and husband of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, has been taken into police custody for a second time in connection with Operation Branchform. Murrell was arrested at 9 a.m. this morning, just over a year after he was taken into police custody for the first time, on 5 April 2023. On the same day, the Sturgeon-Murrell household in Glasgow was searched by officers while the SNP HQ in Edinburgh was raided. Both Sturgeon and the party’s former treasurer Colin Beattie were arrested last year in connection with
In the 2010s the main political dynamic inside western societies could be boiled down to simple left and right. Figures such as Jordan Peterson, and others loosely grouped under the banner of the ‘intellectual dark web’, were only just rising to prominence and had begun to discuss the new-fangled idea of the ‘culture wars’. These days conservatives are just phoning it in, going through the motions, and collecting their paychecks for as long as they can Today, the battle between progressives and conservatives has been replaced by something far more confusing and unsettling. The recent legislative debacle in Sweden, in which a right-wing government – a government that conservatives cheered
You’ve got to feel for Rishi Sunak. He spends his days slaving around the clock to shave half a percentage point off inflation, only to find one of his MPs making lurid headlines, again. Today, the Tory boat has been rocked by Mark Menzies, who lost the whip following claims that he had misused campaign funds. He has also been suspended as the government’s trade envoy to Colombia, Chile, Peru and Argentina. Labour is naturally keen to take full advantage of a fresh set of Tory woes According to the Times, the MP demanded that his constituency manager pay thousands of pounds in cash to ‘bad people’ with whom Menzies had
It was Cop26 in Glasgow and Nicola Sturgeon was in her element, posing for selfies with Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and assorted world leaders. The then first minister was desperate to upstage Boris Johnson who had very much put his mark on the global climate shindig. ‘It’s one minute to midnight on the Doomsday clock,’ the prime minister warned the assembled green lobbyists and corporate CEOs, ‘and we need to act now’. He promised to cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 68 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero by 2050. Nicola Sturgeon just had to go one better. Scotland would cut emissions by 75 per
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Queen of Privacy never manage to keep out of the news for too long. This time it transpires that the red-headed royal has now officially changed his primary country of residence from the UK to the US. Too good for us, Harry? Documents on the Companies House site reveal that the media-shy monarch filed for a change of address for his sustainable tourism business (‘Travalyst’) on Wednesday. However, the change is dated for 29 June 2023 which is, curiously, the day that King Charles asked Harry and his American wife to vacate Frogmore Cottage in Windsor. This is the property, dear readers, that the
Labour, according to Rachel Reeves, is now the party of low taxes. She has said she won’t raise income tax, National Insurance, capital gains tax and corporation tax, as well as ruling out a wealth tax. But that still leaves a few options for jacking up taxes, as one of Reeves’ advisers, Sir Edward Troup has hinted. Last week, Troup, a former head of HMRC, was appointed by Reeves to look at efforts to reduce tax avoidance. This is a slightly ill-timed initiative given that Labour is simultaneously trying to play down the case of a particular taxpayer who stands accused of failing to pay capital gains tax on a
When Nicola Sturgeon unveiled the SNP’s climate change pledge in 2019, the First Minister boasted that Scotland had the ‘most stretching targets in the world’. The problem was that they were too stretching: five years on, the flagship goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 has been binned. The decision to axe the climate target means that another part of Sturgeon’s legacy lies in tatters. This debacle also reveals something simple: writing something into law doesn’t mean it will happen. Despite talking a good game, the Scottish government has consistently missed its climate targets – it failed to achieve eight of the last 12 annual
On Tuesday, parliament voted for the first time on legislation to begin the phasing out of smoking (not just cigarettes, but cigars, shisha, you name it), and to create a two-tier legal system where some adults will be able to buy these products, and some won’t. Although the ban seems popular with the public, it has become a lightning rod for Tory MPs, who see it as a shibboleth for how conservative they and their colleagues are. Westminster-watchers are, inevitably, seeing it through the lens of a future leadership contest. The vote was free – that is, not one where members of Parliament were whipped to vote with the government.
Another day, another Holyrood mess. This time, it’s hapless Humza Yousaf being criticised for his slow response to the Cass review into gender services. It’s not like the Scottish First Minister to be missing in action when it matters… If Yousaf’s time as First Minister is defined by anything, it might well be his staggering level of indecision. Just hours after Mr S asked the question about Scotland’s tartan Tavistock, hapless Humza Yousaf finally threw in the towel. This morning, the Sandyford gender clinic in Glasgow has announced it is pausing prescriptions of puberty blockers to new patients under the age of 18 in light of the Cass review. Only
It’s a day ending in ‘y’ – which means it’s more bad news for Rishi Sunak. The beleaguered Tory premier had a relatively good day on Wednesday, celebrating falling inflation and a punchy performance in parliament. But today’s Times brings news that another Tory MP has lost the party whip while its claims about alleged misuse of campaign funds are being investigated. Mark Menzies, the MP for Fylde since 2010, is facing allegations that he made a late-night call to a 78-year-old aide asking for help because he had been locked up by ‘bad people’ demanding thousands of pounds for his release. According to the Times, £14,000 given by donors for
Next month, Keir Starmer is expected to lead his party to victory in the local elections. The Tories are forecast to lose about half of their councillors who are up for re-election. If it’s a very bad night they could also say goodbye to Ben Houchen and Andy Street, the metro mayors of Tees Valley and the West Midlands. All this would confirm that Labour is on track for a super-majority at the general election. Yet there is one election Starmer’s Labour must fight the left to win: that for the North-East mayor, which takes place on 2 May. The new mayoralty – which covers two million people from Northumberland
The Democrats dare to hope that this week will be a study in contrasts. On their side stands President Joe Biden, the veteran statesman, using all his diplomatic experience to stop a third world war breaking out in the Middle East. On the other, in the dock in Manhattan, sits Donald Trump, facing 34 criminal counts in a case relating to porn stars, adultery and hush money. As Biden urges Israel to ‘think carefully’ as it considers how to respond to Iran’s attack last weekend, Trump is, as ever, ranting away about himself. This speaks to Biden’s 2024 re-election pitch: it’s democracy (him) vs chaos (you know who). Trump can
Why is Britain poised to ban cigarette smoking, when the habit is already dying out anyway? Smoking is seen by the young as disgusting and outdated. A generation ago, 50 per cent of school pupils said they had smoked at some point. By the time David Cameron came to power, this was down to 25 per cent. It has since halved again, to 12 per cent – of whom just 1 per cent smoke regularly. Vaping among the young presents its own challenges, but smoking cigarettes (at £15 a packet) is in terminal decline. So naturally the state has decided to intervene. Smoking is dying out among the young because
At the start of January, Donald Trump offered up a cheery new year message for Americans. ‘If I don’t get immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity,’ the former president declared on his social media platform Truth Social. With this, he touched on a looming question about 2024: will the presidential race be decided by lawyers and jurors, rather than voters? Trump showed up in court for the first criminal lawsuit against him this week, a case which could in theory result in a decades-long jail sentence. He’s accused of paying hush money to the former porn star Stormy Daniels, then falsifying business records to conceal the information from
11 min listen
The day after her book was published, Rishi Sunak faced down questions from Keir Starmer and Labour members at PMQs about Liz Truss. While he had his replies at the ready, the questions underscored the main issue for Sunak: how should he deal with his predecessor? Also on the podcast, there is more inflation news for the Government, and how will Starmer deal with internal party discipline? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
A year ago today, the Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. For the last year, Kara-Murza has been held in a prison in Siberia, often in solitary confinement, with only occasional visits from his lawyer, a couple of books and hostile prison guards watching over him. Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022 and held for over a year in pre-trial detention after being accused of treason and spreading ‘fake information’ about the Russian army. The most alarming aspect of the charges levelled against him
Keir Starmer came to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) with a spring in his step. He announced that he owned ‘a rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s memoirs. ‘The only unsigned copy,’ he added with a chortle. Then he asked Rishi Sunak to justify the calamities of Truss’s premiership. ‘He should spend less time reading that book,’ said Rishi, ‘and a bit more time reading the deputy leader’s tax advice.’ That scuppered Sir Keir’s day in parliament. To wriggle out of trouble he played the class war card, and he accused Rishi, ‘a billionaire prime minister’, of ‘smearing a working-class woman.’ Rishi deserves great credit as a witty, fleet-footed Commons performer.
Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’ Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was a classic knockabout between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clearly written by their respective attack units. Both came armed with the sort of material you’d expect for a scrap: the Labour leader had a ‘rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s book, while the Prime Minister wanted to talk about Angela Rayner’s tax affairs. There were the familiar lines, too, including Sunak reminding the Commons of Starmer defending Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Starmer talking about his legal expertise. The first question from Starmer was whether Sunak had met anyone with a mortgage who agreed with Truss that her mini-budget was the ‘happiest moment of her premiership’. Labour
The heart sinks at the latest thoughts espoused by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, on a future Labour government’s foreign policy. Lammy has penned a 4,000 word essay for Foreign Affairs on his vision of pursuing ‘progressive realism’ for Britain on the international stage. It is a less than catchy phrase that amounts to little substance. According to Lammy, Labour’s foreign agenda will attempt to meld together the policy realism of Ernest Bevin, the post-war Labour foreign secretary who helped found Nato, with the ethical foreign policy of Robin Cook, who served as Tony Blair’s foreign secretary when New Labour took power in 1997. Lammy lays it on thick, praising Bevin for
The curious case of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs continues to drag on and Rishi Sunak isn’t prepared to let Sir Keir Starmer forget about it. In a new development yesterday, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Steve Watson revealed that ‘there are a number of assertions knocking about’ while another police source told the Times that ‘it’s not a single issue’ that the police are concerned with. Rayner has repeatedly denied she has done anything wrong and has been supported by Starmer (although he hasn’t yet read the legal advice she received on the matter) but that didn’t stop the Prime Minister taunting the Labour leader. Starmer used