Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

27 Feb 2025

Inside Nigel’s gang, my day as a ‘missing person’ & how to save James Bond

38 min listen

This week: Nigel’s gang – Reform’s plan for power.Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it’s clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage’s new gang. There are ‘the lifers’ – Dan Jukes and ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. Then there are the Tory defectors, trained by Richard Murphy, a valued CCHQ veteran, who is described as a ‘secret weapon’. The most curious new additions are the Gen Zers, who include Tucker Carlson’s nephew, Charles Carlson, and Jack Anderton, known as ‘the Matrix’. Katy and James joined the podcast

Freddy Gray

Chagos – the riviera of the Indian Ocean?

Keir Starmer seemed on unusually good form as he arrived in Washington last night. He cracked quite a good joke about the United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a charismatic statesman lurking behind the Prime Minister’s dreary exterior. We shall see. At any rate, assuming no bizarre media blow ups in the coming hours, the odds are that the Trump-Starmer meeting today will prove to be a success. Despite his reputation, Trump tends to like people, especially British PMs (he tried and failed with Theresa May) and reports are that he responded well to his long first telephone call with Sir Keir last month.

Steerpike

Mike Amesbury avoids prison after punching man

To the curious case of Mike Amesbury. The former Labour politician for Runcorn and Helsby was on Monday handed a 10-week prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to punching a man in the street. But after appealing the sentence at Chester Crown Court today, Amesbury will now avoid prison. During the ex-Labour man’s appeal hearing today, Judge Steven Everett imposed another 10-week prison sentence – but suspended it for two years. Instead of going to jail, Amesbury will be expected to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, undertake both a 12-month alcohol monitoring programme and an anger management course and do 20 days of rehabilitation work. Explaining his decision,

Kate Andrews

Can Starmer score an easy win with Trump on Ukraine?

Keir Stamer has landed in Washington, where he joins the succession of European leaders lining up to convince the President of the United States that he’s got it wrong on Ukraine. But will the Prime Minister be convincing? Starmer and Donald Trump will meet today at the White House, arriving just after 1pm EST (5pm GMT). The pair are set for talks, lunch, and a press conference, taking up several hours of the afternoon. The Prime Minister has arrived with some points to make about Ukraine – mainly the insistence that the US provides a ‘security guarantee’ for the country under siege – but he’s got some kind words to

Michael Simmons

The problem of Britain’s idle generation

The number of young people not doing anything with their lives has hit its highest level in 11 years. Figures released this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – so-called NEETs – show that the number has reached just under one million in the last three months of 2024. Standing at 987,000, the number of NEETs is up by 110,000 since the end of 2023 – equivalent to a town the size of Oldham. The new data means that nearly one in seven Britons aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. The figures are

Stephen Daisley

Palestinians blew their best chance for peace

Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’ Not as witty, I’ll grant you, but it gets closer to the psychology at play in this conflict. The Palestinians have been able to miss one opportunity after another because doing so has brought no lasting diplomatic consequences. The western liberal mind is a captive of the two-state solution ideology, a lethal idealism convinced

Henry Donovan

Russia is the big winner in Germany’s election

The real winners of Germany’s election are sitting in Moscow. Despite Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) technically claiming victory with a meagre 28 per cent showing, the truly remarkable surge belongs to the openly pro-Russian forces that now dominate the political landscape. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-left party Die Linke (successor to East Germany’s communist SED) have emerged from this record 85 per cent turnout election with unprecedented strength: both unapologetically aligned with Vladimir Putin’s interests and fundamentally opposed to Germany’s Western orientation. That this Russification of German politics coincides with the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels less like coincidence and more like

Steerpike

Ashworth rules himself out of Runcorn by-election

With Reform surging in the polls, no one in No. 10 wants a by-election anytime soon. But thanks to ‘Iron’ Mike Amesbury, such a contest now looms in Runcorn and Helsby. The ex-Labour MP was sentenced on Monday to ten weeks in prison, triggering a recall petition. Already Nigel Farage’s ‘People’s army’ is up in Cheshire collecting signatures, following the party’s second place finish here last July. So with a difficult race on their hands, who might Labour party managers turn to in their desperation? Perhaps Jon Ashworth, the former shadow cabinet mainstay cruelly turfed out in Leicester last year. Ashworth, who now works as Chief Executive of the Labour

Steerpike

Gary Lineker defends Gaza documentary pulled by the BBC

It’s a day ending in a ‘y’ which can only mean one thing – noted geopolitics expert Gary Lineker inflicting his opinions on the Middle East on the rest of us. Gary’s latest dip into the Arab-Israeli conflict comes after the BBC was forced to pull its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, from iPlayer while it performs a ‘due diligence’ check on the programme. This was prompted by the allegation that one of the programme’s child narrators was the son of a Hamas government minister. Since then, it has also been alleged that the programme mistranslated certain words used by its interviewees – changing the Arabic words for ‘Jew’ and

Georg Löfflmann

How to fix Germany’s broken army

On 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was a historic turning point, or Zeitenwende, for European security. Scholz promised to transform German foreign and defence policy, and substantially modernise and rearm Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr. A key element of the Zeitenwende was the creation of a €100 billion special fund for an immediate increase in defence spending, as well as the promise to meet Nato’s target of spending 2 per cent target of GDP on defence by 2024. Two years on, with the dawn of the second Trump administration, it seems that Zeitenwende was only the

Clifford Beal

Britain’s defences have been neglected for too long

Keir Starmer has now been shamed into increasing the defence budget to 2.5 percent by 2027, a welcome move but one that will barely touch the sides of the problem. With the Strategic Defence Review being released in a few months (maybe), hard choices will still have to be made on which capabilities to fund. They can’t all be supported, and reconstituting a depleted army and boosting munitions stockpiles will probably be the priority. But there’s another area that has been badly neglected for decades: air and missile defences at home. Being the first nation to be subjected to bombardment by ballistic and cruise missiles some 80 years ago, one

Christopher Snowdon

How to fight back against the nanny state

Have you ever noticed that there is no pressure group for people who want the government to leave them alone? On the face of it, this is strange because a lot of people want the government to leave them alone and there seems to be a pressure group for everything. There are organisations entirely devoted to agitating for political action against drinking, gambling, smoking, sugar consumption and even infant formula. And yet there are millions of people who use these products and would like to continue doing so without further interference from the government. Nanny state policies are popular with some people, including with a few people who use the

Colin Freeman

Ukraine wants its nuclear weapons back

Kyiv Had America and the Soviet Union ever fought the battle of Armageddon, it would have started from beneath a patch of muddy fields a few hours’ drive south of Kyiv. It’s here, in an underground base near the once-closed town of Pervomaisk, that Moscow housed 80 strategic nuclear missiles, all pointed at the US. Today it’s a museum, a dark tourism excursion, with a 120-foot long ‘Satan’ missile on display. Satan carried 10 warheads plus 40 decoys, and could have single-handedly flattened Britain. The only disappointment, for the Dr Strangeloves among us, is the base’s ‘nuclear button’ – not a red switch with a skull-and-crossbones, but a dull grey

Katy Balls and James Heale

Nigel’s gang: Reform’s plan for power

A year ago, Reform party aides found themselves in a cramped office in Victoria, London, bickering about chairs. ‘There weren’t enough seats to go around,’ recalls a staffer. These days there are no such issues. Leading in the polls and with five MPs in tow, Nigel Farage’s party has moved to Westminster’s Millbank Tower. This 1960s block peering over the Thames is where Tony Blair’s landslide victories were fought for and won; the new tenants are intent on dismantling most of his legacy as they plot a path to 10 Downing Street. Look at any opinion survey and Reform is hard to dismiss. Having won 14 per cent of the

Paul Goodman

The engagement vs isolation debate returns

British foreign policy has always oscillated between isolation and engagement. The division has shaped Conservative thinking over generations. The archetypal icon of engagement is Winston Churchill. In the wake of the Munich Agreement, Churchill made his greatest anti-appeasement appeal: ‘What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany.’ He was for rearmament and, ultimately, for war. Churchill had in his sights the isolationists of the right – those Tories who would not ‘die for Danzig’. Victory in the second world war, the western alliance, Nato, America’s nuclear guarantee, the European Union, communist collapse – all seemed to

Wednesday

26 Feb 2025

Michael Evans

Why Macron is offering France’s nukes to Europe

President Emmanuel Macron has raised the nuclear card. He has offered to provide nuclear cover for Europe as fears intensify that President Trump is moving further away from Nato and from America’s historic obligations towards European allies. The idea of France, the fourth largest nuclear weapons power in the world, extending its nuclear deterrence is not new. Macron is just one of many French presidents who have contemplated providing a European dimension to France’s force de frappe. However, today the context is dramatically different. For the first time in Nato’s history, the US sided with Russia and not its European allies when the Trump administration refused to condemn Moscow for the

Cindy Yu

Why is Kemi struggling at PMQs?

12 min listen

For the second week in a row, the leader of the opposition seemed to struggle at Prime Minister’s Questions, ending up accusing Keir Starmer of being ‘patronising’ after having a couple of her questions rebuffed. Cindy Yu talks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Graham Watts

Labour deserve credit for its Grenfell response

Angela Rayner’s lunchtime announcement to the House of Commons, giving details of the government’s response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report, was a week earlier than the Prime Minister’s commitment to respond to the Inquiry within six months of its publication on 4 September 2024. Frankly, it’s the only deadline that has been met in the sorry saga that has taken almost eight years to bring the Inquiry’s business to a conclusion. Sir Martin Moore-Bick made 58 recommendations, 37 of which were directed at government, with the remainder directed at other bodies and institutions. A dozen recommendations are aimed at one or other of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary

Lloyd Evans

We saw the real Keir Starmer at PMQs – and it was ugly

Strange atmosphere at PMQs. Our MPs seemed to believe that the Commons debate was a vital briefing session for Sir Keir Starmer as he prepares to meet President Trump in Washington. Everyone advised the PM how to handle himself. But it’s far too late. Sir Keir has already grovelled to his new master by pledging to buy bombs and bullets instead of spending cash on failed states overseas. Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, joked that Sir Keir had slashed the aid budget on her personal recommendation. ‘I’m glad he accepted my advice. It’s the fastest response I’ve ever had from the Prime Minister.’ Sir Keir answered with facetious gallantry. ‘I’m

Steerpike

From the archives: Rupert Lowe’s first fight for freedom

These days, it’s rare to find an MP who is consistent in his politics. So Mr S was delighted to discover on a trip to the archives that there is an exception to this usual rule. Rupert Lowe has served as the no-nonsense Honourable Member for Great Yarmouth since July 2024. Prior to his election as a Reform MP last year, Lowe was an MEP for the brief-lived Brexit party in 2019, which topped the European elections and toppled Theresa May. But, two decades before that, Farage and Lowe were candidates for rival Eurosceptic parties at the 1997 election: the former for Ukip, the latter for Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum party.