Politics

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

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Farage plots his next move against Badenoch

Nigel Farage has called on Kemi Badenoch to say sorry after the Conservative party leader accused him of inflating Reform membership numbers. ‘I am asking Kemi Badenoch to apologise immediately for this intemperate outburst,’ the Reform leader said. Badenoch has accused Farage of ‘fakery’ over the claim that Reform’s total membership overtook the Conservatives this week. ‘The Reform UK membership continues to rise rapidly,’ Farage said, ‘and we are delighted with the momentum. The accusations of fraud and dishonesty made against me yesterday were disgraceful, and we have opened up our systems to the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, Sky News and the FT in the interests of full transparency.’ In

Matthew Lynn

Will taxpayers get their satellite bailout money back?

When the British government spent £400 million on the satellite internet start-up OneWeb back in 2020, it was seen as precisely the kind of active, tech-led industrial strategy that could re-boot the British economy. There were hopes the deal would help secure a place for the UK at the heart of the emerging space economy. Then prime minister Boris Johnson saw it as a key part of launching ‘Galactic Britain’. But four years on, the taxpayer is on the hook for a £300 million paper loss after shares in OneWeb’s parent company sank to a record low. The money poured into OneWeb has proved to be remarkably poor value Even

David Shipley

Open prisons are the answer to our jail crisis

Britain should move thousands of inmates into low-security open prisons, according to David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who is chairing the government’s Sentencing Review. Gauke’s comments have sparked a predictably furious backlash, but he’s absolutely correct – and I should know. Locking someone up costs the public about £52,000 per prison place each year “We don’t make as much use of open prisons as we might do,” says Gauke, who thinks open prisons might be the answer to addressing the prison overcrowding crisis and reducing reoffending. The reality is that open prisons are one of the few parts of the justice system that work well. It makes sense to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Russians are feeling the pinch as Putin’s war rumbles on

The Russian Orthodox Church or state calendar doesn’t recognise 25 December as a special day: their Christmas is 7 January by their old calendar and, in any case, it is New Year’s Eve that is the real blow out. As households prepare the usual staples of Salad Olivier, Herring under a Fur Coat (smothered in mayonnaise), tangerines and champagne, it will be impossible for them to ignore a basic fact: everything is getting more expensive. Indeed, while the headline inflation rate is just under 10 per cent, the price of many basic foods have increased dramatically more. One Russian newspaper estimated that the price of a typical New Year’s Eve

Oscar Edmondson

Have we been too quick to judge Kemi Badenoch?

20 min listen

Kemi Badenoch is just over a month into her tenure as leader of the opposition, and already she has been criticised for her performances at PMQs and for failing to offer much in the way of policy proposals. It has been a consistent gripe of many of Badenoch’s detractors that she is a culture warrior or a one-trick pony. However, we might get a better idea of what the Conservatives will look like in the new year once her series of policy commissions get under way. So, how will she position her party? And, as countries around the world turn rightward, can she wrestle herself into conversations with Trump and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What was Badenoch hoping to achieve with her attack on Farage?

Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con. All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become “Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code

Ian Proud

Britain’s diplomats need language classes

Britain is increasingly seen as a bit-part player. That’s down both to our post-Brexit identity crisis and being gradually overtaken by emerging economies such as India and Brazil.  But it’s also because British diplomats don’t have the skills they need to advance Britain’s interests with purpose and credibility.  Take foreign languages. Almost three quarters of Britain’s ambassadors aren’t fluent in the language of the countries where they serve. In the Middle East, most diplomats don’t hit the expected standard in Arabic. In Moscow, one third can’t speak Russian and the picture is similar for Mandarin speakers across our vast diplomatic network in China.    Arabic, Russian and Chinese are the British government’s top priority

David Shipley

How can we stop football academy rejects ending up in prison?

‘The first team at Wormwood Scrubs is said to be better than QPR’s’. That line from Toby Young’s article from November has stuck with me. Could it be true? Are our jails full of talented footballers who didn’t quite make it? Are players regularly ‘spat out’ without any qualifications? Is there an academy-to-prison pipeline? One day, Brian was at a friend’s house when his dreams were shattered To find out, I spoke to some former academy players who had been to prison. ‘Brian’, who played for a London first division club’s academy in the mid-2000s, missed a lot of school to train. He’d leave classes at lunchtime on Wednesday for

Iain Macwhirter

My part in Twitter’s downfall

Two years ago, I was the victim of a peculiarly postmodern version of left-wing cancel culture. After joking on Twitter about the Tory government being a ‘coconut cabinet’, I was given the boot by the Herald, a newspaper where I had worked for 20 years. My downfall was swift. People I trusted turned on me ruthlessly. But I don’t think my tweet – whipped up by a handful of performative offence-takers – would have led to my cancellation had it happened in 2024. Why? Because Twitter/X has changed beyond all recognition. It no longer has a chokehold on political culture. Elon Musk has done the world a favour, even if the

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Most-read 2024: Can Meghan and Harry stoop any lower?

We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Julie Burchill’s article from December on Meghan and Harry. Looking back on the Queen’s 1992 ‘annus horribilis’, the events involved – though surprising at the time – seem almost staid now. The wife of her favourite son was photographed canoodling with an American. Her daughter divorced. Her daughter-in-law was the co-creator of a frank book about the sorrows of her marriage to the Queen’s eldest son, and to top it off, Windsor Castle burnt down. Three decades on, there’s a marked difference between the Queen’s awful year and that of her grandson, Prince Harry. The

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Gangster released early by Labour mocks Sir Keir in Christmas song

Not even the Christmas season can keep attention off Labour’s controversial policies for long. The furore around this year’s early prison releases is still haunting Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot – and those criminals let out early are doing nothing to reassure the public. As Steerpike revealed in October, Isaac Donkoh – a gang member and drill music artist also known as Young Dizz – was among those released under Labour’s new prisons policy. Yet despite the scheme being meant to exclude those convicted of serious violence from getting out ahead of time, Donkoh was still released despite the police chief on the case describing Donkoh’s crime – the kidnap

Steerpike Steerpike

Kemi accuses Farage of fiddling membership figures

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a family feud. Reform has spent this Boxing Day trumpeting its membership figures, which, it says, now outnumber the Conservatives. Nigel Farage’s party projected a ‘countdown clock’ onto CCHQ last night to mark the moment when Reform got its 131,670th member – thus beating the number who voted in the last Tory leadership contest. Talk about cheeky eh? But Kemi Badenoch is clearly not prepared to take Reform’s claims at face value. Five hours after Farage declared that the ‘youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world’, the Tory leader took to Twitter/X to fire back a

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The real significance of Reform’s membership milestone

Nigel Farage has received a late Christmas present. According to figures released by Reform, his party has overtaken the Conservatives on the number of party members. The Reform party say it now has over 132,000 members. While the Tories don’t provide regular updates on their membership numbers, the recent Conservative party leadership contest suggested they are on around 131,680. Announcing the news, Farage described it as a ‘big, historic moment,’ adding that, ‘The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition.’ Reform UK said they have today beaten the Tories in total membership. They now

William Moore William Moore

Best of 2024 with Dominic Sandbrook, Mary Beard and Harriet Harman

75 min listen

This week is a special episode of the podcast where we are looking back on some of our favourite pieces from the magazine over the past year and revisiting some of the conversations we had around them. First up: the Starmer supremacy Let’s start with undoubtedly the biggest news of the year: Starmer’s supermajority and the first Labour government in 14 years. In April, we spoke to Katy Balls and Harriet Harman about just what a supermajority could mean for Keir Starmer. Listening back, it’s an incredibly interesting discussion to revisit. The aim of Katy’s piece was to communicate the internal problems that could arise from such a sweeping victory

Wednesday

Druin Burch

Life and death on the hospital ward at Christmas

Most people shudder at the thought of working on Christmas Day. Not me. I’ve worked as a hospital doctor since 2000 and, most years, come 25 December, I’ll be doing the ward round. As a junior doctor, I didn’t have much choice about doing the Christmas Day shift. But since becoming a consultant, I have usually volunteered for Christmas, and am used to working when others are tucking into their turkey and opening their presents. How lonely must those souls be to regard staying on the wards as festive? I recall being bad tempered one early start, knowing I was missing my two young kids’ excitement, but otherwise the pattern

Janine di Giovanni

The plight facing Gaza’s Christians

On a steamy August morning in 2019, I went to Sunday mass in Gaza city’s Church of the Holy Family. It’s a simple stone building, built in 1974, and shares a compound with a school attended by 500 children, not all of them Catholic. Today, in war time, it is a refuge for hundreds of displaced Gazans whose homes have been destroyed since the Hamas-Israel war began.  As a Catholic who wrote a book about the Christians of the Middle East, and the danger they face of being eradicated, the mass was emotional for me. I have always been struck by the devotion Middle Eastern Christians, the most ancient of people,

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Gaffe-prone Labour spend £17,000 on media training

Well, well, well. It now transpires that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party has spent thousands of pounds on media training for its ministers since winning the July election – yet, despite this, senior politicians have still managed to make a series of rather embarrassing gaffes. Hardly money well spent, eh? Starmer’s army spent almost £17,000 on broadcast coaching, according to answers to parliamentary questions, with frontbenchers from three government departments getting help for their first few months in power. As reported by the Telegraph, Ministers in the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the Scotland Office received £9,700, £1,848 and £5,416 respectively to aid their media appearances. But despite the large

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Labour is out of its depth with electric cars

When Vauxhall announced the closure of its Luton plant a few weeks ago it seemed that the government had finally woken up to how the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate was killing off Britain’s car industry. We were promised a consultation on the rules – which demand that manufacturers ensure 22 per cent of cars they sell this year are pure electric, with fines of £15,000 for every petrol or diesel car sold over the limit. This morning we got it. Does it promise salvation for our remaining car factories? Sadly not. Where are all the booming car factories? The government is suggesting that manufacturers be allowed a little more

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Let’s hope Donald Trump doesn’t mess it up

There’s been a ‘vibe shift’. After the resounding victory at the recent US election, at long last things are changing, and heading towards some form of hope and sanity. This Christmas, there’s hope for the future on the right.  Is this December 2024 or December 2019? Because the current anticipation for the second Donald Trump term in America is very much reminding me of the similar aura of relief and positivity that followed Boris Johnson’s election win five years ago. And we all know how that turned out.  I can’t help feeling jealous of the Americans, because what are we stuck with? One of the few advantages of getting old

Adam LeBor

Giorgio Perlasca’s Christmas in wartime Budapest

Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle fire sounded nearby and the air was thick with the acrid stink of cordite. It was 24 December 1944 and Giorgio Perlasca was trying to get to the Spanish Legation villa to celebrate Christmas. The Hungarian soldiers at the checkpoint said it was not possible to proceed. The Russians were advancing and were now just a few hundred yards away. Perlasca explained that he was a Spanish diplomat and asked again to pass through. The soldiers reluctantly agreed. A few minutes later Perlasca was inside the Legation building. Sixty people