Politics Archives

Thursday

9 Nov 2017

My plan for Europe

The European Union has languished and become enfeebled — and we are all to blame. There is a noticeable paucity of ideas and methods. The whole system has capitulated and is at a standstill. Summits bringing together heads of state and of government have become a parody: getting together behind closed doors, repeating lofty principles, changing a word or two in a statement so that it sounds slightly different from the last one. The system is cut off from the world and from real life. What did the Breton farmers I have met in the past few months think? They did not say that they were against Europe, or against

James Forsyth

Boris’s critics risk becoming Tehran’s unwitting helpers

Boris Johnson made a mistake when he said that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran. He and the Foreign Office should have moved to clear up the error far faster and far more comprehensively than they did. But some of Boris Johnson’s critics are risking turning themselves into Tehran’s unwitting helpers. Take, for example, Emily Thornberry’s letter to Boris Johnson saying that he should resign if Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sentence is extended. This proposal would, effectively, hand the Iranian regime a veto over who the British Foreign Secretary should be. All of us talking about this matter should also be aware of what Tehran is up to. They like

Ross Clark

It’s time for the Tories to admit rail privatisation has been a disaster

Buried in yesterday’s drama over Priti Patel was the news that train drivers represented by Aslef have voted to end their industrial action on Southern Rail by accepting a pay deal which will give them a 28.5 per cent rise over five years. It will take their basic pay – for a four day week – to £63,000. With overtime, some could find themselves dragged into Jeremy Corbyn’s supertax bracket, aimed at those earning more than £80,000. It won’t even mean the end of the misery on Southern Rail, because the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), which has also been striking, has not accepted a deal. Wasn’t this sort

James Forsyth

Penny Mordaunt’s promotion shows May’s limited room for manoeuvre

Penny Mordaunt is the new International Development Secretary. After last week’s very unexpected appointment of Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary, Theresa May has done what many observers expected her to do in appointing Mordaunt to replace Priti Patel. The choice of a female Brexiteer maintains the gender and Brexit balance of the Cabinet. Mordaunt has done two minister of state jobs already, she was until today minister for disabilities and before that minister for the armed forces. So, she had claim to be the next cab off the rank. Though, the fact that May is going for as close to a like-for-like replacement as possible is yet another reminder that

Fraser Nelson

The resignation letter blunder

We ran a Steerpike blog entitled “the resignation letter blunder” about how Theresa May put Priti Patel’s name underneath her signature. In fact, the blunder was ours. No10 was following protocol, where it’s normal to put the recipient’s name under the Prime Minister’s signature in such letters. We – and I – ought to have known better.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: May was right to ditch Patel – but she shouldn’t stop there

Another week, another Cabinet minister heads for the exit. Priti Patel’s departure means Theresa May now faces another difficult decision in choosing who should replace her. But was she right to get rid of Patel? The newspaper verdict is unanimous: ‘We like Priti Patel,’ says the Sun: ‘But she had to go’. After all, ‘fierce ambition’ is one thing – it’s quite another to hold ‘unauthorised meetings in Israel’ which show clearly her ‘over-confidence’ and also ‘no little naivety’. Priti is indeed a ‘loss to the Cabinet’, the paper says; she is a ‘working-class Thatcherite’ who, crucially for the Tory party, remains ‘in touch with ethnic minority voters’. But her

Brendan O’Neill

The political class has lost the plot

The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy theories being spouted by Ben Bradshaw and others — the David Ickes of polite society — which imply Putin is puppeteering the Western masses’ brains. It increasingly feels like we’re being governed not merely by fools and incompetents, but by nutters. Incompetence is the go-to explanation for the political class’s current malaise. And it’s a

Fraser Nelson

Salman’s Arabia

There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp. Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old, and his effective seizure of power means he defines the kingdom for a generation. He’s seen in Whitehall as a history maker, whose ruthless impatience might not only liberalise his country but create an alliance with Israel that could change the region. Minsters talk about MbS (as he’s known in Whitehall) with admiration and awe.

Rod Liddle

If you care about kids, give us all the facts

News programmes are as interesting, these days, for what they don’t tell you as for what they do. So, the ten o’clock news on the BBC on Monday night reported the horrible murder of 18-month-old Elsie Scully-Hicks by her adoptive father, without mentioning that the baby had been adopted by a gay couple. There was a fleeting reference to the murderer, Matthew Scully-Hicks, having a husband, which kind of gave the game away. But otherwise it was something the BBC would rather we did not know, and certainly did not dwell on. Whenever they do something like this, I think it’s important to dwell on it for a bit. There

James Forsyth

Why can’t the PM get a grip?

How much longer can things go on like this? That is the question on the lips of Tory ministers and MPs this week. A government that was already facing the monumental challenge of Brexit now finds itself dealing with a scandal that has claimed one cabinet scalp and led to another Conservative MP being referred to the police. At the same time, Priti Patel has been running her own freelance foreign policy. To make matters worse, the Prime Minister’s closest political ally is caught up in the Westminster scandal. Damian Green is under investigation by the Cabinet Office for his personal conduct. If he has to go —and several of

Matthew Parris

The sex scandal is what psychologists call ‘displacement activity’

There are three reasons why Britain’s political and media world finds itself in the present ludicrous uproar over sexual misbehaviour at Westminster, and only one of them has anything to do with sexual misbehaviour. But let us start with that. And, first, a caveat. Can there be an organisation anywhere in discovered space which, subjected to the intense media scrutiny that the House of Commons now attracts, would not generate a comparable stock of report and rumour? Imagine a workplace — indeed imagine a workplace like our own august Spectator offices – peopled by a lively mixture of creatives, eccentrics, wannabes, rascals, saints, absolute bricks, total pricks and drones. Now

Wednesday

8 Nov 2017

Tom Goodenough

Priti Patel resigns from the Cabinet

Priti Patel has resigned from the Cabinet. Patel said that she accepted her decision to hold meetings with Israeli officials during her summer holiday without the prior say so of the government meant that her ‘actions fell below the high standards that are expected of a secretary of state’. The secretary of state for international development went on to ‘offer a fulsome apology’ to the Prime Minister. Theresa May responded by saying ‘now that further details have come to light’ about exactly what Patel got up to on her summer jaunt, ‘it is right that you have decided to resign’. Her resignation tonight is not much of a surprise. Westminster has spent

James Forsyth

Who might replace Priti Patel in a reshuffle?

Priti Patel is currently on her way to Downing Street, where she is expected to be fired by Theresa May. The early signs are that Number 10 is looking for a Leaver to replace her as International Development Secretary, to preserve the Cabinet’s Brexit balance. But this would be the wrong way to think about the reshuffle. Trying to replace Patel with someone who matches her profile as closely as possible would just be another advertisement of how weak May’s position is. In parliamentary terms, though, May is, obviously, in a weak position, Getting a clean EU withdrawal bill will be very difficult. (Indeed, the position of the Scottish Tories

Isabel Hardman

Focus in Priti Patel row switches to what Downing Street really knew

Priti Patel is on her way back to Britain to face the music following her strange holiday-cum-lobbying operation in Israel. Yesterday it emerged that the International Development Secretary had not told Number 10 that she had suggested giving humanitarian aid to the Israeli army in the Golan Heights. It has been so heavily briefed that she is expected to be sacked that there is little chance that the minister will get away with just another reminder of her responsibilities. But there’s an awkward extra element for Number 10 this morning, which is the claim reported in the Jewish Chronicle that the British government did in fact know about Patel’s meeting

David Butterfield

Gordon Brown still hasn’t learned his lesson from Bigotgate

As Gordon Brown’s new memoir, My Life, Our Times, sends mild ripples across the political play pool, the rest of the country tends to its own business. But there’s an episode from Brown’s turbulent spell as Prime Minister that merits revisiting: ‘Bigotgate’. Not only was it the moment that perhaps secured Labour’s dramatic fall from power but Brown’s finessing of what happened has worrying signs for politicians’ private frankness. You remember it well: while pressing the flesh in Rochdale as part of the 2010 election campaign, Brown found himself in conversation with a lifelong Labour voter. For a savvy politician, this was a golden opportunity to play the crowd and

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Priti Patel and Boris should go

Priti Patel could well follow Michael Fallon in making a departure from the Cabinet today. If she does leave, she’ll be the second minister to go in the space of only a week. So, is this bad luck on the part of the government? Not so, says the FT. The paper says this is a ‘symptom of a deeper malaise’ and ‘two domestic incidents have highlighted the sense of drift’ at the heart of the government. Boris Johnson’s blunder in suggesting an imprisoned British-Iranian citizen was ‘teaching people journalism’ is typical of his ‘blasé attitude’. The FT goes further though, saying that Boris ‘may be the least distinguished figure to

Tuesday

7 Nov 2017

George Davies

After his Iran blunder, Boris must learn that careless talk can cost lives

Boris Johnson’s Iran blunder is a case of diplomatic friendly fire – accidental but devastating. The facts are clear enough. By clumsily misspeaking at a select committee hearing last week, the foreign secretary may have worsened the fate of a British citizen – an innocent young mother – who is locked up in Tehran on spurious charges. It’s not quite a resigning matter, but boy does it come close. Certainly it suggests a lazy and arrogant approach to detail. Here’s what he said: Obviously, we will have to be very careful about this, because we want them to be released. I have raised this case many times now with Javad Zarif,

Isabel Hardman

Welcome to Messminster, where ministers can get away with whatever they fancy

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’. He repeated the point about clarity being the

Isabel Hardman

MPs tear into Boris Johnson for Iran blunder

Boris Johnson mysteriously decided to update the House of Commons on the fight against Islamic State today, even though everyone else was talking about another aspect of the Foreign Secretary’s job. He decided to include the row over his comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in this statement, presumably to take some of the heat out of the row. His other tactic in trying to reduce the row further was to accuse anyone who attacked him for his blunder in which he told the Foreign Affairs Committee last week that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalism of playing party politics. On the opposite benches, it wasn’t just Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry who mooted

Ross Clark

Has Brexit really made us all happier?

Apparently we’re all getting a little happier – if a little more anxious. The government’s official happiness index shows that we rate our overall life satisfaction at an average of 7.7 out of 10. We think our lives are 7.9 out of 10 worthwhile. We rate our happiness yesterday at 7.5 out of 10 and our anxiety rating at 2.9 out of 10 – a slight rise on early 2015 when national anxiety reached a low but still much less than when the index started in 2011. Does it mean anything though? The Guardian seems to think so, publishing a story today which appears to hint that people in England are