Politics Archives

Monday

4 Nov 2024

James Dyson isn’t helping farmers

If I were president of the National Farmers’ Union I know what my first task would be today: ring up Sir James Dyson and plead with him to keep his trap shut. It isn’t that Dyson, one of the few living Britons who has set up a manufacturing business of worldwide reputation, isn’t worth listening to on the economy and many other things. But when it comes to protecting the interests of family farms – which is the NFU’s prime interest after last week’s Budget – Dyson is the very last voice you should want to hear publicly supporting your case. Dyson is the last voice you should want to

Steerpike

Watch: Home Secretary flounders over small boats

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot are desperate to get the press and public talking about anything but the Budget this week – and so the issue of Channel crossings is where the Prime Minister is focusing his attention today. Yvette Cooper was quizzed on the airwaves this morning ahead of the PM’s speech to Interpol’s general assembly in Glasgow over Labour’s small boat plans – but the Home Secretary seemed a little uncomfortable on the specifics… Grilled on BBC Breakfast, Cooper was asked when Labour expects to see a drop in the number of migrants crossing the Channel. ‘We obviously want to make progress as far and as fast as

James Heale

Can Starmer stop the small boats?

It’s small boats week in government. Following last Wednesday’s Budget, No. 10 is turning its attention to the ceaseless flow of Channel crossings. Keir Starmer will use his speech at the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow today to set out Labour’s plans to – you’ve guessed it – ‘smash’ the criminal gangs. Starmer’s remarks are certainly timely. More than 5,000 people crossed the Channel in October, making it the busiest month of the year so far. In total, 31,094 people have crossed so far this year, up 16.5 per cent on the same point in 2023 but still down 22.1 per cent on the same point in 2022. Starmer is

Robin Ashenden

Is Kemi Badenoch the new Mrs Thatcher?

Prior to her election as Conservative Leader at the weekend, Kemi Badenoch was, on numerous occasions, compared to Margaret Thatcher. Simon Heffer, under the headline ‘No Tory has ever reminded me more of Mrs Thatcher than Mrs Badenoch,’ claimed that Kemi was ‘hard-minded, deeply principled, and has Mrs Thatcher’s vital grasp of what Rab Butler called “the art of the possible.”’ Tony Sewell spoke of her ‘Thatcher-like determination: “Because I believe this is right, I’m going to do it,” and said that today’s ‘biased and self-serving’ Civil Service was as much a dragon for her to slay as overweening Trade Union power had been for Mrs Thatcher in the eighties. Mark

Sam Leith

Do we care that the King is rich?

For the first time, the true extent of the property held by the King and the Prince of Wales’s private estates, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall has been revealed, according to a splashy Sunday Times investigation. There are 5,410 separate properties up and down the country paying millions of pounds annually in rents and fees and charges. The NHS pays to warehouse its ambulances, the Navy pays for the use of jetties, charities rent London office blocks, and money rolls in for everything from the training of troops on Dartmoor to the housing of prisoners in a jail on His Maj’s land. ‘Revealed,’ the headline hoots, ‘The property empires

Steerpike

Southport suspect: A timeline of what was said and when

Three months after the Southport attack in July, suspect Axel Rudakubana has been charged with two new fresh offences. With his trial set to go ahead in January, there has been much comment in Westminster as to when the authorities were first informed. To try and make sense of the case, Steerpike has laid out a timeline of events – from the day of the horrific attack up until the latest charges were announced. Monday 29 July: Around noon, reports emerged that a knifeman had entered a Southport dance class and attacked the children present. Tragically three young girls are killed, with others injured before Merseyside Police detain the attacker. The Prime

Steerpike

Michael Caine turns on Labour’s taxes

Taxes, thousands of ‘em! In her bid to alienate the bulk of the British electorate, it seems that Rachel Reeves can add another to her enemies’ list: film legend Sir Michael Caine. The Zulu star – a true working-class talent made good – used an interview this weekend to send a warning about the Budget changes unveiled on Wednesday. Caine, 91, famously left Britain in the late 1970s because of punitively high taxes under Jim Callaghan’s Labour government that peaked at 92 per cent. And he now warns about the same thing potentially happening again. Caine raised the spectre of multi-billion-pound tax rises being seen as a ‘punishment for success’, telling

Brendan O’Neill

Kemi Badenoch isn’t the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’

We need to talk about Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. Labour’s Dawn Butler retweeted tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’ Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader

Sunday

3 Nov 2024

Steerpike

What will Robert Jenrick do next?

Poor old Robert Jenrick. He has spent eleven gruelling months touring associations, existing on a diet of Ozempic and rubber-chicken, only to lose to Kemi Badenoch by a double-digit margin on Saturday. Badenoch may yet offer Jenrick a role in her shadow cabinet. But if she doesn’t – or if Jenrick politely declines any such offer – the question then becomes what will he do next? Prior to entering politics, one career that Jenrick did try his hand at was journalism. Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the Newark MP actually has something of a flair for words. A history student of St John’s College,

Steerpike

Will Dawn Butler lose the whip?

With his super-majority in the Commons, Keir Starmer isn’t afraid of losing the odd MP or two. Back in July he was was willing to remove the whip off seven of his colleagues after they had the effrontery to dare vote against lifting the two-child benefit cap. So the case of Dawn Butler – the gaffe-machine otherwise known as the Honourable Member for Brent East – offers a useful test case for how seriously Sir Keir takes matters of discipline. Butler yesterday shared a social media post accusing Kemi Badenoch of representing ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and suggesting her election amounted to a ‘victory for racism’. It also called the

Alexander Larman

Is King Charles’s honeymoon over?

Since King Charles became monarch in September 2022, after the death of Elizabeth II, he has received reasonably warm treatment from the press. It is easy to forget that, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, he was seen as an unpopular figure, lambasted by the Diana-supporting tabloids for being an adulterer (never mind his former wife’s behaviour; he, apparently should have known better) and criticised in the broadsheets for excessive intervention in the work of the government. The notorious ‘black spider’ memos revealed the-then Prince of Wales as an interventionist figure, keen (perhaps overly so) to have his opinions and thoughts taken very seriously at the highest level, despite

Joe Bedell-Brill

Partygate was overblown, says Kemi in first interviews as leader

Rachel Reeves: ‘I was wrong’ to say no major tax rises would be needed In her first big interviews since last week’s Budget announced tax rises of £40 billion, Rachel Reeves claimed this morning that she had been unaware of the extent of the ‘huge black hole’ in public finances before the election. On Sky News, Reeves told Trevor Phillips: ‘I was wrong… I didn’t know everything’. The Chancellor said the Conservatives had hidden the reality of the situation from the country, and that she’d had to put public finances back on a ‘firm trajectory’. Reeves: ‘We have wiped the slate clean… it’s now on us’ The Chancellor told Trevor

Kate Andrews

Rachel Reeves’s new gamble

Credit to Rachel Reeves: while some chancellors opt to take part in the Sunday shows ahead of a fiscal event, the Chancellor has decided to do the media round the Sunday after her first Budget. Rather than spending the entire interview refusing to say what will be announced in the week ahead (the information is considered to be market-sensitive), she is instead having to answer difficult questions about what she announced on Wednesday. It wasn’t an easy morning, as Labour’s Budget narrative continues to get tested to breaking point. Reeves was played a video on Sky News this morning of her comments back in June, when she said no tax increases would

Cindy Yu

Will China tell North Korea to pull out of Russia?

Throughout the Russian invasion, China has, for the most part, refused to be drawn into the conflict. It has not condemned Russia or asked Putin to pull back (except when the threat of nuclear warfare was on the table). But it has also acquiesced to western sanctions and refrained from giving Russia lethal aid. In the meantime, the invasion has allowed Beijing to pull Moscow closer to its own economic orbit and use Russia’s gas reserves to secure its own energy imports. All this has come as western military and economic resources are bogged down in Europe, depleting the same resources which might eventually be turned to containing China in

David Starkey

How Kemi Badenoch’s Tories can rebuild Britain

The Conservatives finally have a new leader. But Kemi Badenoch must be under no illusions: after the disastrous July election, we have a mountain to climb and a revolution to undo. But we can remain hopeful, because we have been here before – and found a way out. In 1974, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, having taken Britain into Europe, blown up the economy and been humiliated by the miners, was defeated by Labour’s Harold Wilson. The future of the Tory party was in doubt. Surveying the wreckage, Sir Keith Joseph, who had served in Heath’s cabinet, had a revelation: ‘I had thought I was a Conservative, but now

Gavin Mortimer

It’s rich of the French to call Trump ‘vulgar’

There has always been a touch of snobbery in the way the French elite regard American politics. The word one reads and hears most often in the mainstream media is ‘vulgarity’. This is particularly true of Donald Trump, who is abhorred as much by the right-wing press as by the left. ‘Trump, vulgarity on the loose,’ was the headline in a recent article in the centre-right Le Figaro. This snootiness is long-standing, but it became more acute two decades ago during the war in Iraq. France’s refusal – correct, as it turned out – to join George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ led to a torrent of abuse in Washington. The French

Niall Ferguson

Why Kemi was the right choice

A version of this article was originally published in last week’s issue of The Spectator. What set Margaret Thatcher apart from so many other Conservatives in the 1970s was that she had read Friedrich von Hayek. In Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable – his indispensable account of the intellectual origins of Thatcherism – he describes how Thatcher used to pull a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty out of her handbag, declaring, ‘This is what we believe.’ Charles Moore shows in his definitive biography just how widely Thatcher read in the period before she became prime minister. Karl Popper, Frédéric Bastiat, John Maynard Keynes, Edmund Burke, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Marshall, C.S.

Saturday

2 Nov 2024

Steerpike

Labour’s embarrassing Badenoch blunder

So Kemi Badenoch is the new leader of the opposition. How best should Labour respond? One person who has shown the perfect example of what not to do is Dawn Butler, the gaffe machine otherwise known as the Honourable Member for Brent East. Shortly before the result was announced she shared a post on Twitter/X accusing Kemi Badenoch of representing ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and suggesting it amounted to a ‘victory for racism.’ Work that one out. The post has subsequently been removed from Butler’s profile. So much for a new Dawn eh? Next up, it was the turn of Zarah Sultana – Coventry’s answer to Citizen Smith. The teenage Trotskyite declared that

Stephen Daisley

My unsolicited advice to Kemi Badenoch

If there are two things new leaders of political parties dread, it’s unsolicited advice and Scotland. The advice because, even when it’s helpful, and it’s mostly not, it underscores the sheer volume of work that lies head. Scotland because, in recent years at least, its politics have been so volatile and unpredictable that anyone stepping into it, especially an English politician, has done so only under duress. I intend to combine these two political headaches by offering Kemi Badenoch some advice on Scotland, but to make up for it my advice draws on the example of one of her political heroes. After Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership of the

William Atkinson

Badenoch must explain why the Tories deserve power

Kemi Badenoch’s victory was not overwhelming. Her margin of victory was smaller than of any of her Tory predecessors since the current leadership rules were introduced. With the support of 57 per cent of the membership and a third of MPs – similar proportions to what Liz Truss managed in 2022 – her immediate task will be to unite her querulous parliamentary party and reach out to her opponents. Her finishing cry – ‘It’s time to get down to business, it’s time to renew’ – is familiar from the campaign trail. The most immediate task is building a shadow cabinet. James Cleverly’s choice to go to the backbenches frees a space but