Politics

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

Wednesday

9 Oct 2024

Rishi Sunak is the most effective opposition leader since Tony Blair

Rishi Sunak’s fleet-footed performance at Prime Minister’s Questions exposed many of Keir Starmer’s shortcomings as Prime Minister. Sunak is the most effective opposition leader since Tony Blair and he mauled Sir Keir today with a blend of decent gags and wily tactics. The Tory leader has the advantage of resembling a human being, while Sir Keir seems as cold and lifeless as an oil drum. Starmer has only three debating tactics. Blame the Tories, blame the Tories, blame the Tories. The Tory leader has the advantage of resembling a human being Sunak opened with a joke about Sue Gray in relation to Labour’s new deal for workers. When, he asked,

Katy Balls

James Cleverly knocked out of Tory leadership race in shock result

What is going on in the Tory leadership contest? On Tuesday evening, it looked as though James Cleverly was on the up. Following an impressive outing at Conservative party conference, the former foreign secretary had become the bookies’ favourite and in Tuesday’s knockout round secured the highest number of MP backers at 39 votes. However, in a move that has led to shock in the Tory party, he has just been knocked out of the race. In the final knock-out round of the contest, Cleverly only managed 37 votes to Kemi Badenoch on 42 votes and Robert Jenrick on 41. It’s worth noting that the vote is anonymous It means

Matthew Lynn

The break-up of Google is long overdue

It’s innovative, it generates huge wealth, and it offers great products for completely nothing. The lobbyists for Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will make plenty of familiar arguments about why the internet giant should be left intact. And yet, as the US Department of Justice pushes for it to be broken up, it is going to be hard to convince anyone it can carry on as it is. In reality, breaking up Google may be the best thing that has happened to the tech industry in years – and it is long overdue. It promises to be a long and bitter fight, and Google certainly has the resources to

Michael Evans

Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden are on a collision course

Benjamin Netanyahu is set on a path which brooks no deviation. He wants victory against Hamas, victory against Hezbollah and, ultimately, victory against Iran. Over the year since the 7 October massacre, Netanyahu has played the diplomatic game with the United States: receiving constant visits from American officials from the State Department and Pentagon, listening to entreaties by President Biden for limited military action and appeals to protect civilians, and making encouraging noises about ceasefires. When trust breaks down between two such important allies, the winners can only be Israel’s opponents However, all along, the Israeli leader has been relentless in focusing, and then expanding on, his principal objectives. He

Steerpike

Bookies back Badenoch in final two crunch

The countdown for the two Tory leadership finalists is on – and in just over an hour the Conservative party membership will know who their ultimate choice will be between. Tuesday’s knock-out round saw Tom Tugendhat drop back to a distant fourth place, with a ten-point gap separating him from his competitors. Staggeringly James Cleverly – who had not initially been viewed as a leadership frontrunner – cut in front of the rest, with the backing of 37 MPs. And now, as Katy Balls wrote this morning, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch are fighting it out in the race for second place. Yet despite Badenoch’s third position result yesterday, the bookmakers are

Andrew Tettenborn

Labour’s worrying creep back towards the EU

In Labour’s manifesto this year, Keir Starmer cannily sought to reassure any Brexiteers out there by ruling out a return to the EU single market. But, being a lawyer, he carefully inserted a small-print proviso. The Labour leader said that he did not rule out doing much the same thing by realigning Britain piecemeal with EU standards as opportunity presented itself. This process he has now started. As the eagle-eyed Lord Frost pointed out yesterday in the House of Lords, the government’s boring-sounding Product Regulation and Metrology Bill is something of a Trojan horse. While it generally covers product safety and weights and measures, a sneakily-inserted Clause 1(2) also expressly allows the government

David Shipley

Why are high-risk offenders set to be released early?

High-risk offenders could reportedly be released early from secure government-approved hostels. Shortly before before the election in July, the Ministry of Justice reduced the typical period people spend in an ‘Approved Premises’ from 12 weeks to eight. But what are Approved Premises, and does this matter? ‘Approved Premises’ – or ‘APs’ – are a little-known part of the justice system. We should be more aware of them, since they’re badly, badly damaged. They exist to house people who have been released from prison but are considered to be ‘high-risk ex-offenders’. APs are also used when prisoners approaching release are granted ‘home leave’, but either don’t have a home to go

Kate Andrews

Is Labour about to go on a borrowing spree?

At Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon, Rishi Sunak took a technical turn. Why is Rachel Reeves considering changing the fiscal rules, he asked the Prime Minister, when just last year she said doing so would be ‘tantamount to fiddling the figures.’ No clear answer followed. The wisdom during the general election was that borrowing more money – to finance Labour or Tory spending promises – was simply not an option. No one dared to propose anything resembling Liz Truss’s mini-budget saga, which saw her attempt to borrow £100 billion to limit energy price rises for consumers. Instead, the parties said they would make good on their spending promises by going

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer’s reset comes unstuck at PMQs

Keir Starmer’s reset isn’t going very well. He turned up at Prime Minister’s Questions today clearly hoping to talk about the vision he had for the country, but ended up doing something he always complained about others doing when he was in opposition: dodging the question. A planted question from a Labour backbencher allowed Starmer to kick off PMQs with some words about changing Britain: ‘We were elected to change the country, and that means getting the NHS back on its feet. The Chancellor will have much more to say about that in the budget, about fixing the foundations for our economy so we put money in people’s pockets, fix

James Snell

MI5 must stop Russia

The semi-regular speeches given by the heads of Britain’s intelligence services are always described as a ‘rare intervention’, and yesterday it was the turn of Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, to issue one of these periodic warnings about the safety of the nation. McCallum noted that although his favourite subjects (terrorism, Russia, Iran and China) have featured in prior ‘rare interventions’, some things have changed. The ‘shifts underneath present the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen’, he said. We are living in a more dangerous world and our enemies are working together. They share the same goal: bringing more murder and mayhem to Britain. We must not forget the spectre of Islamist terrorism

Steerpike

Watch: Sunak’s ‘fire and rehire’ Sue Gray jibe

It’s the first Prime Minister’s Questions since conference season and Labour’s recent woes have given the leader of the opposition a rather lot of material. An energetic Rishi Sunak was fast to mock Sir Keir Starmer over tensions in his top team – in a dig at Starmer’s swapping out of chief of staff Sue Gray for Labour election guru Morgan McSweeney at the weekend. ‘Mr Speaker,’ Sunak began, ‘tomorrow the government will publish their anticipated changes to employment law. Given the weekend’s events, when did the Prime Minister first become a convert to “fire and rehire”?’ Ouch. It’s a touchy subject for the PM, not least because Gray’s allies

Lionel Shriver

My friend, Amy Wax, the pariah

Spectator TV viewers may recall that in last week’s Americano podcast, Freddy Gray interviewed the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, whose wrist had just been smartly rapped by the administration for her unfashionable generalisations about race and sex. While Professor Wax spoke ably on her own behalf, Amy, as I know her, has been a friend of mine for several years. These scolding financial and reputational sanctions have been in the works for almost as long, so now seems an apt juncture at which to lay down my own marker. Unlike so many of her half-hearted defenders, I’ll put myself firmly in her corner without holding my nose.

Fiona Bruce

How I keep Question Time audiences under control

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love – or it’s supposed to be. William Penn, good Quaker that he was, wanted his city to be a place of religious and political tolerance; a haven for those who’d been persecuted for their beliefs. There are quotations inscribed on walls everywhere about the power of love, selflessness and charity. Given how vicious and divisive this presidential election is, the message seems lost on both parties. I flew out to Philly this week for a special Question Time episode, the first time the programme has been to the US since 2008. One of our panellists has had to pull out at the last

Steerpike

Cleverly slams Home Secretary over Taylor Swift’s special escort

Well, well well. The Labour lot are under the spotlight once again. It transpires, after the Sun newspaper’s splash this morning, that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper personally intervened to ensure that Taylor Swift received a police convoy to her Wembley shows. Priorities, priorities… Cooper has come under fire after reporting revealed that London’s Metropolitan police were pressed by politicians over Swift’s security measures. Three of the US singer-songwriter’s Vienna shows were cancelled this year after a suicide bomb attempt was foiled by forces – and it has been claimed that the American pop icon’s mother and manager was threatening to cut the singer’s London shows unless top level police support

Matthew Parris

The sugared-almond theory of economic consequence

Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language of politics. Doubtless we shall be encountering it (though never by name) in Rachel Reeves’s looming Budget. If you step away from levying the new taxes you must then cut the goodies they were to pay for But we’ll start at my mother’s knee. I was five, and she was teaching me reading: an activity I viewed with displeasure. I did, however, like sugar-coated almonds – very much. So Mum undertook to give me one sugar-coated almond for every chapter I read aloud to her from my First Reading Book.

Katy Balls

The battle between Badenoch and Jenrick

It’s crunch day in the Tory leadership contest. This afternoon, Tory MPs will vote in the final knock-out round of the contest. It means one of James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick will be eliminated and the final two will be voted on by the Conservative membership, with a result announced in early November. The result is due at 3.30 p.m. and it’s fair to say that few in the party are certain who will make the final two. After James Cleverly stormed ahead with 39 votes on Tuesday, his place looks likely, barring a big upset. Cleverly – who is viewed as being in the centre of the

Mark Galeotti

Why MI5 is so worried about Russia’s GRU

Ken McCallum, head of the Security Service (MI5), has warned of the serious threat to Britain posed by the Russian and Iranian intelligence agencies. McCallum said in a speech yesterday that the Russian GRU was on a mission to generate ‘sustained mayhem on British and European streets’, deploying ‘arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness’. That the GRU is being highlighted demonstrates both how the threat to the UK is evolving, but also the changes underway in Russia’s intelligence agencies. Officially, since 2010 the GRU has been known as the ‘GU’, but everyone from Putin down still uses the old name. The GU, or Main Directorate of

Ross Clark

Does Britain really want less immigration?

The economy shrinks quarter by quarter; whole streets of houses in northern towns are abandoned, schools start closing for want of pupils – but there is no shortage of jobs for those who want to work, and traffic on the M25 seems a bit easier. That is a vision of Britain without migration. The headline to the latest population estimates from the Office of National Statistics – which cover the year to the middle of 2023 – is that the number of people living in the United Kingdom swelled by what is a record for modern times. The population grew by 1 per cent, adding an extra 662,400 people –

Steerpike

Farage predicts Tory leadership finalists

Today’s the day that the nation finds out who the final two Conservative leadership candidates will be – after a vote by MPs this afternoon. On Tuesday, former security minister Tom Tugendhat was knocked out after receiving the backing of just 20 MPs, coming fourth place to Kemi Badenoch on 30 votes, Robert Jenrick on 31 and James Cleverly on a whopping 39. And finally the question on everyone’s lips has been answered: who does Nigel Farage reckon will be eliminated today? Speaking on GB News, the Reform UK leader set out his predictions for today’s highly-anticipated result – and couldn’t resist blasting the Tory ‘establishment’ in the process. ‘Who

Lloyd Evans

Reform’s new AI ad is dispiriting and strange

Digital modernity has reached the world of political campaigning. Reform’s new video is the first party political broadcast to use AI imagery and it opens as a movie trailer for a film entitled ‘Labour’s Britain.’ Swelling orchestral music and a growling voiceover introduce us to an X-rated horror show. The opening image depicts Gordon Brown flogging ingots to international traders at knockdown prices. ‘From the people that sold the gold,’ intones the voiceover, ‘we bring you Labour’s Britain.’ The trailer leads us through the three worst blunders of the new government. Robbing the elderly, surrendering to the unions and failing to stop the boats. The removal of the winter fuel