Politics Archives

Saturday

27 Jul 2024

Can Priti Patel become Tory leader?

Priti Patel has tonight entered the race to be the next Tory leader. The former home secretary sets out her pitch in the Daily Telegraph on why she is best placed to succeed Rishi Sunak. It is framed by the newspaper as being an appeal to the party’s grassroots, with Patel suggesting that she would give party members ‘a much greater voice’ in formulating policies. She writes that the ‘heroic grassroots of the party did ‘nothing wrong’ in this month’s election campaign but were let down by MPs who ‘fell out and fell short.’ Patel becomes the fifth candidate to say she is standing following James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Mel

Katy Balls

Who might replace Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary?

13 min listen

The rumour swirling around Westminster is that there will soon be a new Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant position. Politico reported that current Cab-Sec Simon Case is being advised to step down for health reasons at the end of the year, providing an opportunity for Keir Starmer to fill the position with his person. But who might that be? Who are the runners and riders to become one of the most powerful people in government? Katy Balls speaks to Henry Newman, former advisor to Boris Johnson and editor of the Whitehall Project substack. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Gareth Roberts

Has the Olympics opening ceremony finished yet?

The 2012 British opening ceremony has sadly become a shorthand for nostalgic Remainy twee. But la grande débâcle in Paris last night brought back with a jolt how magnificent it was. The creators of Paris’s opening ceremony were faced with a challenge: how to convey, in capsule form, the history and culture of France, a comparatively small nation that has provided such riches over the centuries – transcendent beauty, epoch-defining philosophy, a motor of artistic innovation and sophistication. They decided to go for something else entirely. A peculiar introduction to the BBC coverage from actor Tom Hiddleston was an early warning sign that something was askew. Hiddleston breathlessly told us, in that very specific

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson, Paola Romero, Stuart Jeffries, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, and Nicholas Farrell

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Damian Thompson argues that Papal succession plotting is a case of life mirroring art (1:26); Paola Romero reports on Venezuela’s mix of Evita and Thatcher, Maria Corina Machado, and her chances of bringing down Nicolas Maduro (11:39); reviewing Richard Overy’s book ‘Why war?’, Stuart Jeffries reflects that war has as long a future as it has a past (17:38); Ysenda Maxtone Graham provides her notes on party bags (24:30); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders on the challenges of familial split-loyalties when watching the football in Italy (27:25). Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Anthony Browne

What journalists don’t understand about being an MP

At the end of the last Parliament, I was the only MP who had previously been in the Lobby – the elite cartel of political journalists, who rejoice in having a parliamentary pass (I was once the chief political correspondent of the Times). I used to be in the Press Gallery looking down at the Chamber, but as an MP I was in the Chamber looking up at the Press Gallery. Famously, journalists have power without responsibility – you can shift national debates and kill off careers without having to worry about the consequences. As an MP, you have responsibility without power: you are held accountable for pretty much everything,

Jawad Iqbal

Team GB is a force to reckon with

Expectations are high for Team GB at the Paris Olympics. UK Sport, the Olympic funding agency, expects British athletes to win at least 50 medals and achieve a top-five finish in the overall table. That must count as the bare minimum and there is every chance that Britain could do even better than this. Why the confidence? Britain boasts 41 current World Champions across all the main Olympic disciplines. Paris is also the first games in a European time zone since the London 2012 Olympics, which helps with preparation and conditioning. Performing well at the Olympics is becoming routine: Team GB won 51 medals in the Beijing Games in 2008, followed by

Friday

26 Jul 2024

Isabel Hardman

What’s behind Wes Streeting’s quality care reforms?

One of the big themes of Keir Starmer’s government could well end up being accountability in the public sector, which sounds boring until you look at examples of where that is sorely lacking. Take the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the NHS regulator. Today, Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared it ‘not fit for purpose’ after an interim report found some hospitals had never received a rating, that others hadn’t been reinspected for up to ten years, and that some inspectors seemed to have even less experience of healthcare settings than the average member of the public. That included inspectors who had never been in a hospital before, and ‘an inspector of

Steerpike

Keir cracks the whip on his Starmtroopers

As the third week of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government comes to an end, there’s certainly been a lot of change in town. From the party’s tone shift on private jets to the Culture Secretary’s volte face on the culture wars, the Labour party has proven it still has a penchant for U-turns. And in Westminster more specifically, with a parliamentary party of over 400 members, Starmer’s army is rather concerned with a change in MP discipline too. Steerpike has spent the last few weeks speaking to political newbies about how they’re getting on – and there have been more than a few grumblings… Whipped into shape Seven MPs have already had the

Andrew Tettenborn

Does Labour care about free speech on campus?

Universities fought tooth and nail against plans to impose fines if they failed to uphold freedom of speech. That proposal – contained in last year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – was one of the few things the Tory government could point to as a success. But under Labour the plan has been shelved. It’s a good day for universities; a bad day for anyone who cares about free speech on campus. This bleak episode neatly sums up Labour’s attitude to higher education Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that the ministerial order, which was required to bring into force the relevant parts of the new law, would be delayed.

Niko Vorobyov

Could Kamala Harris end the war on weed?

Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ new hope for keeping Agent Orange out of the Oval Office. It’s probably for the best. Many younger, more progressive voters saw president Joe Biden as a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone era. Among other things, Biden was an old-school drug warrior who co-wrote the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which made the penalty for handling crack rocks a hundred times more severe than powder cocaine; the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill, which massively expanded the prison-industrial complex; and, in 2002, he proposed the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, which would have held party organisers liable for drugs consumed on their premises (this had the

Katy Balls

Labour’s ‘£20 billion black hole’ strategy

17 min listen

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to give a statement to Parliament on Monday outlining the state of public finances, including a ‘£20 billion black hole’. James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about the strategy behind this: will this speech lay the ground work for the Autumn budget? How new are these economic issues? And, with the Conservatives embarking on a long leadership election, will Labour have a free rein for their plans? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Ross Clark

How Labour plans to justify its tax hike

Oh, the suspense. It seems that we will have to wait until next week to discover the details of the £20 billion ‘black hole’ which chancellor Rachel Reeves has supposedly discovered in the public finances. Don’t get too excited, though. The revelation will be no greater a surprise than the ending of James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic (spoiler alert: a large ship hits an iceberg and sinks). As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out before the election and has done so again: the state of the UK government’s finances are not exactly a secret – they are already open to anyone who cares to examine them. You

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry will never win his war on the tabloids

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, according to the old adage; and so it stands that someone who you find generally objectionable can also, occasionally, be correct. Many people who would not count themselves fans of Prince Harry would find it hard not to sympathise with his ongoing campaign against more scurrilous elements of the tabloid press. As a new ITV documentary, Tabloids On Trial, suggests, the media’s actions amounted to a horrendous invasion of privacy for Harry and many others in the public eye over a period of years. Yet, as ever, it is considerably harder to sympathise with him than it is the other victims, purely

Steerpike

Joanna Cherry blasts SNP’s ‘culture of hate’

Another day, another drama – and this time it’s the SNP in the spotlight. Ex-Edinburgh MP Joanna Cherry has taken to the august pages of Scotland’s only pro-indy newspaper, the National, to urge her party to take a long hard look at itself after its electoral wipe-out this month. Though she has insisted she ‘intends to remain a member of the SNP’, Cherry has pulled no punches in her criticism of her colleagues. It’s quite the read… Blasting the ‘culture of hate’ that the party has ‘allowed to flourish…against those who dare to disagree’, Cherry has lamented the ‘”no debate” mantra’ coursing through the current iteration of the party. Going

Kate Andrews

There is nothing new about the £20bn ‘black hole’

Labour’s pro-growth reforms were fun while they lasted. Now here come the tax rises. That’s not quite how Rachel Reeves will convey the findings of the Treasury audit she plans to announce on Monday – but hikes are probably going to be the next step in filling in what the Chancellor will claim is a £20 billion hole in the public finances. This multi-billion pound ‘discovery’ is the latest addition to Labour’s narrative, which has been building since before the election. The party wants to claim that when it discovers what’s really been going on inside government, its fiscal decisions will become even more difficult – and this could include some

Gavin Mortimer

France descends into chaos on the Olympics’ opening day

France’s Olympics could not have got off to a worse start. Hundreds of thousands of train passengers have been left stranded after the country’s high-speed rail lines were targeted by a series of suspicious fires. Rail company SNCF says it’s a ‘massive attack aimed at paralysing the network’, with security services suggesting this morning that the far left may have been behind the attack. Whoever is to blame, one thing is clear: France’s president Emmanuel Macron will be furious. The world’s eyes are on Paris tonight as the opening ceremony gets underway. Macron wanted them to see France at its best; instead, they will see a country in chaos. The

Sam McPhail

Who are the Olympics for?

For the first time since its first race in 1903, the Tour de France didn’t finish in Paris this year. The world’s best cyclists, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, were banished to the south coast after a gruelling three-week race, received by a small crowd as they struggled into the Place Masséna in Nice. Their achievements were purposefully overshadowed by Emmanuel Macron’s political folly: the largest opening ceremony in the history of the Olympic Games. Macron has commandeered the Games as part of his unending mission to save France. He seeks political unity to ‘showcase the entire France’ at the Games but his left-wing opponents accuse him of hiding behind

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Olympic delusion

All the world’s a stage and the Olympic Games in Paris is the greatest stage of all for the comedian president. Emmanuel Macron declared a political truce amidst the political nervous breakdown of France, so that his show could go on. The opening ceremony spectacle last night culminated in Macron declaring the Games open and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. The president ordered Thomas Jolly, his personally selected director, to outdo London 2012. Off stage, France is in crisis. France doesn’t have a real government. There’s no calculus showing how one might even be possible in a fractured new National Assembly of more than a dozen factions who loathe each other. The left and

Thursday

25 Jul 2024

Steerpike

Ousted Reform candidate chases Farage for £8,500

Reform has managed to get 5 MPs elected, take 14 per cent of the vote share and outdo any other UK political party on campaign video views on Twitter – but it’s not all looking rosy for Nigel Farage right now. Before Farage decided he was going to stand in the election, Reform UK selected one Tony Mack to contest the Clacton-on-Sea seat. But Mack was quickly ousted when Nige chose to run – and it turns out he wasn’t all that happy about the decision. Mack has now handed Farage a staggering £8,500 bill which the former candidate claims is compensation he is due for his short-lived election campaign.

Ross Clark

Are we really experiencing more ‘extreme’ weather?

The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor Justin Rowlatt on the BBC website. As well as experiencing more really hot days, ‘its observations suggest there has been an increase in the number of really wet days too, such as the prolonged and heavy rain Storm Babet brought to wide areas of the country in October last year.’ He comments: ‘The UK’s shifting