Politics

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

Thursday

25 Jan 2024

Steerpike

Sturgeon’s foul-mouthed Boris-bashing revealed

If there’s one thing that both Covid Inquiries have reliably provided, it’s expletives. Use of foul-mouthed language was popular among Boris Johnson’s top team, but members of the Scottish government were prone to the odd swear word or ten. And today’s Covid hearing has revealed that some obscenities came from, um, none other than the Dear Leader herself. This morning’s hearing in Edinburgh heard from former Sturgeon aide and self-confessed close confidant of the former first minister, Liz Lloyd. Lloyd is unusual in the fact she did actually retain all her WhatsApp messages (and even handed them over to the inquiry ahead of time) – although she may now be wishing she

Arash Azizi

Airstrikes won’t stop the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks

It was less than two weeks ago that the US and UK introduced a new element to the multi-faceted conflict in the Middle East. On 12 January they carried out joint strikes against the Houthis, a militia that controls Yemen’s capital Sanaa and large parts of Yemeni territory and is recognised as the country’s government by its main backer, Iran. The UK and US strikes came in response to weeks of Houthi attacks on ships passing through the Red Sea. The militia claimed its attacks were in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza but in practice it was targeting any and all shipping in the area as well as US

Jawad Iqbal

Is Saudi Arabia softening its booze ban?

Saudi Arabia, an Islamic nation where drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden, is to get its first official liquor store. There’s just one catch: only foreign diplomats will be able to buy booze there. The store in the capital Riyadh’s Diplomatic Quarter will remain off-limits to Muslims and, needless to say, ordinary Saudis. For a handful of lucky diplomats, the shop’s opening will spell an end to having to import alcohol via a diplomatic pouch or sealed official package. Yet the purchase of their favourite tipple won’t be straightforward. They will need to apply for clearance through a mobile app administered by Saudi officials. There will also be strict limits on how much

Freddy Gray

Could Dean Phillips be President?

New Hampshire Joe Biden likes to say that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024. Yet Joe Biden was not on the ballot on Tuesday in New Hampshire. In his absence, a 55-year-old former congressman called Dean Phillips, who started his campaign just ten weeks ago, won 20 per cent of the vote. Biden still won easily as more than 65 per cent of Democratic voters wrote his name in. But the President’s ducking of New Hampshire, and Phillips’s sudden emergence, says a lot about the sorry state of Democratic politics and the gnawing fear that Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in November. Dean Phillips’s hair is

Katy Balls

Why Labour’s tax attacks on the Tories are working

This week tens of millions of workers will receive their pay slips for the month of January and with them a tax cut. National Insurance is going down, so take-home pay is rising. Polls show that voters think Labour is more likely to cut tax than the Tories, a surprise weapon for Starmer The NI tax cut is meant to signal a ‘gear shift’ – as the Prime Minister told this magazine last month – when it comes to taxation. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have hinted that more cuts may follow in the spring Budget. Will voters be grateful? In the past, the governing party has benefitted from pre-election

Fraser Nelson

McMafia: inside the SNP’s secret state

After years of scandal and intrigue, the Scottish National party has not lost its ability to shock. The UK Covid Inquiry has moved to Edinburgh for three weeks and in the process has exposed Nicola Sturgeon’s government to some robust scrutiny. The verbose, preening Hugo Keith has been replaced with Jamie Dawson, a more incisive KC. What he has uncovered has been a revelation. That Sturgeon deleted her WhatsApp messages is bad enough. The ability to learn from the decision-making process is vital, so for a senior minister to wipe records like these can be seen as a conspiracy against the public. But as we have learned this week, the

Wednesday

24 Jan 2024

Steerpike

Downing Street aide defects to the dark side

So, who is the Conservative Britain Alliance? Westminster is virtually swamped these days with an alphabet-spaghetti-esque collection of different acronyms, ranging from the CGG and CSG to the the NRG and ERG. But the CBA is both the newest and most secretive entity of them all, with little known about the Alliance, other than its name and tendency to commission polls that are unhelpful to No. 10. But tonight a little more light has been shed on the group. First, Sir Simon Clarke did an interview with the BBC in which he admitted that even he did not know who was behind the group. And now, the Alliance has unveiled

Steerpike

Simon Clarke breaks his silence

Well, that was quick. Less than 24 hours after Simon Clarke called for Rishi Sunak to resign and tweeted ‘I have no further comment to make’ he has, er, issued a further comment. The former Levelling Up Secretary broke cover tonight after taking a battering from colleagues over his call for the Prime Minister to go. In an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason, Clarke doubled down on his position but acknowledged that not all his colleagues would agree with him: I totally respect the strong views that something like this evokes. No-one likes the guy who’s shouting “‘”Iceberg!” but I suspect that people will be even less happy if

Lucy Dunn

The political motives behind the SNP’s Covid strategy

What motivated the Scottish government to take a more cautious approach to lockdown? Deviations from the UK government’s approach meant that those living north of the border often had to live with harsher restrictions compared to those in England, decisions that were widely assumed to be made on the basis of scientific advice. But now the Covid Inquiry has disclosed conversations that took place at the heart of government — and revealed how top academics were left confused by the SNP’s strategy. Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the inquiry on Wednesday that he ‘did not understand’ the Scottish government’s ‘very, very cautious’ pandemic strategy

Stephen Daisley

Replacing Sunak won’t rescue the Tories

Sir Simon Clarke’s call to replace Rishi Sunak leans heavily on Tory MPs being in denial about the scale of defeat that could be heading their way. He quotes Alan Clark on the ‘defence mechanism of the psyche’ that allowed Conservatives to disbelieve the landslide thumping forecast ahead of the 1997 election, even though ‘every single device for measuring popular opinion was pointing consistently in the same direction’. Sir Simon points out that Sunak trails Sir Keir Starmer in almost 500 constituencies and warns his colleagues that the price of failing to move against the prime minister will be far greater than the headlines that would come from yet another Tory regicide.

Isabel Hardman

Sunak dodges Tory revolt on council cash crisis

Rishi Sunak sidestepped another Tory rebellion this afternoon with the announcement of an extra £500 million in funding for councils in England. A group of more than 40 Conservative MPs had joined colleagues from other parties to warn of a crisis in local authority funding that was threatening even deeper cuts to services and council tax hikes in an election year. In a written ministerial statement, Michael Gove said this extra money, which is to cover rising costs in adult and children’s social care, was coming because ‘the government has also listened to the sector and to the issues raised by members of this house’. The Levelling Up Secretary wrote

Lloyd Evans

Has Rishi Sunak already given up?

Sir Keir’s spin doctors have been enjoying clips of Tony Blair’s performances as opposition leader. In the mid-1990s, Blair took aim at John Major with this, ‘I lead my party, he follows his.’ At today’s PMQs, Sir Keir tried the same judo-throw on Rishi Sunak. ‘I’ve changed my party. He’s bullied by his,’ he said. Less smooth, somehow. The session was dominated by facile insults and awkward name-calling. Sir Keir wants to depict Rishi as a pampered globalist who spent the 2008 financial crash in the banking sector, ‘making millions betting on the misery of working families.’ At the same time, noble Sir Keir was putting ‘terrorists and murderers’ in

Steerpike

Foreign Office blows £110k on KCL counter-terrorist courses

It was ten days ago that Mr S brought news of the latest controversy to embroil our ancient seats of learning, after a lecturer at a leading London university allegedly suggested Douglas Murray should be ‘suppressed’. Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, was subsequently forced to order a review into the Home Office’s use of external courses after it was claimed that the training sessions, put on by the security studies department of King’s College London (KCL), amounted to ‘indoctrination’. But now some diligent digging in the House of Lords has revealed just how much these courses have been costing the British taxpayer. Dean Godson, the Tory peer and director of

Mark Galeotti

Who shot down the plane carrying Ukrainian PoWs?

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war ready to be exchanged. Around 11 a.m. local time this morning an Il-76 transport aircraft crashed in a fireball near the Russian village of Yablonova in the Belgorod Region, some 35 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Everyone on board was killed. It appears that, perhaps alongside a military cargo, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs – if the claims of the Russian defence ministry are to be believed. As is always the case in this war, multiple and contradictory explanations

Oscar Edmondson

Does Simon Clarke’s intervention matter?

12 min listen

Tory MP Simon Clarke called for Rishi Sunak to resign last night. In a piece in the Telegraph, he wrote that the Prime Minister was ‘uninspiring’ and ‘does not get what Britain needs.’ Will other Conservative MPs also demand Sunak resign, or will they unify around their leader? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale.

Isabel Hardman

When will Starmer and Sunak get with the times at PMQs?

‘Another week with no ideas. Absolutely no ideas for this country and absolutely no plans.’ Either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could have hurled that insult across the chamber at Prime Minister’s Questions this week – or indeed any week. Once again, both leaders were arguing over who didn’t have a plan, with a few contemporaneous references thrown in here and there so that viewers tuning in could be confident they weren’t watching a re-run. Starmer made an early reference to the latest unrest in the Conservative party – unrest that’s currently almost more ludicrous than the overall situation, given Simon Clarke remains the only MP marching up the hill

Steerpike

Watch: Sunak slaps down Labour MP over Gaza

A feisty session of PMQs today. As speculation swirls around the future of the Tory leadership, Sir Keir Starmer sought to go for the jugular by channelling Tony Blair in the dying days of the Major government. ‘I’ve changed my party, he’s bullied by his’, he told the House to cheers. But Starmer’s efforts to present his party as cured from the effects of long Corbyn were somewhat hindered towards the end of the session when one of his own backbenchers rose to ask the Prime Minister a question. Labour MP Tahir Ali directed a verbal barrage at Sunak, accusing the Tory leader of having the blood of innocent people

Ross Clark

Hinkley C and the rising cost of net zero

Should we be bothered that Hinckley C nuclear power station has run even further over budget (the latest estimate is £35 billion, nearly twice that quoted when the project was given the go-ahead in 2016) and that its completion date has been put back yet further, to 2031? After all, the whole point of offering French energy giant EDF a guaranteed ‘strike price’ at the then juicy rate of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (at 2013 prices, rising with inflation) was supposed to be to transfer financial risk to EDF and its financial backers. ‘It is important to say that British consumers won’t pay a penny, with the increased costs met entirely

Rory Geoghegan

Why is the British Transport Police launching a bursary for British Africans?

Some of Britain’s police chiefs are in a total pickle when it comes to race, not least as a result of them rushing to embrace critical race theory and anti-racist ideology in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the United States in 2020. Whether actually captured, or simply pretending to be, they have committed policing to a political course that risks ending very badly. The latest development has seen a police force agreeing to fund a bursary for a law student, but only if they are ‘British African’. At a time when many of our public institutions are happy for you to identify however you like, something tells me

Isabel Hardman

Simon Clarke isn’t the only Tory MP unhappy with Sunak

Simon Clarke’s detonation last night didn’t come as a huge surprise. The Tory whips had already pre-briefed a group of MPs that the Daily Telegraph piece calling for Sunak to go was incoming, and asked them to get out and fight Clarke’s comments. For all the whips’ efforts, there are other Conservative MPs who are planning to join Clarke It also didn’t come as a huge surprise to the Tory MPs who are deeply unhappy with the way the party is being led. Many of them have been privately complaining for a long time that there is no clear plan from the Prime Minister. They have been left trying to