Politics

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

Tuesday

16 Jan 2024

Labour’s toothbrush classes for school kids? No thanks

Labour’s latest proposal for teachers to supervise pupils’ toothbrushing reveals a worrying view of parenting as playing a light-touch, rather than hands-on, role in a child’s upbringing. Only a week ago, the thoroughly sensible and appealing shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson MP delivered a speech that emphasised the need ‘for a two-way street’ in education: teachers and parents should collaborate to improve children’s outcomes and school attendance, which has reached crisis point. Yet within a day Sir Keir Starmer had come up with a proposal for teachers to oversee three to five year olds as they brush their teeth. Sir Keir as the tooth fairy is a comical image but one

Monday

15 Jan 2024

Katy Balls

Isaac Levido’s warning to the Tory party

Tory MPs start the week fretting about their seats after the Telegraph published an MRP poll suggesting Keir Starmer would win a majority of 120 if an election were held tomorrow. So, it was a case of interesting timing that the party’s official election strategist Isaac Levido was already scheduled to address Tory MPs on Monday night. Levido ran the 2019 election campaign and holds clout with Conservative MPs (when Liz Truss cut ties with the strategist during her premiership, it led to panic in parts of the party). Levido used the address to discuss that poll – playing down its significance as ‘just another poll, another MRP model, with

Isabel Hardman

Houthi attacks are nothing to do with Gaza, says Sunak

Rishi Sunak has updated MPs on the strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, just as a missile reportedly from the rebel group hit a US-owned cargo ship. The Prime Minister told the Commons that he had come to tell members at the first opportunity and that the action taken by the US and UK on Friday was ‘taken in self defence: it was limited, not escalatory’. He was very careful to emphasise that he was making himself accountable to parliament, but even more assiduous in knocking down any suggestion that this action was in any way linked to the war in Gaza. He said: We shouldn’t fall for their malign

Steerpike

Lee Anderson joins Rwanda rebellion

A tough week for Rishi Sunak just got even more difficult. For Lee Anderson, his own deputy party chairman, has tonight gone public to confirm that he will be voting for the rebel amendments on the Safety of Rwanda Bill on Tuesday. The red wall rottweiler took to Twitter/X after 24 hours of speculation about his intentions to confirm simply that: The Rwanda Bill. I have signed the Cash & Jenrick amendments. I will vote for them. These amendments seek to disapply international law from the Bill and curtail asylum seekers’ rights to appeal against flights to Kigali. Anderson was joined in his act of defiance shortly thereafter by fellow

James Heale

Is there a plot to oust Sunak?

15 min listen

Polling published in the Telegraph has ruffled more than a few feathers in Westminster today. The YouGov survey shows that the Tories are on course to lose half of their MPs – including eleven members of the cabinet – at the next election. Are the Tories heading for another 1997 moment? What should we read into the timing of the poll? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home. Produced by Oscar Edmondson. The Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts – including this one – as well as our YouTube channel Spectator

Angus Colwell

AI won’t be humanity’s ‘co-pilot’

One of the world’s most powerful men was trapped in a central London basement this morning. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, had come down to the lower ground floor of Chatham House to talk to the former chief mandarin of the Foreign Office about artificial intelligence. He had precisely 40 minutes, our host said, because he needed to catch a plane to Davos. ‘Thank you for choosing Chatham House for your London destination’, Nadella was told, in the same way that passengers are thanked for ‘choosing’ Ryanair to Dublin. Chatham House was the perfect stage: if you want somewhere to talk about the impact of things, how to harness

Patrick West

Why do the French struggle to speak English?

Why are the French so bad at learning foreign languages? Yes, you read that right. This isn’t a lament as to how the British are so terrible at learning foreign languages, a theme so beloved by stand-up comedians, who insinuate that it reflects our outdated superiority complex and ingrained xenophobia. I meant the French. For they, too, are terrible at learning foreign languages. Many people in France don’t even know how to say the most basic greeting in English, according to a report in the Times. In a study published by Preply, a language teaching platform, there are 14,800 searches on Google Translate every month for ‘bonjour’ in English, with a

Steerpike

Watch: Ed Davey heckled in parliament

This is Sir Ed Davey’s worst week in politics since last week – and it’s still only Monday. The Liberal Democrat leader is enduring a torrid time at present, amid continuing questions about his handling of the Horizon scandal when he was the postal affairs minister. This morning, the Daily Mail went heavy on profiling the ex-deputy postmistress who is seeking to unseat him in Kingston-upon-Thames at the next general election. Then just before lunch the Evening Standard dropped with a front-page splash that dubbed him ‘Sir Hypocrite’ – some nice night-time reading for Sir Ed’s London constituents perhaps. And now, this afternoon, the usual respectful silence which greets Davey’s

Lisa Haseldine

Are Germans turning against the AfD?

After months of steadily climbing in the polls, could this be the moment the bubble bursts for the right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people gathered in cities across the country to protest against the party and its ideology. Over 25,000 people congregated by the Brandenburg gate in Berlin on Sunday, holding placards with slogans such as ‘AfD is not the alternative’ and ‘Defend Democracy’. At least 7,000 turned out in the northern port city of Kiel, a further 5,000 protested in the south-western city of Saarbrücken, and in the city of Dresden just under 1,000 came out to protest. On Friday, 2,000

Ross Clark

Is Germany the sick man of Europe?

There must be a slight flaw in the IMF’s crystal ball, causing the future prospects for the German economy to be refracted onto Britain. Remember a year ago when the IMF confidently predicted that the UK economy would suffer the worst performance of any major industrial nation and contract by 0.6 per cent in 2023, worse even than Russia? The Remain lobby had a field day, presenting it as ‘evidence’ that our departure from the EU had put us in the international slow lane. It wouldn’t have been such a bad forecast, it turns out, had it been for Germany. The German economy, it has been announced today, shrank by

James Heale

Grant Shapps says world order ‘shaken to its core’

Grant Shapps this morning made his first major speech as Defence Secretary, in the wake of the US/UK airstrikes on Friday against the Houthis in Yemen. The headline announcement at Lancaster House was confirmation that the UK will send 20,000 troops to join one of Nato’s largest military drills since the Cold War, from Eastern Europe to the Arctic Circle. ‘Today our adversaries are busily rebuilding their barriers, old enemies are reanimated, battle lines are being redrawn, the tanks are literally on Ukraine’s lawn,’ warned Shapps as he outlined plans for Operation Steadfast Defender. ‘The foundations of the world order are being shaken to their core.’ Shapps said the airstrikes

Isabel Hardman

Is Starmer being slippery over the Yemen bombings?

Has Keir Starmer got himself into yet another pickle about what he really thinks? The Labour leader and his frontbenchers are having to defend a leadership contest pledge he made that he now appears to have junked. They’re obviously used to this, but the latest pledge is on whether parliament should get a vote before military action. It was the fourth of Starmer’s ten pledges back in 2020, which read: ‘No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.’ That legislation would mean

Matthew Lynn

What’s wrong with trillionaires?

Why is Oxfam so concerned about the coming possibility of the world’s first trillionaire? The charity has this week released a report with an apocalyptic warning that one is likely within the next decade. Yet surely people only get that rich by making something that people want. That should be celebrated instead of condemned. In a report published for the start of Davos, the annual event where very rich people gather at an expensive resort in Switzerland to worry about being rich, Oxfam said the world’s first trillionaire could come soon. Apparently, that showed we are entering a ‘decade of division’. ‘We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled

Freddy Gray

Trump looks unstoppable in Iowa

The bitterly cold conditions in Iowa today have at least given journalists something to talk about. There’s a distinct lack of political drama, given everyone expects today’s Republican caucuses to be a blowout win for Donald Trump. The main questions of interest are: will Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis finish second? And will Trump break Republican records and win more than 50 per cent of the vote? Given that polls suggest Trump voters are far more enthusiastic than the supporters of his rivals, the arctic temperatures may only give him a further advantage. The weather is also a handy metaphor for the frozen state of Republican politics: Haley and DeSantis’s

Patrick O’Flynn

The damning poll that could inspire Tories to move against Sunak

The debate about whether Rishi Sunak’s Tories are heading for a 1992-style against-the-odds narrow election win or a 1997-style landslide defeat is pretty much settled now: it’s the latter. A terrible few months for Sunak had been pointing that way in any case, but now a huge political data-dump has confirmed it. YouGov’s giant opinion survey and analysis, with a sample size of 14,000, published overnight in the Daily Telegraph estimates that the party is heading for 169 seats and that Labour will have a majority of around 120. But for the Tories there is much more scope on the downside than the upside as regards this finding. To reach

Steerpike

Tory MPs squabble over migrant housing

A new year has seen the resumption of Westminster’s favourite parlour game: endless Tory infighting over the Rwanda Bill. But ahead of Rishi Sunak’s flagship legislation to ‘stop the boats’ returning to the Commons tomorrow, some Tory MPs spent the weekend arguing over a similarly thorny issue: where to house the 50,000-odd asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK already. Unsurprisingly, with a tough election ahead of them, few Tories are keen on taking hundreds of migrants into their patch. The main WhatsApp group for Conservative MPs duly ignited on Sunday as various MPs made the case for why it should not be them. Caroline Johnson, who sits for

Jake Wallis Simons

Why the West should target Iran as well as the Houthis

Peace cannot always be won by peaceful means. This is a truth that is as tragic as it is perennial. When history forges an enemy that cannot be placated, the blind pursuit of ‘peace in our time’ only shores up an even more devastating conflict in the future. This lesson, learned so painfully by previous generations, has faded in the somnambulant years of postwar Britain. It is one that we are starting to remember. Today, the defence secretary Grant Shapps pledges 20,000 British personnel to take part in a major Nato exercise to prepare for a potential Russian invasion of Europe. His words are unvarnished. ‘We are in a new

Stephen Daisley

Could a 1997-style wipeout spell the end of the Tories?

There is not a crumb of comfort for the Conservatives in the YouGov poll splashed across the front of this morning’s Daily Telegraph. It forecasts that the Tories will lose 196 seats in the coming general election, a bigger slump than the party suffered in 1997, 1945 or 1929. This would represent the second-worst defeat in the party’s history, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer would be looking at a majority of around 120. The poll suggests election night, whenever it comes, will serve up a steady stream of Portillo moments, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and Leader of

Hardeep Singh

Why China benefits from the Maldives’ spat with India

Think of the Maldives and you’re likely to conjure up images of expensive honeymoons and golden beaches, but the archipelago is also the focus of an extraordinary spat with India. The Maldives’ high commissioner was summoned by the Indian government last week after three Maldivian deputy ministers published derogatory posts on X/ Twitter, labelling Indian prime minister Narendra Modi a ‘terrorist’, ‘clown’ and ‘puppet of Israel’. One message even compared India to cow dung. The fallout from this imbroglio has been swift. The trio were suspended and the posts have now been deleted. But India is furious: the hashtags #BoycottMaldives and #ExploreIndianIslands have been trending and there have been reports

Gavin Mortimer

Macron governs Paris but Le Pen rules France

There has never been a more Parisian government than the one selected by Emmanuel Macron last week. Ten of its 15 ministers come from the capital, despite the fact that the Greater Paris region represents 18 per cent of the population. New prime minister, Gabriel Attal, is a Parisian, the MP for a district in the south of the city. I was one of his constituents for a number of years; he did a decent job and, during political campaigning, I sometimes took a leaflet from one of his minions. They were all very much like Attal: same age, same breeding, same self-assurance. I’m no longer a Parisian. Last