Politics Archives

Friday

20 Oct 2023

Losing Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire is a disaster for Sunak

What an epically horrible night for the Conservative part, one of the worst in the party’s long and storied history. Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, before yesterday the 57th and 98th safest Tory seats in the country respectively, fell to the Labour party. As if that weren’t enough, these by-elections also revealed that Rishi Sunak is in an even worse position than the current polls suggest – and the current polls suggest something approaching electoral apocalypse for the Prime Minister. The Lib Dems in Mid-Bedfordshire claim that they helped Labour win the seat yesterday. The theory they have posited is that, with their tireless campaigning in the more rural portions of the

Steerpike

Watch: Tamworth Tory loser storms off

Oh dear. It seems that not all have taken the by-elections results well. Tories everywhere are waking up to two of the worst defeats in the party’s history but others involved in the campaign have preferred not to stick around. Among them was Andrew Cooper, the defeated Conservative candidate in Tamworth. Moments after losing a safe seat with a majority of almost 20,000, Cooper left the hall, rather than stick around to hear the victory speech by Labour victor Sarah Edwards. By doing so, he eschewed his chance to thank those Tories who have toiled in his cause these past two months. In fairness to Cooper, it’s not exactly been

Katy Balls

The Kate Mosse Edition

35 min listen

Kate Mosse is an international best-selling author who’s sold millions of books, translated into 38 different languages. She describes herself as a feminist and has worked hard to champion other female authors by creating the Women’s Prize for Fiction and non fiction – now the UK’s most prestigious annual book award. Kate isn’t afraid to use her platform to address issues she feels strongly about. In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for services to women and literature. Born in West Sussex, my guest still lives there now, alongside her childhood sweetheart and they have two children.

Arash Azizi

Iran and Hamas didn’t always get on

In the days after Hamas’s attack on Israel last week, everyone wondered how much Iran knew beforehand. But a focus on the specifics of the 7 October operation misses the point. The attacks just wouldn’t have been possible without Iranian support. It doesn’t matter much if they directed them. A Hamas leader said Soleimani had given a delegation of his group $22 million in cash The kinship between Hamas and Iran began in the nineties. Hamas was founded in 1987 by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Islamist movement, and throughout the 1990s, as the conferences in Madrid and Oslo led to hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, with the

Katy Balls

Tories suffer double by-election defeat

Keir Starmer has reason to celebrate this morning after his party triumphed overnight in both the Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth by-elections. Both on paper are safe Tory seats that aren’t even on Labour’s target list. Despite this, Starmer’s party managed to overturn a Tory majority of 19,634 in Chris Pincher’s old seat, which was last Labour in 2010. In Mid-Bedfordshire – Nadine Dorries’ former seat – Labour won out in a three-way fight for the constituency that has been Tory since its creation. Overturning a Tory majority of 24,664, Labour won 13,872 votes to the Tories’ 12,680 and the Liberal Democrats’ 9,420. In both votes, the Tory candidate was close behind

Thursday

19 Oct 2023

Oscar Edmondson

Sunak tells Israel: ‘We want you to win’

14 min listen

Today Rishi Sunak joined Benjamin Netanyahu for a joint press conference in which he pledged support to Israel. Netanyahu thanked him for his, ‘strong statement of support’ and grounded Israel’s fight in the context of Britain’s own history. ‘You fought the Nazis 80 years ago,’ he said, ‘Hamas are the new Nazis’. Also on the podcast, the polls have opened for by elections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. What should we expect? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale. Produced by Oscar Edmondson. Photo credit: Simon Walker/No. 10 Downing Street

Christopher Sandford

The Queen’s sole mistake

It’s often been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II rarely if ever put a foot wrong during her 70-year reign. Trained from a young age to betray no sign of partiality, or even of individuality, she lived long enough to become the matriarchal figure at the centre of everyone’s favorite soap opera. In a world of change, she never wavered. Her death last year may have drawn a final line under the era we knew as ‘postwar’, where qualities like stoicism and self-effacement still just about prevailed in British life, and where nobody blamed, whined or emoted. But as the curious events of exactly 60 years ago prove, the

Steerpike

Labour’s new towns PR blunder

Ping! An email lands in Steerpike’s inbox. It’s a press release about Labour’s new homes pledge, touted with much fanfare in Liverpool last week. ‘Labour will jump start planning’ it declares, ‘to build 1.5 million homes and save the dream of homeownership.’ The ‘transformational package of reforms’ includes the ‘next generation of “new towns”, new communities with beautiful homes, green spaces, reliable transport links and bustling high streets.’ All very motherhood and apple pie. But according to an accompanying document, the new towns are not just about homeownership. Labour claim that their ‘next generation of new towns’ will be ‘attractive investment products, generating stable and diverse income streams; sales of

Ross Clark

The Treasury should stop paying attention to the OBR

A year ago Liz Truss’ brief government collapsed when markets lost confidence in Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. A large part of the problem, it was explained at the time, was that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – founded by George Osborne specifically to provide some independent backing for Budget measures – had not been invited to give its views. Isn’t the real problem that the OBR fails to make any allowance for political events? But how much use would a judgement by the OBR have been in any case? Let no one say that the organisation has no insight into its own failures. Today it has published a mea culpa on the

James Heale

Sunak tells Israel: ‘We want you to win’

Rishi Sunak is in Israel today for talks with the country’s leaders amid the ongoing conflict. The Prime Minister has just concluded a televised appearance with Benjamin Netanyahu, in which the Israeli Premier paid tribute to Sunak. He thanked him for his ‘strong statement of support’ and grounded Israel’s fight in the context of Britain’s own history. ‘You fought the Nazis 80 years ago,’ he said, ‘Hamas are the new Nazis.’ He framed the conflict as a fight between good and evil, modernity and barbarism, declaring that both Israel and the world were facing their ‘darkest hour’. On one side stand ‘the forces of progress and humanity’; on the other

Steerpike

‘WFH Whitehall’ still afflicting Foreign Office

The Foreign Office is often called the grandest of all Whitehall’s ministries – so it’s just a shame then that so few mandarins appear to enjoy it. New figures unearthed by Mr S show that less than half its staff were working in King Charles Street at the beginning of this month, despite much talk about getting ‘back to the office’. And even last week, as the Gaza crisis raged, numbers working in the HQ building rose to just 56 per cent of staff. Hardly ‘Action this day’… But one person who the Foreign Office was prepared to welcome was Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of the Chinese region of Xinjiang,

Steerpike

Biden struggles to speak aboard Air Force One

Is it ageist to suggest that an obviously frail 80-year-old might not be well suited to the task of resolving global conflicts? Even a man in his prime would struggle to fly from Washington to Israel, do a frantic day of talks, greet the suffering, make a speech and jet off again hours later to go back to leading the free world. Joe Biden is not, to put it mildly, a man in his prime. The octogenarian Commander-in-Chief just about got through his duties in the Holy Land. He delivered a passable, albeit platitudinous speech about dealing with the pain caused by terrorism. But then he reappeared in front of reporters

Lara Prendergast

New world disorder

38 min listen

On the podcast: In The Spectator’s cover piece Jonathan Spyer writes that as America’s role in international security diminishes history is moving Iran’s way, with political Islam now commanding much of the Middle East. He is joined by Ravi Agrawal, editor in chief of Foreign Policy and host of the FP Live podcast, to discuss whether America is still the world’s policeman. Also this week: In the magazine this week, The Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith speaks to Jacques Testard, publisher at Fitzcarraldo Editions, the indie publishing house which has just won its fourth nobel prize in under ten years. They have kindly allowed us to hear a section of their conversation in which they discuss the joy

Wednesday

18 Oct 2023

Lloyd Evans

Starmer channels Blair on Israel

The gears were grinding hard at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer shifted his party decisively away from its Corbynista past and pledged full support for Israel after the recent atrocities. He said he was ‘still mourning the terrorist attacks’. And having met relatives of British hostages held by Hamas, he was unequivocal. ‘Release them immediately.’ Sunak hid behind legal sophistries It’s a shame that his rhetoric felt so polished and poetic. Almost like song lyrics. ‘Too much blood, too much darkness,’ he crooned. ‘The lights are going out and innocent citizens are terrified they will die in the darkness, out of sight.’ And he indulged in a lot of glib verbal counterpoint.

Cindy Yu

Has inflation stuck?

12 min listen

September’s inflation data was released today, and showed that it was at the same level as August. Is inflation getting stuck a problem? Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls. Also on the podcast: Labour’s Israel headaches and a look ahead to tomorrow’s by-elections. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Euan McColm

Will Yousaf come to regret his council tax freeze?

After the SNP won its first Holyrood election in 2007, foolish council leaders across Scotland rushed to sign up to what then finance secretary John Swinney described as a ‘historic concordat’. In return for Swinney pulling back from his threat to centralise education, Scotland’s 32 local authorities agreed to uphold the nationalists’ promise to freeze council tax rates. Lots of councillors swanked about, bragging about this brilliant deal. Look at us, they said, we’ve got a ‘historic concordat’. It appears that Yousaf has announced a flagship policy that he is simply unable to cost. And then reality slapped them across their faces. Swinney had stitched them up good and proper.

Jonathan Spyer

Political Islam now commands the Middle East

No sane American president takes office hoping for war. Woodrow Wilson, a 56-year-old Princeton academic, said it would be ‘the irony of fate’ if his presidency came to be dominated by foreign affairs. He spoke in 1913. Joe Biden came to office in 2021 promising to end the ‘forever wars’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. But as he boarded Air Force One on Tuesday, another irony of fate was in evidence: the American-enforced world order is crumbling, and the results are now becoming clear. Iran, far from being neutered by US sanctions, was able to start a war using its Hamas proxies and their Hezbollah allies to attack Israel. At a

Danny Shaw

Which crimes no longer deserve prison?

More people are being jailed than the justice system can manage. There are only 557 places left across 120 prisons in England and Wales, while prisoner numbers are increasing by 100 to 200 every week. Justice Secretary Alex Chalk had some tough-sounding rhetoric on Monday to deal with the problem: lock up dangerous offenders and send foreign criminals back home. Yet it distracted – perhaps deliberately – from the most liberal penal policy reform announced by a government minister in decades: a legal ‘presumption’ against short sentences. Does the government want the message to go out that shoplifters won’t hear the clang of the prison gates? Incarceration is expensive: it

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s Middle East diplomacy is a wreck

Joe Biden prides himself on his decades of foreign-policy experience, his ability to talk tough yet be kind, and his talent for bringing opposing sides together. Touching down in Israel today, he gave Bibi Netanyahu a big hug – quite the gesture – and promptly told him he believed that ‘the other team’ – i.e. Hamas, not Israel – was responsible for the bomb that struck a hospital in Gaza last night, killing many of non-combatant Palestinians and inspiring another wave of anti-Israel protests. Biden will now set about trying to help release the hostages held by Hamas and persuading local powers to allow a secure flow of humanitarian aid

Katy Balls

The SNP’s reckoning is coming

The SNP party conference in Aberdeen this week wasn’t the nationalist jamboree activists had hoped for. Even though it was Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader, several of his MSPs stayed away and the main hall was half-empty most of the time. ‘The key word was “flat”,’ says one attendee. It was Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf’s predecessor, who attracted the most excitement, when she made a cameo appearance on Monday. The former first minister had to deny she was the ‘Liz Truss of the SNP’ – a reference to the former prime minister’s attempts to upstage Rishi Sunak. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her for the hubris,’ said one