Politics

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

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Rishi whirs like a supercomputer

‘Hold your nerve.’ Rishi’s ill-judged advice to voters last Sunday was perhaps his worst blunder yet. At PMQs it came up half a dozen times. Sir Keir Starmer made the first attempt but he was too verbose to inflict real damage. ‘Rather than lecturing others on holding their nerve why not locate his?’ He exposed Rishi’s confused housing policy and asked if any credible expert believes that the government will reach its house-building target this year. Rishi wriggled deftly and chucked out a few helpful statistics. ‘More homes are meeting our “decent homes” standard, the housing supply is up 10 per cent… and first-time buyers are at a 20-year high.’

Steerpike Steerpike

Lords watchdog refused to back five nominees

It’s been a difficult few years for Paul Bew, chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC). Bew picked up his own peerage in 2007, but since being appointed chair of Holac in 2018, he has been busy fighting off the claims of others put forward for a peerage. There was the Lord Lebedev farrago back in 2020 and more recently the row over Boris Johnson’s resignation honours’ list. The names who got on to the latter list caused enough of a scandal: one wonders who didn’t make it that far. For Mr S has now obtained a Freedom of Information response from Holac which shows that almost one in

Robin Ashenden

Rostov returns to reality after Wagner’s botched coup

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, it always seemed likely that the war would come back to Rostov-on-Don, the city which until then had been my home. Rostov isn’t just close to the border but feels it. Most of my university students were from the Donetsk and Lugansk, refugees from the 2014-2022 war. It’s the military hub of southern Russia, the first major city you come to from the Donbass. It felt like a sitting invitation. It was also somewhere I knew intimately and had been part of my life since my half-Russian daughter’s birth a decade ago. I took to Rostov-on-Don with an outsider’s greed for all four

The Spectator

Parents have a right to know what’s in sex education classes

Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials whichare being used in their children’s sex education classes. The Bill is necessary because the Conservative government has allowed sex education in many schools to be taken over by campaign groups with a radical agenda who wish to persuade children that it is wrong to think in a ‘heteronormative’ way. The government has let down a generation of children in allowing ideologues to infiltrate lessons The scandals that have recently surrounded schools reveal the scale and severity

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What reshuffle season has in store

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have something in common: both men are under pressure to reshuffle their front benches and pick a final pre-election team. ‘The agitating tends to be done by those who want jobs, rather than those who have them,’ sighs one member of the Labour leader’s team. But with an election due next year – whether it’s in the spring or autumn – Sunak and Starmer know they have one last chance to refresh their front benches before going to the polls. Sunak’s mission is to refresh a tired, squabbling party to make it look like a new government A pre-election reshuffle isn’t just about managing teams

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sunak and Starmer clash on housing

Rishi Sunak used today’s Prime Minister’s Questions largely as an opportunity to attack the Labour party, and specifically Keir Starmer’s policy U-turns. This is fertile territory given there have been so many, even if the Labour leader is now adopting better positions than ones he naively took earlier on in his tenure. It does also show that the Prime Minister doesn’t feel he has a great deal to boast about when it comes to his own government achievements. Starmer invited these attacks by making his first question about Tory frontbench confusion over housebuilding. He said: ‘His party spent thousands of pounds on adverts attacking plans to build 300,000 new homes

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: More mortgage pain, 999 goes down and a race to kill rats

Home Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, encouraged banks to enter a voluntary agreement for stretched mortgagors to pay only the interest on their loans for six months, after the Bank of England raised interest rates to a 15-year high of 5 per cent. HSBC, with employees continuing to work from home, is to move its world headquarters from its 45-storey tower in Canary Wharf by 2027. Boots is to close 300 of its 2,200 chemists’ shops in the coming year. To cut its debts, Cineworld, the world’s second-largest cinema chain (also owning Picturehouse cinemas in Britain), is to apply for administration. The government said it would cost £169,000

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Jonny Bairstow shows how to deal with Just Stop Oil

Give Jonny Bairstow a knighthood. Whatever else happens at the Ashes, or indeed throughout the rest of his cricketing career, the England wicketkeeper has already earned his place in history, with his quick-thinking response to a Just Stop Oil activist who tried – and failed – to disrupt play at Lord’s this morning. Immediately after the first over, two members of the eco-extremist troupe ran on to the outfield, wielding their trademark orange paint. Bairstow intercepted one of them, picking him up and carrying him all the way to the boundary, with all the calm and nonchalance of a man returning a stepladder to the shed. England captain Ben Stokes

Jawad Iqbal

Nato’s leadership race is a miserable advert for the alliance

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has conceded defeat in his bid to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of Nato. Wallace had been a strong contender for the job, owing to his role in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. But now it seems the role will go to a character in the mould of the incumbent, a compromise candidate who least offends the countries doing the choosing. The role is simply too big and important to be left to this kind of petty box-ticking and political horse trading. Wallace appeared to suggest, in an interview with the Economist, that he faced opposition to his candidacy from America and France. The next

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The unspeakable truth about housing

Earlier this year I was a panellist for Any Questions, and a young man in the audience asked what could possibly be done to make it easier for Britons his age to buy currently unaffordable property. I said what none of my fellow panellists was foolish enough to venture on the radio: scarcity always raises prices, and the UK’s housing shortage is overwhelmingly caused by high rates of immigration. Reduce newcomers, ease the problem. I’ve appeared in enough public forums to read the room. A sudden pin-drop silence followed by murmurous resettling in chairs conveyed shock, then palpable unease. Clearly I had just broken a fierce social taboo. Once upon

Steerpike Steerpike

Newsnight’s bizarre NHS ‘birthday’ tribute

It’s the 75th anniversary of the creation of the National Health Service next week, which can only mean one thing: mass, ostentatious displays of affection for a creaking arm of the British state. Still, even Mr Steerpike was taken aback by how quickly our state broadcaster descended into bizarre jingoistic tub-thumping for ‘our’ NHS ahead of the anniversary. Last night the makers of Newsnight decided to capture the spirit of North Korea when they commissioned a children’s choir to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the ailing health service on air. The Cambridge Children’s Hospital Choir did a lovely job of course, but was it really necessary for the Beeb to go

Tuesday

Lucy Dunn

Why doctors voted to strike – and nurses didn’t

As the crisis in the NHS continues, patients may be glad to hear the nurses’ strike is over. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has been forced to end its industrial action today after nurses failed to back a vote for more walkouts. But within hours of that announcement, any hope that the NHS might be returning to business as normal fell flat: consultants, the most senior doctors in the service, voted to strike – 86 per cent are in favour, on a turnout of 71 per cent. And while nurses won’t be walking out, many join doctors in remaining unhappy about the pay and working conditions within the health

Winston Marshall

Lee Fang: Forced to apologise for reporting on BLM

59 min listen

Lee Fang is an independent journalist formally at the Intercept. He discusses his forced apology for how he covered the 2020 BLM protests, how and why media and journalists collude as part of the censorship industrial complex, what he discovered during the Twitter Files investigations and FBI surveillance.

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

What happened at Hancock’s Covid grilling?

17 min listen

Matt Hancock gave evidence at the Covid inquiry today. The former health secretary said that ‘the doctrine was wrong’, care home preparation was ‘terrible’ and improper planning was an ‘absolute tragedy’. But why was it accepted that harsher lockdowns would’ve helped?  Max Jeffery speaks to Isabel Oakeshott and Fraser Nelson. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Steerpike Steerpike

Daniel Korski flails under questioning about groping

The questions aren’t going away for Tory mayoral candidate Daniel Korski. The self-proclaimed tech entrepreneur is having a tough time answering questions about claims that he grabbed the breast of a woman when he was working in No. 10 under David Cameron. In a bid to clear the air, Korski – who denies the allegation – has today done an interview with TalkTV. The former war reporter claims that: I didn’t do what’s been alleged. I absolutely didn’t do that. Ten years ago, when it happened, nothing was said to me. Seven years ago, when this first came out, nobody alleged anything to me. I just didn’t do what’s being

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Can big tobacco ever be a force for good? An interview with PMI’s CEO Jacek Olczak

Philip Morris International is one of the world’s most interesting and controversial companies. Recently, they announced their vision to exit the business of making cigarettes and enter what they describe as a ‘smoke-free world’. But what pace are they moving at? And what are the risks involved? Jacek Olczak the chief executive of Philip Morris International joins The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson to discuss what a smoke-free future might look like; the risks and rewards to cigarette alternatives; and why he believes big tobacco can be a force for good. 

Sasha Lensky

Why Wagner’s coup failed

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, the overall mood among those around me – Russians from a range of ages and social groups – was one of scarcely believable elation, even hope. ‘Judging from the news this morning,’ one man said to me that day, ‘the borders of the Russian Empire will soon be moving westwards.’ I didn’t share his enthusiasm. ‘In two years’ time, we’ll be lucky if there’s a Russian Empire at all,’ I replied. Last Saturday, as Prigozhin and his Wagner group set out on their abortive coup, the picture was reversed: for the first time in 18 months, I felt a limited optimism about

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Has Matt Hancock just had a good idea?

Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry was some of the most explosive we’ve seen so far. It was largely damaging to anyone who wasn’t Matt Hancock, naturally, but the former health secretary did induce some rather big cringes from all present when his voice cracked as he said ‘I’m not very good at talking about my emotions’. He also apologised to all those who had lost loved ones. Hancock did offer some important insights into the mistakes made at crucial moments in the run-up to the pandemic. He also backed the idea of a resilience minister who can work on planning rather than being distracted by the many other

Austin Williams

When will the Tories get a grip on the post-Grenfell construction chaos?

It’s been more than six years since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and made many more homeless, yet the survivors – and families of those who died – are still waiting for answers. The Grenfell Inquiry, which launched a few months after the disaster, was meant to hold people to account, to question the management and design of high-rise buildings and to rebuild trust. Yet the only tangible results so far seem to have been the £70 million paid to an army of lawyers. The Inquiry has been labelled a ‘never-ending circus’ by the British-Nigerian novelist, Jendella Benson. It’s a description that is hard to disagree with. And while the

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How Humza Yousaf could take advantage of Labour

The campaign for Scottish independence is at an impasse. Humza Yousaf used the SNP’s conference in Dundee to set out his party’s latest strategy for achieving statehood for Scotland. That strategy isn’t all that different from what the party faithful has heard before: keep winning elections, keep up the pressure on Westminster, and sooner or later something will happen.  The problem with this tartan Micawberism is that something has been going to happen for rather a long time. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of events that were supposed to shift the dial on independence: the SNP’s commanding wins in the 2015 and 2019 general elections; its victories