Politics

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

Wednesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Could AI save the human race?

Two things are buzzing about in the air at the moment: decline and artificial intelligence. Douglas Murray and Louise Perry have written recently in these pages about social desuetude: Murray on the five million or so Britons who seem to have opted out altogether of economic activity; Perry on the worrying lack of new humans being born. Could AI get us out of these holes?  It’s tempting to scoff at new tech and the alternating warnings and promises about what’s coming down the line. Many of us in the demographic bulge of older citizens will recall the heated clamour of the early 80s. We remember how the auguries about the

Andrew Finkel

Erdogan is desperate

There is such a thing as governing for too long. After about ten years in post, politicians’ once natural feel for the nation’s pulse instead starts to rub the electorate the wrong way. Thatcher, Blair and de Gaulle all saw their time run out.  What about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? He has led Turkey since 2003 as prime minister and since 2014 as president. This Sunday, he will try to defy political gravity.  Opinion polls don’t suggest a clear outcome in the Turkish election. They suggest that no presidential candidate will get 50 per cent of the vote in the first round on Sunday, and that Erdoğan’s principal and not overly

Tuesday

James Heale James Heale

Starmer struggles on the coalition question

With gains of 643 councillors and 22 authorities, Labour clearly had a good result in Thursday’s local elections. Yet with the BBC and Sky both publishing vote share projections which show the party falling short of an overall majority – winning just shy of 300 seats rather than the necessary 326 – the spectre of a hung parliament looms large over British politics once more. It was that subject which dominated Sir Keir Starmer’s broadcast round this afternoon. The Labour leader refused seven times in an interview with Sky to rule out a deal with the Liberal Democrats if his party found themselves short of a majority, insisting that he

Steerpike Steerpike

Humza Yousaf’s right royal U-turn

Humza Yousaf has already stoked a right royal row with his party’s hardliners by ditching a pro-independence rally to attend the coronation. And now he’s really gone and done it by leading the Scottish Parliament in a celebration of the event. The SNP leader tabled a motion showering praise on the King and Queen: That the Parliament congratulates Their Majesties The King and The Queen on the occasion of Their Coronation; expresses its gratitude for Their Majesties’ public service to Scotland, and affirms the deep respect that is held for Their Majesties in Scotland. Speaking to the motion this afternoon, Yousaf hailed ‘an important constitutional milestone’ and praised the multi-faith nature of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Wanted: researcher for The Spectator’s lunchtime newsletter

The Spectator is looking for a freelance newsletter assistant for early-morning morning shifts (which can be done at home) for our Lunchtime Espresso newsletter. The lunchtime email goes out to more than 120,000 people: one of our most-read, and one of the most influential newsletters in Britain. It should reflect the same ethos as the magazine, our website, and our broadcast offerings. We’re looking for someone with curiosity, who can separate wheat from chaff, who can work out what’s happening that matters – and summarise it all in a sentence. You provide the first draft: a team then pick up, add, enhance. But the first draft matters a lot. Sounds

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Joanna Cherry and the fight for women’s rights

I would like to go back to disagreeing with Joanna Cherry, thank you very much. Not so long ago, it was easy enough. She was an SNP MP, beloved by the party’s grassroots, and one of the most articulate advocates for Scottish independence. She was also a lawyer, and I really don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged.   Then something happened: she started to talk out of turn about transgender ideology and its impact on women’s rights. In doing so, this left-leaning lesbian has been vilified as a bigot, shunned within her party, and subjected to appalling online abuse. Her latest punishment has been the cancellation of her ‘In conversation

Lucy Dunn

Can pharmacies help solve the NHS crisis?

High street pharmacists in England will, for the first time, be able to prescribe medication, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced today. Minor conditions that require simple treatments may no longer involve prolonged waits at the GP – and patients requiring routine checks, like blood pressure measurements, will also be able to access these at their local pharmacies.  This simple shift will help ease the pressure on local health services: it is predicted to free up 15 million appointments and ensure that GPs have more time to deal with complex patients. It will also have a knock-on effect on hospital waiting times and, hopefully, the numbers on waiting lists – which have hit highs

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Victory Day threatens Putin’s alternative reality

As Vladimir Putin rounded off his Victory Day speech with a resounding ‘Hurrah!’ to Russia, the contrast between the celebrations of this year and last could not be starker. Putin was a president in a hurry: he spoke for just nine minutes, the parade was wrapped up in under 25 minutes. ‘A real war has once again broken out against our motherland,’ he began. Perpetuating the lies upon which he has sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin continued with the trademark bellicose ranting that we have come to expect from his speeches over the past year: ‘We have resisted international terrorism, we will defend the citizens of the Donbas, and we will guarantee our own safety’. 

Andrew Tettenborn

Why Rishi Sunak should take the fight to Airbnb

Last month Michael Gove suggested changing the law in England to allow tourist hotspots to force homeowners to seek planning permission before they can rent out holiday lets. Planning laws aimed at preserving the character of a locality are entirely consistent with conservative principles It didn’t go down well. Some on his own side, including hard hitters like Jacob Rees-Mogg, saw the notion of restricting homeowners’ rights as anti-commercial, anti-freedom and downright unconservative. Not surprisingly, Airbnb said it would fight the idea hard, joined by pressure groups representing those who had done well out of the Airbnb boom. A few days ago hedge-funder and big Tory donor Crispin Odey, never one to mince his words, bluntly

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

War in Ukraine rains on Putin’s Victory Day parade

It may be having trouble on the battlefield, but the Russian army does know how to stage a parade. Behind the goose-stepping ranks, massed bands, and rumbling missile launchers, though, was a clear sense of the practical and political costs of the war in Ukraine. Although parades from Crimea in the south to Pskov in the north had been cancelled on reasons of security, there was no way Vladimir Putin could let this one not run – even Covid had not accomplished that. The Senate’s golden dome had been repaired after last week’s drone attack – and anti-drone guns were very much in evidence among the security team – and

Steerpike Steerpike

Guto Harri gets a podcast to spill the tea on No. 10

What do you do when you’re opinionated, loquacious and somewhat under-employed? Start your own self-concentred podcast of course. So Mr S is delighted to welcome the garrulous Guto Harri to the world of political broadcasting, with the onetime Downing Street director of communications now launching ‘a brand-new political memoir podcast series Unprecedented‘ with Global. Fresh from earning the ire of Acoba after Steerpike pointed out his new (undeclared) speaking gig, Harri is in a hurry to record his recollections for the posterity of history/make as moolash as he can. Today’s Daily Mail gives him the full Northcliffe House treatment, going all guns blazing on his claims that Johnson ‘squared up’ to

James Heale James Heale

Inside the clash between Boris and Charles

Conversations between the Prime Minister and the monarchy are, by convention, kept strictly confidential – and taken to the grave. But Boris Johnson has always been someone who thinks rules are there to be broken. His former spin chief, Guto Harri, has just confirmed something that they tried to cover up at the time: the extent of the clash between Johnson and now-King Charles. They squared off against each other at a Commonwealth summit, apparently, after Charles described the government’s Rwanda deportation policy as ‘appalling’ within political earshot. At the time, word of Charles’s disapproval leaked out suspiciously quickly – and via Westminster channels. Polls showed strong public approval of

Ben Domenech

The ‘brutal’ poll that spells trouble for Joe Biden

The latest poll from the Washington Post and ABC News sent shockwaves through America’s media over the weekend, with numbers that are absolutely dire for president Biden. ‘This poll is just brutal’, announced former Democratic spokesperson turned ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. He’s correct: with approval ratings at just 36 per cent, and lagging far behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in potential general election matchups, the voting numbers are terrible. But the personal ratings are somehow even worse than that — 68 per cent of those polled, including 48 per cent of Democrats, believe Biden is too old for another term. And just 32 per cent think he has the mental acuity to

Owen Matthews

Pushback against Russian sanctions grows in Germany and Italy

Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, some of the Kremlin’s staunchest friends in Europe were the energy executives who lobbied for ever greater dependence on Russian gas and their political allies. The war – and the still-unexplained destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines which connected Germany directly to Russia last September – sent Russia’s share of European gas supplies plummeting from over 40 per cent to around 5 per cent. Sweeping US and EU sanctions made doing business with Russian state-owned companies not only taboo but illegal.  Nonetheless, many of Europe’s energy tsars, industrialists and politicians still dream of restoring cheap Russian gas supplies – and are making increasingly public

Gerry Hassan

Keeping it in the family has been the making – and breaking – of the SNP

The Scottish National party is described as many things, rightly or wrongly: a nationalist party and movement, ‘separatists’, a one-party state, even a ‘cult’. Missing is the sense of what animates and binds the SNP together as a political force beyond the cause of independence. At its core, the SNP is a tribe underpinned by a sense of community and of being an extended family of sorts. It’s true that this idea of the SNP as a family has provided a modus operandi throughout its history and rise to power. Now, though, this needs to be seen as a contributory factor in the scandals engulfing it. It cannot be entirely

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s coronation policing muddle

The political fallout from the coronation policing row shows us that if Labour does get into government after the next general election, it is going to have a hard time unpicking even reforms it has complained loudly about under the current administration. Though ministers are having to justify why the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, many of whom seem not to have been planning the sort of disruption that the Public Order Bill is supposed to focus on, the bigger difficulty today has been for Labour. Rishi Sunak did his usual thing of being as detached as possible from events, saying the police were operationally independent from the government and,

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Vote Joe Biden, get Kamala Harris?

Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk – and significantly so. For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to happen. Biden would have to keep her as his vice-president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the 80-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice-president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden won in 2024 and didn’t complete his second-term, it would be all hail Kamala, the lady

Steerpike Steerpike

Prince Harry’s ghostwriter takes aim at the British press

Prince Harry kept a dignified silence at his father’s coronation – even if he opted to make a hasty exit back to Los Angeles when the service at Westminster Abbey finished. But the Duke of Sussex’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer has chosen this week to talk about the ins and outs of writing Spare. Moehringer reveals that he argued with the ex-royal numerous times during the book-writing process. He also tells, in a piece for the New Yorker, how he called Harry ‘dude’ from the outset. But if that informality suggests Moehringer has little in common with the high-born prince, think again. Although Moehringer and Harry’s backgrounds couldn’t be any more different,

William Atkinson

Tory supporters should curb their enthusiasm for Penny Mordaunt

A confession: Penny Mordaunt was my teenage political crush. Publicly admitting that would be rather more embarrassing if the performance of the Leader of the House of Commons at the coronation didn’t have my fellow Conservatives infatuated. God knows what my 15-year-old self would have made of her eye-catching role on Saturday, but many Tory supporters were suitably impressed. As soon as she appeared in ceremonial battledress, ‘Oh my Gods’ at her outfit mixed with tweets of appreciation for her remarkable ability to carry a weighty sword for an hour. Comparisons have been drawn to other formidable women: Boudica, Athena, and Britney Spears. She may not have been crowned this