Politics

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

Thursday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Should the SNP leadership contest be stopped?

Yesterday saw the final televised debate between the three contenders for leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. Voting will end and the winner will be declared on 27 March.  Or will it? Those sick of this increasingly tawdry contest should prepare themselves: it may have a way to go yet. There are calls for the contest to be halted, restarted or at least reset. And if that doesn’t happen, there is a risk that the winner will not be recognised by certain sectors of the party. There is a talk of a legal challenge from pro-independence blog Wings Over Scotland (which is mulling crowdfunding such a move). 

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The trial of Boris Johnson

20 min listen

Boris Johnson sat through a grueling four-hour hearing into whether the former Prime Minister deliberately misled parliament. Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson take a look at the key moments of the meeting; and whether Rishi Sunak should be worried about the Brexit vote rebels.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Fed’s rate rise shows it is confident about the banks

So, things really are different this time. The US Federal Reserve has decided to raise its Federal Funds Rate (its main interest rate) by a quarter-point, to 4.75 per cent – 5 per cent, in spite of a banking crisis that has seen two large banks fail in the past fortnight. For the past two decades, this sort of thing didn’t happen. Under the unwritten laws of the ‘Greenspan put’, the Fed could be relied upon to provide some form of stimulus at the first sign of financial trouble. It began with the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, when the Fed put together a

James Heale James Heale

Five things we learned from Boris’s Privileges Committee grilling

Boris Johnson has just finished a mammoth three hour evidence session in front of the Privileges Committee inquiry into whether he misled the House about Covid guidance being broken in No. 10. It was a combative affair at times with Johnson displaying flashes of anger and irritation – understandable given it was twice as long as the Liaison Committee grillings he was used to as PM. If this were a boxing match, it would appear to be decided on a points decision, with neither side being able to land a killer blow: Johnson looked on the ropes at times but the committee were unable to conclusively prove that the ex-premier

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

It’s easy to become numb to the madness of Boris Johnson

What was Boris Johnson up to at the Privileges Committee? The former prime minister has just finished more than three hours of evidence on whether he deliberately misled the Commons over partygate. In his opening statement, he said ‘hand on heart, I did not lie to the House’. One of his repeated insistences was that he was just doing the ‘right thing’ when he was thanking staff who were leaving, despite MPs on the committee also repeatedly insisting that the guidance at the time clearly did not allow this. He also appeared to lose his cool at times. ‘People who say that we are partying in lockdown simply do not know

Steerpike Steerpike

Rishi publishes his six-figure tax bill

It’s a good day to bury bad news. After months of stalling, No. 10 have chosen today of all days to publish Rishi Sunak’s long-awaited tax bill – slap bang in the middle of Boris Johnson’s evidence session at the Privileges Committee. The records show he paid more than £1million in UK tax over the previous three financial years. Cha ching! Sunak first made the pledge to publish these returns during his initial unsuccessful campaign to be Tory leader last summer. He is one of the richest MPs in the current parliament, with Labour showing little reticence in using Sunak’s wealth as a political attack line. And today’s disclosures will

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs proved that we have too many politicians

PMQs drove up a cul-de-sac today. Sir Keir’s team of researchers have discovered a crime blackspot where ten houses have been burgled in the last 18 months, but only one of these offences has ended up in court. This delighted Sir Keir as it gave him a chance to remind the world that he once worked as a prosecutor. Even better, the benighted cul-de-sac happens to be in Yorkshire where Rishi Sunak’s constituency is located. Crime dominated the session because Sir Keir brought up Baroness Casey’s end-of-term report on the London police force. The cops have fluffed it, according to the baroness, and their ranks are now overflowing with sexists,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Sunak avoids large Tory rebellion on Brexit deal

Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework has won support in the House of Commons at 515 ayes to 29 noes. As expected, DUP MPs voted against the deal – after the group’s leader Jeffrey Donaldson announced early this week that the party would oppose it. As for the Conservative party, there were 22 Tory rebels, including three former Tory leaders in Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Iain Duncan Smith. Other rebel MPs include Jacob Rees Mogg, Priti Patel, Jake Berry, Jonathan Gullis, Christopher Chope and William Cash. The rebellion is less severe than feared last month The number of abstentions looks to be sizeable – in the region of 48 Tory MPs.

Harriet Sergeant

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown

‘There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’ That

Coffee House

The trial of Boris Johnson – as it happened

Boris Johnson has faced a three-hour grilling in front of the Privileges Committee, where he was quizzed about parties in Downing Street during the pandemic. The former PM is accused of lying to parliament when he told MPs that ‘the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times’. The cross-party committee, led by Labour’s Harriet Harman, is looking at whether he inadvertently, recklessly or intentionally misled the House with this statement. Johnson yesterday admitted to misleading the Commons, but said it was not intentional and he made his remarks in good faith. Here’s how the session played out: Boris’s trial ends And that’s a wrap, with the Privileges

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why No. 10 fears Boris’s banishment

Even now, months after he was forced to resign, Boris Johnson has a potency that no other British politician can match. Everything he says still catches the attention of Westminster and the media. Like Donald Trump, he enrages his enemies so much that they can seem obsessed. And rumours of a Boris restoration will not go away. ‘If he was six feet under in a coffin,’ says one minister, ‘he’d still have ambitions of a comeback.’ Some MPs do want to see his return to Downing Street, of course. ‘They may be noisy,’ says a member of government. ‘But they’re also small in number.’ Some of Johnson’s critics believe he

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Starmer’s attacks on crime flop

Rishi Sunak isn’t giving evidence to the Privileges Committee’s inquiry today. Nevertheless, he got his defence on partygate in anyway when he took Prime Minister’s Questions. In one of his answers to Keir Starmer, Sunak told the chamber that the fine he received was investigated by a ‘senior civil servant’. He added: ‘The findings of which confirmed that I had no advance knowledge about what had been planned, having arrived early for a meeting.’ Then he joked that the Labour leader ‘doesn’t need me to tell him that: he’s probably spoken to the report’s author much more frequently than I have’. This, of course, was a reference to Sue Gray,

Keir Starmer (Credit: Parliamentlive.tv)
The Spectator

The Boris distraction

Boris Johnson should not be forgiven for his handling of lockdown. He needlessly criminalised everyday behaviour when voluntary guidelines would have sufficed. Nannies were prosecuted for delivering birthday cards to children; friends were apprehended for meeting up in the park. Meanwhile, the officials who had created these rules flouted them regularly. Johnson wrongly denied that his staff were having parties. But compared with everything else that went wrong during that period, his false denial is trivial. It is surprising, then, that the House of Commons seems obsessed by it, rather than by the collapse of the democratic apparatus during lockdown, or the fact that the government was allowed to deploy

Steerpike Steerpike

Is Alastair Campbell a conspiracy theorist?

The king of spin is at it again. Fresh from bailing out his boss Gary Lineker from another self-imposed Twitter mess, Alastair Campbell is now laying the mantle of ‘defender of the BBC’ to pick up another instead: Boris Johnson lockdown truther. Campbell, a former director of communications in No. 10 no less, must be having difficulty filling the days as he has taken to responding to viral anti-Tory tweets including this gem earlier: Does anyone actually believe that Johnson nearly died of Covid? To which Campbell replied ‘No’ – implying that Johnson’s experience in April 2020 was greatly overblown. For that to be true of course the New Labour

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The overlapping lives of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump

Often spoken of in the same breath, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are not in fact all that similar. Both men inspire devotion among their followers. Both men are egotists, born privileged in New York. Both have weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex. But Johnson is more of an introvert than Trump and less interested in money. Boris is a voracious reader who writes his own books. Donald might, like the satirical horror novelist Garth Marenghi, be one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read.  Still, it is curious how, since the rabble-rousing year of 2016, the lives of Johnson and Trump have

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

After his trip to Moscow, Xi Jinping still holds all the cards

After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand guard over the world order based on international law’. This statement came closer than ever before to articulating his view that a normative struggle is going on between a western-dominated order, and one more suited to Beijing’s interests. As he departed yesterday, he went further: ‘Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.’ Having positioned himself as a potential peacemaker, Xi clearly believes the war in Ukraine presents him with a win-win situation ­­­–

Owen Matthews

The mild-mannered economist who could end Erdogan’s rule

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years – echoed with chants of ‘Erdogan, resign’ and ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’. The same weekend, the home crowd of another major Istanbul club, Besiktas, had filled the pitch with a heartbreaking, minutes-long hail of soft toys thrown from the stands in memory of the thousands of children who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake of 6

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Steve Baker blasts Boris as ‘a pound shop Farage’

It’s all getting a bit spicy in Westminster. Barely an hour after Boris Johnson and Liz Truss announced that they would not vote for Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework, out came serial rebel turned ultimate loyalist Steve Baker to savage their decision. The Northern Ireland minister launched an astonishing attack on the former Tory premiers saying that both are ‘better than this.’ And turning his guns specifically on Johnson, Baker said that: He has got a choice. He can be remembered for the great acts of statecraft that he achieved or he can risk looking like a pound shop Nigel Farage and I hope he chooses to be remembered as a

Ian Williams Ian Williams

ChatCCP: how will China cope with AI?

The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much any question you can think to ask it. China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the technology has already gone ‘viral’ in China. The paper said that AI could give ‘a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests’. That’s

Lucy Dunn

Is Humza Yousaf backing down against Westminster?

The final debate of the SNP leadership contest, which took place last night, came after a weekend of upheaval for the party. The SNP chief executive Peter Murrell resigned on Saturday. His resignation followed that of Murray Foote, the SNP’s head of communications, who accused the party of telling him to make false statements to the press. And Ash Regan’s campaign team called for the contest to be restarted after revelations about falling membership numbers (and their cover-up) surfaced nearly a week into voting opening. Viewers (or listeners) were understandably unsure how last night’s debate on Times Radio would proceed, given that the very integrity of the Scottish National party,