Politics

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

Friday

14 Oct 2022

Liz Truss’s painful press conference fails to calm Tory nerves

Liz Truss has just confirmed that she is U-turning on another part of her government’s not-so-mini Budget. After sacking her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng this morning, the Prime Minister used a Downing Street press conference to say that she will now keep the increase in corporation tax, despite promising to ditch it. This ought to raise £18 billion in tax. Explaining her decision, Truss said that while she still stuck to her vision for the country of a pro-growth government, it had become clear that her government’s fiscal event – which saw a range of unfunded tax cuts announced – ‘went further and faster than the markets were expecting’. The PM

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The real damage caused by eco-protestors

A pair of Just Stop Oil activists walked into the National Gallery this morning and threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. ‘What is worth more? Art or life?’, one of the demonstrators yelled as she glued herself to the wall. This isn’t the first time a work of art has been targeted by environmentalists. In July, eco-protesters glued themselves to the frame of Constable’s painting The Hay Wain and covered it with an altered version of their own, doing minor damage in the process. A few days before, eco-protesters rushed onto the track at Silverstone. Eco-protesters also glued themselves to a Turner painting in Manchester. In June, eco-protesters… you get the idea. For all

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine braces itself for Russia’s cold war

So far this week, 128 Russian missiles have been fired at Ukraine. Half were intercepted by air defences, according to figures from Ukrainian authorities, but all too many of the others hit their target: power stations. This is a new phase in war, an anti-humanitarian campaign to cut supplies of water, electricity and leave the notoriously cold Ukrainian winter to do its worst. ‘Ukraine is about to face the hardest winter in all the years of independence,’ said Volodymyr Zelensky in one of his nightly addresses to the nation. About a third of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been hit by Russian missiles and Iranian kamikaze drones. Kyiv had expected Russia

Kate Andrews

Truss sacks Kwarteng. What next?

13 min listen

Prime Minister Liz Truss has sacked her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt. By removing her closest ideological ally. Can she save herself? Kate Andrews speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth. Produced by Natasha Feroze.

James Kirkup

Liz Truss is still at the mercy of the Bank of England

Last week, I wrote here that 14 October was the key date in British politics, because the expiry of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme would force the Government to act to lower gilt yields. Be in no doubt: the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng today is a consequence of the Bank’s refusal to go on supporting bond prices and artificially shielding the Government from the credibility-shredding consequences of the September fiscal statement. That’s not to say the Bank planned or engineered this. I don’t think Andrew Bailey, the Governor, is a Machiavellian political strategist. It’s just to say that the nature of the UK’s economic and financial position is that

Katy Balls

Why Truss picked Hunt for Chancellor

A day is a long time in politics. Just this morning, a No. 10 source told the BBC the Prime Minister believed Kwasi Kwarteng was doing ‘an excellent job’ as chancellor and the pair were ‘in lockstep.’ Only just a few hours on, Liz Truss has sacked her close ally and friend in a bid to salvage her premiership. Now, Truss has appointed Jeremy Hunt to replace Kwarteng. It’s not even 2 p.m. The view in Downing Street is that Hunt is ultimately a low-tax Tory As soon as rumours started to circulate that Hunt was the preferred pick, there were raised eyebrows among Tory MPs. Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid

Steerpike

Flashback: Hunt demands 15p corporation tax

Kwasi Kwarteng, we hardly knew ye. After 38 days, the Chancellor was unceremoniously axed from his post today as Liz Truss desperately tries to rescue her crumbling premiership. Memorable highlights of his five-week stint include the mini-Budget, firing Tom Scholar and being mistaken for Bernard Mensah. Indeed, the official mourning period appears in retrospect to have been the honeymoon of his tenure. Kwarteng and Truss were elected to parliament on the same day and have been close friends for more than a decade. They were co-authors, co-founders and successive leaders of the Free Enterprise Group, allies through the long years of May and Johnson. And yet that didn’t stop her

James Forsyth

Kwarteng’s sacking is a warning to his successor

Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking is brutal – and he was sacked as his letter makes clear. He was a chancellor who wanted to say yes to the Prime Minister, he deliberately did not try and build a power base for himself. But he has now been removed without ceremony, sacked even before he had returned to Downing Street. He will feel bruised, and understandably so. Whoever succeeds Kwarteng is going to take a very different approach. They are going to demand control over economic policy and they are going to install their own people in the Treasury and try and build up their own position. They will be acutely aware that if

Isabel Hardman

Will sacking Kwarteng be enough to save Truss’s premiership?

Can sacking Kwasi Kwarteng really save Liz Truss’s premiership? In the past few minutes, the chancellor has had a meeting with the Prime Minister – and he has now left the government. Tory MPs have spent the past week doing a lot of writing. The first thing many of them have been writing is a letter to Sir Graham Brady calling for a vote of no confidence. Even though the rules currently don’t allow one for a year after the election of a new leader, those who’ve sent their missives expect that he will reach a point where he has to tell the Prime Minister there would be a vote

George Brandis

Removing PMs hardly ever ends well

As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would be well advised to take a deep breath and reflect upon the absurdity of removing a leader after six weeks. As they do so, they might find it instructive to look across the sea to Australia to see the folly of constant leadership turmoil and the ever more lethal poison it injects into the bloodstream of political parties. Over the past decade and a half, Canberra – whose politics are famously robust – earned the unenviable taunt of having become the ‘coup capital of the South Pacific,’ as both sides

James Forsyth

Liz Truss sacks Kwasi Kwarteng

Liz Truss has sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor. It is a truly remarkable development. Truss and Kwarteng were even more part of a joint political project than David Cameron and George Osborne. The mini-Budget was an expression of their joint beliefs: his dismissal is a sign of how bad things really are. Less than six weeks into her premiership and she has sacrificed her closest ideological ally to try and shore up her position. Truss will hold a press conference at 2 p.m. In it, we can expect a U-turn on freezing corporation tax to be announced – the markets assume it is happening and with the Bank of England’s

Cindy Yu

What will Kwasi do?

9 min listen

It’s one of those flight tracker days here in Westminster as Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is about to land from a trip to the IMF in Washington, cut short last night. Is the government about to U-turn on its three-week-old mini budget? If so, will the Chancellor resign? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.

Andrew McQuillan

The sectarian shame of Ireland’s women’s football team

How bad is Irish nationalism’s sectarian problem? In the somewhat Panglossian world occupied by nationalist and republican activists and politicians – boosted by recent census and election results – it doesn’t really feature in the discussion. At the recent ‘Ireland’s Future’ conference in Dublin, attended by thousands of people, the grubby stuff – the legacy of the Troubles and all – barely featured amidst the hopeful mood music and good vibes. The sight of the Republic of Ireland’s women’s football team celebrating their World Cup qualification in Glasgow earlier this week with the pro-IRA chant of ‘Oh, Ah, Up the ‘RA” – a line taken from a Wolfe Tones song –

Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t Graham Norton speak up for JK Rowling?

Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the misogynistic monstering of JK Rowling an act of violence? ‘Silence is Violence’ is the radical slogan du jour. It was popularised by Black Lives Matter. There were moments over the past couple of years when you couldn’t browse the internet for five minutes without encountering a post saying that anyone who keeps schtum on hatred

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Liz Truss’s immigration conundrum

The Conservatives – in office since 2010 – are now into their fourth successive manifesto pledge to bring down immigration, which remains well over 200,000 annually. Naturally, Liz Truss is said to be weighing up increasing it further. Some of those in the Treasury believe that visa liberalisation is the quickest way to growth. From the Treasury’s perspective, and that of the new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, immigrants represent an excellent deal: you don’t have to pay for their education or childhood, instead simply importing units of homogeneous labour fully formed. What’s not to like? Open the borders and watch the line go up! Home Secretary Suella Braverman disagrees. She would like to

Jacob Heilbrunn

What does the 6 January subpoena mean for Trump?

Poor Donald Trump. The 6 January committee has subpoenaed him. The New York attorney general is seeking to put the kibosh on his new Trump II organisation. The Supreme Court has rejected his bid to stymie the Mar-a-Lago investigation. What next? Will it turn out that Jared or even — gasp! — Ivanka has been ratting him out to the feds about his hoarding of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago? Far from ending with his ousting from the White House, the Trump show has become an unending pageant of new plot twists. The central actor remains Trump and Trump alone, intent on hogging the spotlight in one way or another. Far

James Kirkup

In praise of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the secret centrist

These are hard times for centrists, though we should be used to that by now. My tribe – clever, technocratic, sometimes liberal and sometimes smug – has been losing arguments and elections consistently for several years, often deservingly. We may know all about how policy works, but we haven’t been great at politics. A common centrist lament comes from looking at the current government and despairing at the way libertarian ideologues have taken control, running the country according to the ideas found in Institute for Economic Affairs pamphlets and Allister Heath columns. Is there no one in government who is prepared to take a pragmatic, what-works approach to policy? Well,

Ross Clark

The markets have rebounded – but how long for?

So, no Black Friday. The pound is steady, the FTSE100 up 1.5 per cent, the FTSE250 up more than 3 per cent. Just as fears grew that the end of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme could send pension funds to the brink and precipitate a fresh market crisis, the opposite happens: markets embark on a rebound. It won’t necessarily last, of course. The long, miserable decline of stock markets and gilt markets this year has been punctuated, as ever, by periods of optimism, only for a fresh slide to begin. But for the moment it seems as if the big story that is driving markets is the expectation that

Michael Simmons

Six graphs that could seal Liz Truss’s fate

When Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday, prime minister John Major phoned the Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie to ask how the day’s events would be covered. McKenzie is said to have responded: ‘Prime minister, I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit which I am just about to pour all over you.’ With the Bank of England ending its emergency support for pension funds this afternoon, what newspaper editors are saying about the present Prime Minister by market close could come down to the ebbs and flows of these six graphs: 1. It’s all about gilts. Yesterday

Steerpike

Fight or flight? Kwarteng dashes home

It seems that panic and turmoil is something the markets and Tory party currently have in common. Kwasi Kwarteng is flying home a day earlier than planned from the annual meeting of the International Money Fund in Washington – so he will be back in London this afternoon when the Bank of England is due to end its gilt-buying programme, risking further chaos on the markets. So what’s Kwarteng up to? There are four options: Could Kwarteng be hoping to swoop in and save the day? 1. Quell rebellion, argue against a U-turn The Tory party is buzzing with speculation of a plot brewing to oust Liz Truss before Christmas.

Unlock full access to The Spectator

Friday