Politics Archives

Sunday

5 Mar 2023

Kit Wilson

Who’s afraid of organoid intelligence?

For fans of bioethical nightmares, it’s been a real stonker of a month. First, we had the suggestion that we use comatose women’s wombs to house surrogate pregnancies. Now, it appears we might have a snazzy idea for what to do with their brains, too: to turn them into hyper-efficient biological computers. Lately, you see, techies have been worrying about the natural, physical limits of conventional, silicon-based computing. Recent developments in ‘machine learning’, in particular, have required exponentially greater amounts of energy – and corporations are concerned that further technological progress will soon become environmentally unsustainable. Thankfully, in a paper published this week, a team of American scientists pointed out something rather nifty: that

Steerpike

Hancock wanted to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant and ‘frighten the pants off everyone’

Day 5 of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and the most startling stories yet. Here’s what’s new: When the more contagious Alpha (then ‘Kent’) variant started spreading in December 2020, many were scared. Good, thought Hancock. The former health secretary told his adviser that ‘we [can] frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain’ on 13 December, and wondered when ‘do we deploy the new variant’. Five days later, Boris Johnson cancelled Christmas. 2. Simon Case saw the benefit in fear-mongering At least Sir Humphrey was subtle. The Cabinet Secretary told Hancock early in the third lockdown that ‘the fear/guilt factor’ was ‘crucial’ in keeping restrictions in place, if

Saturday

4 Mar 2023

Steerpike

Hancock and Gove’s cringeworthy Covid love-in

Last night it seemed as if the Matt Hancock WhatsApp messages released by the Telegraph couldn’t get any worse, after the paper published texts showing Hancock’s realtime reaction to his rule-breaking affair being exposed. Yet somehow new depths have been plumbed in Hancock’s correspondence today. For the paper has published texts between Matt Hancock and Michael Gove. Despite some friction between the pair – with Hancock at one point fearing Gove was gunning for his job – the published messages show that the two had a remarkably (some might say pathologically) close relationship. In one exchange from 2021, Hancock texts Gove before a meeting asking what they were trying to achieve. Gove

John Keiger

Is Macron really saying the France-Afrique is finished?

On 2 March in Gabon, West Africa, President Macron declared that ‘the days of France-Afrique are over’. Since the early nineteenth century the African continent has emblazoned France’s aspiration to international power status. Like any empire it provided natural resources. It also provided manpower. Unlike other imperial powers with surplus domestic populations to deploy, France’s demography was stagnant at 40 million from the 1840s until the 1940s. Africa provided troops for her armies (tirailleurs sénégalais) to compete with Germany’s demography and growing forces. Even after the troubled decolonisation in the 1960s Africa continued to provide cheap labour to a thriving French domestic industry. France’s Francophone African empire – combined with its south-east Asian colonies

Theo Zenou

The spy movie that set Putin on the path to the KGB

Leningrad, summer 1968. Volodya is 15-year-old. With his mates, he goes to the cinema to catch The Shield and the Sword, the new movie everyone in the USSR is buzzing about. It’s a big-budget production about a Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazis during World War II. Volodya is blown away. ‘I am going to be a spy,’ he decides right there and then. He’s so determined he pays a visit to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad, a bleak office building known to everyone in town as the Big House. He walks up to an officer on duty and says, ‘I want to get a job with you.’ ‘That’s terrific,

Steerpike

Seven things we learned from the juiciest lockdown files yet

Day four of the lockdown files and it’s the juiciest so far. Here’s what the Telegraph released last night: 1. Matt Hancock thought kissing report wasn’t that bad While cursing ‘that f——g CCTV camera’, the indefatigable Hancock said ‘that [the Sun’s] write up is very gentle’, after the paper released pictures of him and Gina Coladangelo in a rule-breaking embrace. Hancock then set up a WhatsApp group called ‘Crisis Management’ with his media adviser Damon Poole and his lover Coladangelo. He said that he ‘need[ed] to find a clinician’ to say that he broke guidance, not guidelines. ‘PLEASE STAND THIS UP’, he wailed to his advisers. Upon being shown the video of him kissing, his

Max Jeffery

Max Jeffery, Emily Rhodes and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

This week: Max Jeffery reads his letter from Abu Dhabi where he visited the International Defence Exhibition (00:56), Emily Rhodes discusses the tyranny of World Book Day (05:59), and Daisy Dunn tells us about the mysterious world of the Minoans (10:22). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Michael Simmons

Coffee House Scots – what did we learn from this week’s hustings?

14 min listen

It’s been an interesting week in the race for the leadership of the SNP. Kate Forbes’s campaign has been plunged into fresh doubt by the news that her husband attended a private Tory hustings, whilst Douglas Ross has been forced to apologise after swearing during First Minister’s Questions. We also had the first televised hustings, but who came out on top? Michael Simmons speaks to Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Stephen Daisley. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Friday

3 Mar 2023

Lisa Haseldine

What Belarus gets out of its friendship with China

What has Alexander Lukashenko been up to in China? The purpose of the Belarusian President’s three-day visit, according to state media outlet BelTA, was to continue ‘the long-term course of building friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation’ between the two countries. But the truth is somewhat murkier. Lukashenko is Vladimir Putin’s closest ally. He allowed Russian troops to launch the northern flank of the invasion from Belarus back in February last year. Since then, he has given Russia free rein to consistently transport troops, weapons and supplies through the country. So, could he have travelled to China as a de facto Russian emissary? Lukashenko was full of praise for Xi Jinping’s leadership, congratulating him

Steerpike

Matt Hancock’s Covid social media frenzy

Another day, another painful set of WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock. Yet again the Daily Telegraph have released another batch of texts involving the former health secretary, this time about his burgeoning public profile in the wake of the pandemic. The paper reports that as Covid arrived on Britain’s shores, Hancock shared with his special advisor a memo written by a ‘wise friend’, that suggested that Hancock’s career could be propelled ‘into the next league’ by the Covid pandemic. Hancock certainly comes across as image conscious in the texts. The Telegraph suggests that over the course of the pandemic, he exchanged more than 22,000 messages with his staff about social

Rupert Darwall

The green movement faces a painful confrontation with reality

Environmentalism is the ruling ideology of our times. Forget neoliberalism. That peaked around 2000 and was definitively dethroned by the financial crisis in 2008, the same year Parliament passed the Climate Change Act which paved the way for Net Zero. Since then, environmentalism has won victory after victory, so it might appear paradoxical that one of the founders of the British green movement struck a defeatist note. Speaking at an event to celebrate the Green Party’s 50th anniversary, Michael Benfield suggested that the ‘battle for the world’s environmental survival is, at this moment, lost.’ The Greens had succeeded in raising consciousness, Benfield said, ‘but we have failed in dealing with the battle

Matthew Lynn

Will the last company to leave the City please turn out the lights?

It would have been bad enough if just one major British company had decided to list its shares in New York rather than London in the space of a single week. But two? First it was the chip-maker Arm, one of the UK’s very few major technology companies. Then came the building materials giant CRH. Shell also said they came very close to shifting their base to the US. The moment has surely arrived for the UK to radically deregulate its listing regime – or else watch the City slowly wither away. At this rate, within a few years there might only be a couple of retailers and a bus

Ian Acheson

The problem with the BBC’s Manchester bombing coverage

The BBC have reacted to the Manchester Arena bombing, carried out by an Islamist maniac, by providing us with a cautionary tale of how easy it is to be radicalised by…the extreme right. The fifteen-year-old boy, named as John, who is featured in the online article describes how he was manipulated into ‘hating Islam’ by consuming hours of dodgy online content and eventually attending some demonstrations. ‘To see Manchester attacked – a city where I spent a lot of time – really fuelled my anger,’ he said. ‘I stopped caring who knew about my involvement and moved from mainly speaking online to actively trying to recruit people and sharing propaganda.’

Iain Macwhirter

Is Humza Yousaf’s campaign starting to sink?

The SNP leadership has turned into open civil war. Alex Salmond has shafted the frontrunner Humza Yousaf who tried to shaft Kate Forbes, who was, in turn, shafted by Nicola Sturgeon. No wonder long-suffering deputy First Minister, John Swinney, has resigned. Swinney’s departure came on the day Salmond torpedoed Yousaf, Sturgeon’s chosen successor, by claiming he had skipped Holyrood’s landmark gay marriage vote in 2014 due to ‘religious pressure’. Yousaf says his ‘recollection is different’, but his position is now untenable. His account is contradicted by the minister who was in charge of the 2014 equal marriage vote, Alex Neil, and now the then first minister, Salmond. It is all

Patrick O’Flynn

Theresa May is the true villain in this latest Tory Brexit war

The blond bombshell has criticised Sunak’s new Windsor Framework as not passing the Brexit test of taking back control. He’s made clear that he believes abandoning the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is a terrible idea and says he will find it very hard to vote for his successor’s measure. In return, Sunak loyalists are muttering about it being Johnson’s mess – i.e. the original disastrous protocol that he agreed and then oversold at the tail end of 2019 – that their man has been clearing up. In fact, they both have good reason to feel chippy – but not with each other. For the true villain of the piece has

James Heale

Four things we learnt from the Boris Partygate probe

Today the privileges committee has published its initial report into whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about Partygate. This inquiry does not look at whether gatherings in lockdown happened or not – we know they did. Rather, it is going to investigate whether Johnson was aware such gatherings were taking place and, if he did, whether he ‘knowingly’ lied to the House of Commons when he told MPs that ‘the rules were followed at all times’. It also focuses on why the then prime minister did not correct the record at the earliest opportunity when it became clear that the Covid rules had not been followed at

David Abulafia

Captain Cook’s Aboriginal spears belong in Cambridge, not Australia

On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his first encounter with native Australians in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. There they could be seen and studied by any visitor to Cambridge, rather than being hidden away in a cabinet of curiosities in the Wren Library at Trinity. Now, more than 250 years after Cook’s visit to Australia, they are to be returned to Sydney and to members of the tribe that originally made them. After they arrived in what became known as Botany Bay, Cook’s men confiscated about 40 of these rods from members

Katy Balls

Sue Gray defects

14 min listen

Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson about Sue Gray’s new role as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and what happened on the Tory MP’s away day in Windsor.

Isabel Hardman

Why have we become numb to the failing social care sector?

Helen Whately, the care minister, gave a moving speech this week. It was personal and emotional, but it won’t get much attention. Whately told a health conference organised by the Nuffield Trust about the final months of her grandmother’s life. Her grandmother had reached the age of 100 and was living independently, enjoying walks in the countryside, a spot of gardening and reading, she told the audience. But then, she had a fall, and while Whately said she would spare the conference the details of what happened next, there was a period of five months in which the centenarian was stuck in hospital. She was ‘occasional receiving treatment, but mostly

Gus Carter

The madness of the lockdown trials

I think we can now admit that Covid sent us all a little loopy. Matt Hancock certainly seems it, handing over more than 100,000 highly sensitive texts to a hostile journalist. Today’s revelations show Hancock telling colleagues ‘we are going to have to get heavy with the police’. While everyone gets excited about the lockdown files, there are still plenty of lockdown trials going before the courts. Which, even if a gratuitous breach, seems a little pointless now. Rules are being enforced that are no longer in place. Rules that, the Daily Telegraph reports, weren’t based purely on ‘the science’. Mr Hylton’s is a sad tale of what happens when