Politics

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

Thursday

2 Mar 2023

Is Andrew Bailey finally learning his lesson?

Last month the Bank of England announced its tenth rate rise in a row, taking interest rates to 4 per cent. At the time it was speculated that the BoE might end there: not only were rates now catching up with market expectations of where they would peak, but there seemed to be more agreement within the Monetary Policy Committee, based on the way its members were voting, that it was time to slow down. Their own report noted that, to keep hiking rates, the Bank would need to see ‘persistent pressures’ contributing to inflation. But the Bank’s governor reminds us once again that nothing is off the table. 'I

Stephen Daisley

Humza Yousaf emerges on top in first SNP hustings

The first SNP leadership hustings was neatly summed up by the first question asked: ‘What will the candidates do to counter the misinformation, lies and antipathy aimed at our party on a daily basis by journalists based in Scotland?’ There was no mistaking that this was an SNP event. No political party likes the news media but Scottish nationalists are almost as much defined by their boundless, visceral hatred of journalists as they are by their ardour for independence. It wasn’t the only question to raise an eyebrow in Cumbernauld last night. Another member asked the candidates: Yousaf is every bit the machine politician that Sturgeon is; he just does

Steerpike

Five things we’ve learned on day two of Hancock’s lockdown files

More revealing Matt Hancock messages dropped late last night as the Telegraph released another tranche of the former health secretary’s WhatsApps. Here are some of the stand-out lines on day two of the lockdown files: Matt Hancock said that then education secretary Gavin Williamson (who was ‘going absolutely gangbusters’ to keep schools open) was risking a ‘policy crash when the kids spread the disease’ in January 2021. Hancock said that ‘we must now fight a rearguard action for a rational policy’. Williamson has written a column for the Telegraph saying that he was ‘battling’ to keep schools open, and that he thought ‘long and deeply’ about resigning. Ministers accused teachers’ unions of being work-shy, with

Wednesday

1 Mar 2023

Steerpike

Williamson and Hancock’s schools battle revealed

Ding, ding, ding! It’s day two of the revelations from the Telegraph’s lockdown files and today’s chosen battlefield is the school playground. The paper splashes on claims that Matt Hancock as Health Secretary fought a ‘rearguard action’ to shut down the nation’s schools against the efforts of Sir Gavin Williamson, who held the Education brief from 2019 to 2021. Exchanges reveal the lengths which Hancock went to fight such battles, privately suggesting it was ‘mad’ that Sir Gavin was trying to re-open them in January 2021. After Johnson initially backed Williamson, his cabinet rival sneered that ‘the next u-turn is born’, adding: I want to find a way, Gavin having

Steerpike

Watch: ministers considered ‘exterminating all cats’ in Covid

It’s not a great time to be a friend of Matt Hancock, knowing that any moment the Telegraph might splash the contents of your private WhatsApp conversations. Still, good old Jim Bethell – a veteran of the Ministry of Sound and the Department of Health – was wheeled out to defend him tonight. And in his eagerness to defend his onetime boss, the Old Harrovian made an extraordinary revelation: that the British government debated whether it might have to ask people to exterminate all pet cats during the early days of the Covid pandemic. He told Channel 4: What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease.

Steerpike

Is Keir trolling Boris with his next hire?

Wanted: a chief of staff for Sir Keir. Steerpike was first to break the news last year that the Labour leader was on the hunt for a top civil servant to become his head honcho. And today Sky has a delicious report that suggests he has found his man – or woman in this case. For it seems that the person best suited to pursuing Labour’s electoral success is none other than, er, Sue Gray, of Cabinet Office fame. She of course was the fearsome sleaze-buster who investigated Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties, playing her role in events that brought down the man who achieved the best Tory result for 30

Natasha Feroze

Coffee House Scots – is the SNP shifting right?

14 min listen

In the first of The Spectator’s special Coffee House Scots series, Michael Simmons speaks to Isabel Hardman, Katy Balls and Stephen Daisley about the SNP leadership race. Given that the main motivation uniting the SNP is the ambition for an independent Scotland, how do the candidates differ ideologically?

Lloyd Evans

Rishi Sunak is starting to enjoy PMQs

A bad day for daffodils. Hundreds of these little golden trombones were cut down this morning so that our MPs could display their bogus affection for Wales. Honestly, sporting a daff on St David’s Day is like clapping for the NHS – a badge of insincerity. The issue of the moment, the Windsor Framework, barely got a mention at PMQs. Hats off to the marketing genius who coined the phrase ‘Windsor Framework’. Such a cosy, domestic and stylish term. One imagines a pine gazebo by John Lewis or a luxurious summerhouse from Habitat. A place where friends and families can relax forever. To Ulster-watchers, it’s odd that the agreement has

James Heale

What we learned from the lockdown files

12 min listen

The Daily Telegraph has splashed on over 100,000 WhatsApp messages to and from Matt Hancock during his time as Health Secretary. Altogether they show the internal workings of the government and how key lockdown decisions were made during that time. On the podcast, James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson, who has been working with the Telegraph on putting these files into the public eye. Produced by Cindy Yu.

The Spectator

Matt Hancock and the anatomy of a scandal

Last summer, Rishi Sunak told this magazine about what happened inside government during lockdown. The policy, he said, had been pursued with little consideration of the drawbacks. To even discuss the impact of lockdown – to acknowledge the damage being done to schools or NHS waiting lists – was seen as treachery. At the time, Sunak’s testimony was said to be an exaggerated ploy at the end of a bruising Tory leadership campaign. This week, documents have emerged that prove that government lockdown discussions were even worse than Sunak said. The health secretary created a record of the modus operandi of a government in crisis Seldom do journalists come into

Freddy Gray

The great villain of Covid is China. Not Matt Hancock

The Telegraph has a hell of a scoop with its lockdown files, aka Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps. It’s a major public interest story. We see with increasing clarity now how our government flapped and flailed and obfuscated as ministers and senior officials desperately tried to figure out the deadliness of Covid and what to do about it. There’ll be more recriminations in the coming days and rightly so. But if we really want to be angry at something, and we do, shouldn’t we also direct our indignation at another government? One which, US intelligent agencies believe, probably let the Covid-19 virus escape from one of its laboratories, covered the crisis up

Katy Balls

Rishi’s new momentum

When Rishi Sunak appeared in the House of Commons to outline the details of his new agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, one politician was conspicuous by his absence. Over the past few weeks, Boris Johnson had been warning that Sunak was making a mistake in his dealings with Brussels. His words were taken by MPs and journalists as evidence that he was preparing to lead the rebellion against a deal. But on the day, the would-be rebel leader was nowhere to be found. ‘It’s very Boris to march an army up a hill and then be missing in action,’ says a minister. Johnson’s retreat reflects the changing power balance

Isabel Hardman

Starmer did a bad job of interrogating Sunak at PMQs

Rishi Sunak bowled up to Prime Minister’s Questions in an excellent mood, clearly still on a high from his Windsor Framework. The PM was greeted by a huge cheer from Tory backbenchers on arrival, but then had six eclectic and not-particularly-effective questions from Keir Starmer to wade through. The most important of those questions came at the end when the Labour leader asked about the Daily Telegraph story on Matt Hancock and care home testing. ‘We don’t know the truth of what happened yet’ because there were ‘too many messages’, Starmer said, before adding: ‘For families across the country will look at this, at the sight of politicians writing books,

Rod Liddle

Unmasking the truth about Covid

You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned out to have had considerable substance It’s an actual fact that nobody who lives north of Stamford, Lincs, has ever knowingly eaten cucumber. I watch the northerners sometimes in the Tesco at Chester-le-Street, shuffling hurriedly past the vegetable section, eyes averted, nervous lest a pak choi reach out and grab them. There are even tomatoes

Gareth Roberts

The decline and fall of Matt Hancock

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence. Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing

Toby Young

Hancock’s lockdown files show there was no Covid ‘plandemic’

For those of us who were cynical about the government’s pandemic response as it was unfolding in real time – as I was – the Daily Telegraph’s ‘lockdown files’ confirm our worst suspicions. Judging from the revelations in the 100,000+ WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone that Isabel Oakeshott has handed to the newspaper, the then-Health Secretary’s decisions were driven as much by a desire to shore up his own political reputation as they were by medical considerations. To be fair to Hancock, the medical advice often changed from one moment to the next and wasn’t always consistent, as these messages reveal. The overall impression left by the ‘lockdown files’

Gavin Mortimer

Elly Schlein shouldn’t be a problem for Georgia Meloni

There is much excitement among western Europe’s chattering classes after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be ‘a problem’ for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative PM. On the contrary. Schlein’s elevation to party leader is an electoral gift for Meloni, whose sex is the only thing she has in common with her new foe. Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists Meloni was raised by a single mum in a working-class district of Rome and

Katy Balls

How Labour can win: Bridget Phillipson on childcare, Brexit and faith

On 12 April last year, Boris Johnson’s fixed penalty notice was dominating the news. Few noticed another, perhaps equally seismic political story in Bournemouth: a member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet was being booed by the unions. Speaking at the National Education Union’s annual conference, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson faced a revolt. She had reneged on a Corbyn-era pledge to abolish the schools inspectorate, Ofsted. ‘It began with heckling and then it became louder and there was a mass walkout. They continued the demonstration outside the conference hall,’ Phillipson says nonchalantly. Was she put off? ‘I was taken aback by the degree of hostility. If they are not prepared

Mark Galeotti

Ukraine’s drone war on Russia could backfire

Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential threat and reassuring distance: the Russian president portrays the conflict as a struggle to preserve the nation from a hostile West and its Ukrainian proxy, but one fought safely outside its borders. Increasingly, Kyiv seems to want to bring the war to Russia, though, in a gamble which could go either way. A drone identified as a Ukrainian-made Ukrjet UJ-22 Airborne, capable of carrying up to 20kg of explosives, crashed close to a gas distribution station 60 miles southeast of Moscow yesterday. This is more than 300 miles from the

Fraser Nelson

The importance of exposing Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages

For a while now, I’ve been buried deep in a vault in the Daily Telegraph going through the Matt Hancock files. Like the MPs expenses expose, it is a project that was carried out in secrecy and with astonishing thoroughness and resources. Several journalists, including some of the newspaper’s very best, have been working non-stop on this for weeks, going over some 2.3 million words of messages. That’s four times as large as War & Peace. The hunt isn’t just for the stories, but for context; every published exchange is carefully monitored to make sure nothing is left out. I’d have loved to have run this story in The Spectator but only