Politics

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

Monday

Quentin Letts

How to fail upwards

Steam, which is largely insubstantial, rises. The same goes for soap suds, methane bubbles and numerous politicians. We naively consider 21st-century Britain a meritocracy, yet serial failures still float to the top of our public life. It has been a good year for these latter-day Widmerpools. Two changes of prime minister provided rich openings. One failer-upper made it all the way to 10 Downing Street; another leads HM Opposition. They are not just in parliamentary politics. In the civil service, journalism, art, football, business, the church and elsewhere, duffers drift upwards, grinning inanely while the rest of us gasp: ‘How did that happen?’ Resistance is pointless. We should embrace these

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The greatest threat to Holy Island since the Vikings

It’s hard to explain how sad it will be if, after Christmas, Defra officials ban fishing on Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, in the North Sea, where the Lindisfarne gospels were written and where men and women have fished for hundreds if not thousands of years. For some reason no one can quite work out, Holy Island has been placed on the shortlist to become a Highly Protected Marine Area – HPMA – in which no fishing of any sort is allowed. But banning all fishing will destroy the village; Lindisfarne, which has been inhabited since long before its most famous residents, St Aidan and St Cuthbert, set up

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s troubling Rotherham selection

Earlier this month, the Rother Valley Labour party made its pick for the next election, selecting Dominic Beck as its candidate for the Tory-held seat. Who he, you might ask? Well thanks to the work of GB News’ documentary-maker Charlie Peters, we now know. Beck is a local politician who has served on Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (RMBC) since May 2011. In August 2014, Professor Alexis Jay published her report which found that at least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The RMBC cabinet resigned: Beck was appointed in the subsequent reshuffle with responsibility for business growth and regeneration in September 2014.

Steerpike Steerpike

Jolyon Maugham’s meltdown continues

Christmas is just two weeks away, and with it comes an inauspicious anniversary. It will be three years since the Boxing Day massacre, when the kimono-wearing, baseball-bat wielding KC Jolyon Maugham brutally beat a fox to death, incurring much mockery and the opprobrium of the RSPCA for his boastful tweets about the slaying. Maugham – a self-made man who worships his creator – subsequently apologised but the damage was done to both the opportunistic omnivore and the lawyer’s own reputation. Perhaps then that looming milestone is why the Babe Ruth of the bar has been in such a huffy, hysterical mood this weekend. First, he opted to attack the Charity

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

GDP grows – but the UK isn’t out of the woods on recession

Have the prospects of a recession been overstated? That would be the most optimistic reading of this morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics, which released the latest set of monthly GDP data showing 0.5 per cent growth in October. This is the biggest monthly rise since January, when the economy was bouncing back from a voluntary slowdown in activity when the Omicron variant of Covid hit last Christmas. Unfortunately, a breakdown of the data waters down that optimism. October’s 0.5 per cent growth followed a 0.6 per cent contraction in September, half of which the ONS thinks was directly linked to the bank holiday added to the calendar

Sunday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Wes Streeting and the urgent need for NHS reform

The NHS England waiting list stands at 7.2 million – and the shadow health secretary is one of them. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph today, and subsequently on the media round, Wes Streeting is speaking openly about being ‘mucked around’ by the NHS. He has been trying for months now to get a scan to confirm his kidney cancer is gone. But the appointment was pushed back, and then his time was wasted where he showed up for the results and discovered they had not been processed yet.  Streeting insists this is about ‘the system’, not the doctors and nurses who work inside of it. He says Labour is

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Strikes will deepen NHS winter crisis

Stephen Powis – ‘There is trouble brewing this winter’ The National Health Service is bracing itself as the strike dates set by the Royal College of Nursing begin to loom, with the first to take place on Thursday 15 December. Laura Kuenssberg sat down with Stephen Powis, the medical director of NHS England, to discuss the many strains on the system. Powis suggested that if people thought that previous NHS winter crises were bad, there wasn’t much cause for hope in 2022: James Cleverly – ‘We have to be sensible with our expenditure’ On Sky News, Jayne Secker spoke to the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly about the government’s role in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Football won’t save France or Britain from decline

Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron rekindled their bromance on Saturday, swapping tweets prior to England’s World Cup quarter-final clash with France. It was a bit of fun, diplomatic joshing, but Sunday morning will have felt a whole lot sweeter for the president of France.  He is a genuine football fan, not something that can be said of the Prime Minister, but Macron also knows how important this World Cup is for a France mired in economic and social woe. The same was true for England, and Sunak must have cursed Harry Kane more than most as he ballooned the ball over the bar from the penalty spot.   The World Cup

Julien Foster

The tricky business of Judges’ names

From now on, barristers like me will no longer have to worry about calling a District Judge ‘Sir’ or avoiding clumsy expressions such as ‘Has Sir read the papers?’ in court. Nor will I have to wonder if I have to call a judge ‘Madam’, ‘Ma’am’ (to rhyme with dam) or ‘Ma’am (to rhyme with calm). Instead, all advocates, litigants and witnesses in England and Wales will now address most judges in court simply as ‘Judge’, after a new ruling from the Lord Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals.  My reaction when I heard this news was mixed, as you might expect: lawyers have a reputation for ensuring that the simplest issue has at least two

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

What’s the difference between Starmer and Sunak?

If we were to build a hybrid politician out of the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, then which of each party’s main policy stances would he advance and which would be dropped? Our amalgam – let’s call him Krishi Sumer – would accept the basic permitted spending envelope for any given level of taxation that was set out by Jeremy Hunt the other week. He’d certainly advance strong support for Ukraine and unflinching resistance to the evil ways of Vladimir Putin. He’d also be a stout supporter of the Union and hammer of the SNP and other Celtic nationalists. On so-called ‘culture war’ matters he would play things

Saturday

Lucy Dunn

Volunteers won’t save the NHS this winter

Workers are balloting for industrial action, attending mass demonstrations and preparing to strike. A ferocious tug-o’-war between trade unions and employers is playing out across the country. Though striking RMT members have been accused of ‘ruining Christmas’, the country’s greatest fears should be reserved for the NHS, which will see ambulance workers and nurses walk out before January, when junior doctors in England cast their vote on industrial action. Is there a solution? A leaked briefing from the Department of Health and Social Care suggests that the government believes volunteers could act as a buffer while healthcare staff take action this winter.  The 31-page report reveals that NHS performance is

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China’s dangerous zero-Covid retreat

China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It is abrupt and haphazard and comes at a particularly risky time. Hundreds of millions of people will soon be on the move for Chinese New Year, which is next month, and the spread of the virus, already fast, will accelerate rapidly. The transition to living with Covid has not been easy for any country but will be particularly difficult for China – and dangerous for the communist party. After almost three years of instilling fear – with brutal lockdowns, mass testing, sweeping quarantine and claustrophobic surveillance – the virus is

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney, Chloë Ashby and Ysenda Maxtone Graham

18 min listen

This week: Jenny McCartney says don’t expect a united Ireland any time soon (00:57), Chloë Ashby reads her review of Con/Artist the memoir of notorious art forger Tony Tetro (07:57), and Ysenda Maxtone Graham tells us the etiquette of canapés (14:55).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. 

Simeon Tegel

Peru’s staggeringly incompetent far-left coup

Lima, Peru For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of Pedro Castillo, their staggeringly incompetent and deeply unpopular far left president. On Wednesday, they got their answer — when Castillo made a botched attempt to metamorphise from an elected head-of-state into an even more inept version of that trope of Latin American history, the caudillo or authoritarian strongman. Cornered by anticorruption prosecutors and facing an impeachment vote that evening, the 53-year-old former rural schoolteacher and wildcat strike leader decided to take the bull by the horns. In an unannounced televised address to the nation shortly before noon, Castillo, his hands

Robert Tombs

England vs France is far more than a football match

When England play France tonight, more will be involved than just a game of football.  We all know why. Even those with an enviable indifference to history will have vague notions about Agincourt, Joan of Arc, Waterloo, Napoleon and General de Gaulle. When I first went to France decades ago I was surprised to be asked fairly regularly why we had fired on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir – an event which, despite my history degree, had largely passed me by.  From the Norman Conquest to the Tudors, England was in a formative and often abusive relationship with France. Our language was changed by the influx of French, but on the other hand

Iain Macwhirter

Is the SNP falling apart?

The SNP should be basking in its recent formidable polling success. Not only does support for independence appear to be on the rise – with 56 per cent in favour, according to the latest Ipsos Mori poll – but there is evidence too that the SNP could win an outright majority in the next Scottish parliament elections. So why does the party appear to be falling apart? Three front bench resignations in as many days doesn’t look like a party at peace with itself.   The Westminster group of SNP MPs is roiled by divisions and rancour. The palace coup by the 34-year-old Stephen Flynn against veteran Westminster leader Ian Blackford

Friday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The two books that made me a Conservative

From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often dazzle the reader with a display of erudition or passion, rather than tell the more mundane truth. The mundane truth is that our dispositions and the courses of our lives tend to be fixed before our ages run to two digits: a time when we were unlikely to be tackling Proust, understanding Nietzsche or appreciating C.P. Cavafy. The child being father to the man, we should be looking at fairy tales, picture books and First Readers if we seek the truly formative influence of literature. Foreign and war correspondents or

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak needs to get tough on strikers

We are still a long way from the Winter of Discontent, when 29.5 million worker-days were lost to strikes. Nevertheless, with today’s strike of 115,000 postal workers the number is creeping inexorably upwards. This one-day strike alone will cost 40 per cent of the 273,000 lost working days recorded across all industries over the whole of 2018. To describe Britain as being in the grip of a wave of public sector strikes isn’t quite accurate. The 115,000 Royal Mail workers who have walked out today are not public sector workers. Nor are the train drivers, guards and other train staff who have been striking, on and off, for much of