Politics

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

Tuesday

Francis Pike

Is Imran Khan Pakistan’s Donald Trump?

Imran Khan, the cricketing hero, legendary lothario and deposed prime minister of Pakistan, is in trouble again. His political opponents in the police and the judiciary, in a manner not dissimilar to the judicial attack on former US president Donald Trump, have moved against Khan in recent days by accusing him of terrorist activities. In theory, these charges could carry the death penalty. Khan’s crime was to threaten retaliatory action against the police and the judiciary in revenge for the arrest of his chief of staff, Shahbaz Gill. Gill had been roughly arrested by police and his assistant allegedly beaten up. In addition, police had tried to apprehend former Khan acolyte

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The desperate demonisation of Liz Truss

We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist. Of course, the boggle-eyed have said this about pretty much every Conservative leader – pretty much every Conservative – in living memory, but I’ve noticed

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Farewell, St Anthony Fauci

So farewell, Anthony Fauci, the unfortunate face of America’s pandemic response. Well, not so unfortunate – the doctor is stepping down as head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases this December, riding off into the sunset with a reported $350,000 per year golden parachute, the largest pension in US federal history. Fauci has developed something of a reputation for baffling the public – whether it be for contradictory advice on the efficacy of masks or herd immunity or vaccines. Even his resignation announcement was confusing:  I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career… While I am

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

You can’t sit out the culture wars

As if Judy Murray wasn’t already a national treasure. When the tennis coach, mother of Jamie and Sir Andy, heard about a biological male poised to be awarded tour status by the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association, she tweeted: The replies are what you might imagine but, refreshingly, Murray has not backed down or issued an apology. It’s important to have people as popular and high-profile as Murray speak out on the undermining of women’s sport. If we left it up to professional bodies and sports journalism, we’d get nothing but an endless stream of platitudes and craven championing of men taking women’s spots. It got me to thinking about who

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Sunak snubs Truss

Oh dear. It appears the blue-on-blue warfare that has dominated the Tory leadership campaign is taking its toll. After reports last week that members of Liz Truss’s team hope Rishi Sunak will decline any job she offers him should she win, it appears the former chancellor has taken such briefings to heart. When a Radio 2 interviewer asked Rishi Sunak today whether he would serve as Liz Truss’ Health Secretary, Sunak reacted with an amused laugh and answered: ‘you really need to agree with the big things because it’s tough… and I wouldn’t want to end up in a situation like that again.’ Sunak is following in the footsteps of

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Truss scared of the OBR?

11 min listen

The focus is on Liz Truss’s planned emergency budget. Over the weekend it was revealed that she wouldn’t consult the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) before announcing her plans. Could this backfire? Also on the podcast, investment bank Citi have warned that inflation could hit 18 per cent come January. Were the Bank of England’s projections too optimistic? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews. Produced by Natasha Feroze and Oscar Edmondson.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Sanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy

With an honourable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of ‘party’ as a verb. It immediately reminds me of ‘Party, party, party, oikies!’ – the war cry of the drunken potbellied Afrikaaners who once roared in their bakkiesonto our Namibian campsite at about 2 a.m. and proceeded to be, well, Boerish. It’s a usage that smacks of creepy men in movies inviting young women into their cars, or footballers in search of questionably consensual sex. It has passed from a frat-boy Americanism into a tabloid euphemism for illegal drug use and sexual sleaze without ever quite passing through a phase of meaning, actually, having a party.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Truss and Sunak reach crunch week on the energy crisis

There’s still two weeks of the Tory leadership contest to go but by Friday the scale of the energy crisis that awaits the next prime minister will be clear for all to see. This is when Ofgem is due to announce the new level at which energy bills will be capped. After the price cap hit £1,971 in April, the forecasts point to trouble ahead. Cornwall Insight predicts the October rise could see bills go up to £3,582 a year. This could go up to £4,266 by January with suggestions it could even reach £6,000 by April next year. After Friday, both candidates will come under greater pressure to spell

Sunday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What the Dugin assassination tells us about Russia

Car bombs used to be a fixture of gangland feuds in 1990s Russia but have since fallen out of fashion. This makes it all the more striking when, as happened on Saturday night, such a device rips through a car just outside Moscow, killing Darya Dugina, daughter of the controversial nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. She was a prominent figure in her own right, a journalist working for an outfit Washington says is owned by Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin – under sanctions in the West for being the godfather of both the Wagner mercenary group and the infamous social media ‘troll farms’ – who had been a cheerleader for the war in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe’s new migrant crisis

Earlier this month I spent a week in Sicily, driving south from Palermo to Agrigento and then east to Syracuse and Messina. It was my first visit to Sicily in 17 years and, given the media reports, I had expected to find the island crowded with migrants from Africa. In fact, I saw none, other than those I glimpsed in a fenced-off processing centre at the quayside in Agrigento, the first port of call for many migrants who arrive in Sicily. Last week the local paper in Agrigento drew on official government figures to reveal that so far in 2022, 45,664 migrants have landed on Italian territory, an increase of

Jack Brown

Will an Office for the Prime Minister work?

Boris Johnson now leads an interim administration. Within a fortnight, we will have a new occupant of No. 10. What will Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss find waiting for them in Downing Street? And what might the machinery of government mean for their ability to deliver on their campaign promises? The first thing that will strike the new Prime Minister is Johnson’s internal reforms. The creation of an ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ is potentially the most significant, although it was announced late in Johnson’s premiership and it remains to be seen how seriously it has been taken. On arrival, the new Prime Minister may therefore be equally entitled to

Theodore Dalrymple

How we fell for antidepressants

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By then, of course, this famous neurochemical had become the key to a perfect human existence, too little or too much of it resulting in all the little problems that continue to plague mankind. If only we could get the chemical balance in our brains right, all would be well, life would return to its normal bliss! After the commercialisation of Prozac, people started talking about the chemical balance in their brains in much the same way as they talked about the ingredients of a recipe. As Peter D. Kramer put

Steven Fielding

Thatcherism is a cult the Tories should not follow

Friedrich Nietzsche may not be the most fashionable member of the conservative canon, but doubtless he wouldn’t care much. He knew that one of the main symptoms of a civilisation in decline is ‘herd thinking’. Regardless of the victor, this summer’s Conservative leadership contest has been a case in point for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. None of the candidates have dared deviate from the dogma of Thatcherism. Grant Shapps said it loudest: like Thatcher, he would confront union ‘Luddites’ to save an ailing economy. Liz Truss wants to to ‘crack down’ on trade union ‘militants’ by making it harder for them to call strikes. Truss didn’t even need to name Thatcher

Saturday

Mary Dejevsky

The strange morality of sponsoring weapons

Forget fund-raising concerts donating spare clothes and offering your spare room to a refugee family. There’s a better way of showing your sympathy for Ukrainians: you can now sponsor weapons, and arm it with your very own message. For up to £2,500, Brits can send a personalised message to the crowdfunding site Sign My Rocket, who will then write it on a missile destined for the Russian army. Sending hostile messages to the enemy, of course, is not new, and may be as old as war itself. Dropping black propaganda leaflets from planes for the benefit of the enemy beneath has long been standard practice. Nor was it unusual for

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Don’t write off Michael Gove

No senior politician has ever possessed a talent for upsetting prime ministers to match that of Michael Gove’s. David Cameron unfriended him after the EU referendum, having believed Gove had assured him he would campaign for Remain only to see him mastermind the triumphant Leave operation. While Boris Johnson was forgiven for his front-of-house Brexit role, Gove was forever damned. Theresa May then left him out of her first cabinet as a calculated rebuke for his spectacular betrayal of Johnson during the 2016 leadership election by which time a ‘Game of Thrones’ mentality appeared to have completely overtaken him. Johnson himself last month fired Gove from the cabinet before he

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Toby Young and Mark Palmer

15 min listen

On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Katy Balls discusses the challenges facing prospective PM Liz Truss (00:52). Toby Young shares why he is defending a pro-Putin apologist (06:45) and Mark Palmer reads his notes on hand luggage (11:29). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Sunak and Truss are wrong about solar

Rishi Sunak has joined Liz Truss in grumbling about solar panels in fields. This is all rather dismaying, and revealing. It suggests that Conservative leadership contenders – and the party faithful they’re appealing to – lack faith in the transformative power of markets and free enterprise. Those solar panels that Sunak and Truss deplore are nothing less than an economic miracle, delivered by private companies seeking profit. Anyone who proclaims themselves supporters of markets should be shouting from the rooftops about this miracle, since it shows how people and organisations freely allocating capital makes our world better, fast. Private enterprise works because the incentive to make a profit by selling

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Gove says Truss’s plans are a ‘holiday from reality’

Is the Tory leadership race already over? That’s the narrative among Conservative MPs with two weeks of the leadership contest to go. The Sunak camp dispute this version of events – and tonight they have an endorsement which works in their favour. After several Tory MPs switched their allegiance from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss, this evening Michael Gove has endorsed the former Chancellor. Writing for the Times, the former Minister for the Cabinet Office has argued Truss’s plans for immediate tax cuts are a ‘holiday from reality’ that would put ‘the stock options of FTSE 100 executives’ before the poorest. He says that Sunak is best placed to prioritise

Debbie Hayton

The gender debate is getting nastier

Elaine Miller is one of the grown-ups. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, with a specialism in pelvic health. She also jokes about it. Her comedy show, Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story is currently playing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a good one: the production has won awards and a five-star review. Miller is forthright – her audiences are warned about ‘strong language and swearing’ – but her performance is more than mere entertainment. In Miller’s words, The aim of the show is that the audience leave knowing what a pelvic floor is, what it does and where to take theirs if they think it