Politics Archives

Friday

28 Oct 2022

Why shouldn’t Macron meet Meloni?

One in four Italians who voted at last month’s election backed Giorgia Meloni’s conservative Brothers of Italy party – that is 7,302,517 men and women. Second in the general election was the centre-left Democratic party with 5,356,180 votes with 19 per cent. In other words, Meloni’s victory was resounding. Coming as it did after the brief premiership of the unelected Mario Draghi one might even call it a victory for democracy. Yet the western reaction to Italy electing its first female prime minister was overwhelmingly cold and aloof. The Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, for example, promised to keep a close eye on Meloni to ensure she respected Italy’s human rights

Thursday

27 Oct 2022

Steerpike

Trevor Noah’s bizarre Sunak skit backfires

Fire up the engine, the clickbait machine has gone into overdrive. Mr S doesn’t spend much of his time watching America’s Daily Show for obvious reasons: life is short and sermons are best delivered on a Sunday. Yet, stumbling across Monday’s episode of the late-night satirical programme, Steerpike couldn’t help but reflect on the sheer crassness of its host Trevor Noah: a man who has done for comedy what Harold Shipman did for palliative care. As predictable as he is tedious, Noah, inevitably, seized on the imagined ‘backlash’ which has – supposedly – greeted Rishi Sunak’s appointment to the premiership. In an achingly right-on monologue, accompanied by the hollow whoops

Stephen Daisley

In defence of Ash Regan’s gender bravery

Ash Regan’s decision to resign as Nicola Sturgeon’s community safety minister will not have been taken lightly. The Scottish parliament has today passed stage one of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, legislation championed by Sturgeon which will make it easier to access a gender recognition certificate, remove medical experts from the process and lower the applicable age to 16. Regan told Sturgeon in her resignation letter that ‘my conscience will not allow me to vote with the government’. Regan was one of a handful of SNP politicians who signed an open letter in 2019 warning ministers: ‘Changing the definition of male and female is a matter of profound significance. It

Nigel Jones

The Tory wars haven’t gone away

Rishi Sunak told the Tories to ‘unite or die’ as he took office this week. Some of his party colleagues appear to be pursuing the latter option. It hasn’t taken long for Conservative MPs to resume the civil war that has brought the party to its current parlous and deeply divided state. First came an open clash in the Commons chamber between Jacob Rees-Mogg and fellow Tory Richard Graham, the MP for Gloucester. Not waiting for his inevitable sacking as business secretary, Rees-Mogg had only just finished penning his handwritten resignation letter on Tuesday when he accused Graham of never having accepted Brexit. Graham angrily denied the charge as ‘utterly

Wednesday

26 Oct 2022

James Heale

Will anyone buy my Liz Truss book?

‘If you’re having a bad day at work,’ read the Twitter meme, ‘at least you’re not Harry Cole or James Heale.’ The inglorious collapse of Liz Truss’s government put paid to many plans, but none more so than the biography of the lady herself, which Harry and I have been writing for the past ten weeks. Having started the project as her biographers, we ended it as her political obituarists, furiously rewriting copy as it became clear that our intended cliff-hanger could only have one ending. Our deadline was 29 October. Harry (who is the political editor of the Sun) and I signed the deal for Out of the Blue:

Katy Balls

Will the Tory truce hold?

During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he won. It would have required a major polling error and gone down as one of the biggest political upsets in recent years. ‘If we win, we win by 1 per cent,’ was how one close ally of Sunak put it at the time. If this had played out, it would have come as a nasty surprise to many in the Tory party. With wounds still raw from Boris Johnson’s departure, the deposed former PM’s loyalists would have quickly gone on the offensive – accusing Sunak of being a traitor for

Samir Shah

How will Rishi Sunak’s Hinduism inform his premiership?

When Rishi Sunak was elected as an MP, he swore his oath of allegiance in the House of Commons on the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most sacred texts. Many – if not most – people think that Hinduism is a religion of peace: an idea that’s taken root thanks to Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence. The truth is that the Bhagavad Gita is about war. The text consists of the dialogue between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna on the battlefield. Prince Arjuna is facing amoral and emotional dilemma. The battle is against his own kith and kin – many of whom would be sure to be killed.

Charles Moore

The personal faith of PMs

I have seen it suggested that because Rishi Sunak is a Hindu, it would be wrong for him to have any role in the appointment of bishops in the Church of England. This is a non-sequitur. So long as the C of E remains the church by law established, its main appointments must, in formal terms, be made by the Supreme Governor of that church, the monarch, ‘on advice’. That advice, though informed by the views of the hierarchy, must be tendered by the Prime Minister. Gordon Brown, when prime minister, tried to shuffle off these responsibilities, perhaps feeling rather Presbyterian about them; but this does not work. If the Church of

Alexander Downer

The threat to Britain’s undersea cables

‘In the digital age of cloud computing, the idea that steel and plastic pipes are integral to our life seems anachronistic,’ wrote Rishi Sunak. ‘But our ability to transmit confidential information, to conduct financial transactions and to communicate internationally all depend upon a global network of physical cables lying under the sea.’ And what if those cables are cut? ‘The threat is nothing short of existential.’ Sunak wrote those words five years ago in a paper for the thinktank Policy Exchange. Last weekend, as he was running to become prime minister, he was proven right. The Shetland Islands lost phone and internet connections after the cable that links the islands

Louise Perry

Why the next wave of feminism is conservative

At a recent dinner, an MP told me a story that reveals a great deal about the current state of feminism. One of her constituents had come to her surgery in some distress. She had children at a local primary school, she said, and had been alarmed to discover that the school’s sex education curriculum contained explicit details that she considered wildly inappropriate. She was aware of the prevailing culture in which adolescents – particularly girls – are sexualised at an ever younger age, and she did not want that for her own children. But parents are increasingly powerless in the face of progressive schools, and not having been to

Julian Jessop

Liz Truss: my part in her downfall

Now that the final curtain has fallen on Liz Truss’s brief and tumultuous premiership, it is time for reflection. A chance to set the record straight and also to own up to mistakes – especially for those of us who tried to advise her. What went wrong? Yes, the tipping point was Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. But three problems were by then already brewing. First, the leadership campaign over the summer had become very focused on tax cuts. Even Rishi Sunak ended up saying he would cut the basic rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 16 per cent by the end of the next parliament, while Jeremy Hunt

James Forsyth

Is Rishi ready? Sunak’s first test will be getting through winter

It is the most remarkable turnaround in recent political history. On 5 September, Rishi Sunak lost the Tory leadership race to Liz Truss with 43 per cent of the vote. He was written off as another politician with a brilliant future behind him. Seven weeks later, the former Chancellor – whom, I should say, I have been friends with for many years – walked through the door of No. 10. His political resurrection was made possible by the economy. He spent the summer warning of the risk of slashing taxes without having a grip on inflation and controlling spending. When Truss followed through on her tax-cutting campaign pledges – adding

Jacob Rees-Mogg

It’s good to be back on the back benches

After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It is a remarkable facility that helps take batteries from development through to production. It means companies only need the hundreds of millions of pounds in investment once they have shown that their product works and is saleable. It was funded by the Faraday Battery Challenge, and I was there to announce a further £221 million of taxpayers’ money. This is one of the rather better ways the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy spends money, while some of our policies seem designed to ruin industry. I am particularly concerned

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sunak in No. 10, pasta gets pricier and Russia hits Ukraine’s energy grid

Home Rishi Sunak, aged 42, became Prime Minister. At the weekend Boris Johnson had flown back from a holiday in the Dominican Republic in response to the resignation of Liz Truss. She said she could not ‘deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party’. The 1922 Committee devised a hurdle of 100 nominations for any MP to be considered as leader, with secret ballots of MPs and, if two candidates remained, an online vote by party members. It was thought that if Mr Johnson secured 100 votes, the membership would elect him. At 9 p.m. on Sunday, the day before nominations closed, he withdrew from the

Cindy Yu

Did Rishi win at PMQs?

12 min listen

Rishi Sunak faced up against Keir Starmer in his first Prime Minister’s Questions today, and rallied the Conservative backbenches to a more enthusiastic mood than has been seen in, perhaps, months. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about the attack lines that Labour are trying out at the moment (on everything from the appointment of Suella Braverman to Rishi Sunak’s comments about diverting money away from ‘deprived urban areas’).

Ross Clark

Is Britain heading into an inflation spiral?

Inflation, asserted Rishi Sunak in his first PMQs, makes us all poorer. That is not entirely true – people relying entirely on the state pension, for example, will be fully compensated for this year’s high inflation, and no doubt some of Sunak’s former colleagues in the hedge fund industry have found a way to profit, too. But generally, he is right. Working people have on the whole suffered a large drop in their real wages. In the year to April, median weekly pay rose by 5 per cent from £610 to £640. In many years that would be a substantial rise, but when adjusted for inflation it comes out as

Lloyd Evans

How long before Rishi fatigue sets in?

The Prime Minister has an Asian background. You wouldn’t know that if you listened to the Tories at PMQs because none of them thought it a big deal – not even Rishi himself. But Sir Keir Starmer instantly used the issue to scold the rest of mankind. ‘Britain is a place where people of all races and beliefs can fulfil their dreams,’ he said, sounding bitter and angry. ‘And that’s not true in many countries,’ he added. A strangely aggressive type of jingoism. His attitude was replicated by a second Labour MP and by two SNP members. It’s a curious habit of some of those on the left: they focus on race to

Andrew Watts

The comfort of hating Britain

I occasionally get sent articles from the ‘London Correspondent of the Papua New Guinea Courier’ – less often, now that most people have realised that it is a satirical blog, not an actual newspaper. The articles are a droll extension of the gag – and it’s a good gag – of describing British politics using the language of foreign correspondents, like referring to ‘UK strongman Rishi Sunak’ or ‘feared interior minister Suella Braverman’. When I gently pointed out that it was all made up, the only person who admitted she had originally taken one of them for a real article insisted it said something true about the government. The fact

Patrick O’Flynn

Backing Badenoch and Braverman is key to Sunak’s success

What do you do when you are a prime minister presiding over a desperately difficult economic outlook riddled with features that are all but intractable in the short-term? Well, in Rishi Sunak’s case, you find other issues that might persuade people to vote for your party and convincing message-carriers to hammer home the approach you are taking. Sunak’s cabinet appointments have left fiscal conservatives in charge of the economic repair job while unleashing cultural conservatives on areas such as immigration control and the militant trans agenda. The reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary was the biggest talking point and biggest risk Sunak took when forming his new administration. But

Isabel Hardman

Sunak will be pleased with his PMQs debut

Rishi Sunak vs Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions today was spicier than many had expected. Both men enjoyed themselves, and though the new Prime Minister has barely had any time to prepare, he was assured and fluent. The session started with the Labour leader marking the appointment of the first Asian British Prime Minister, saying it was a ‘significant moment in our national story’. Sunak thanked Starmer for those words, and said he looked forward to their ‘serious and grown-up’ exchanges in the future. Starmer’s task today was to frame the third Conservative prime minister he’s faced across the despatch box as being just like the rest, and not