Politics

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

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

It’s crunch week for Truss and Sunak

The next 48 hours have the potential to be decisive when it comes to the outcome of the Tory leadership contest. This evening, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will go head-to-head in a BBC primetime debate – followed by a second clash on Tuesday hosted by TalkTV. Depending on who you speak to, these debates could reset the dial or have no effect at all. But scratch the surface and ultimately both of the campaign teams view them as a moment of risk for their candidate ahead of the ballots going out next week. Depending on who you speak to, these debates could reset the dial or have no effect

Andrew Tettenborn

Will the police finally see sense on ‘non-crime hate incidents’?

Sex offences, violence and fraud have spiked, according to the latest crime figures. Meanwhile, the number of convictions remains staggeringly low: in England and Wales, more than 99 per cent of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. In short, there’s plenty for the police to get on with. Yet worryingly, officers are sometimes kept busy investigating legitimate debate. Finally, though, there are signs that police chiefs are seeing sense. The College of Policing, the national standards body for police, has said that officers need to focus on cutting crime, take a common sense approach and ‘not get involved in debates on Twitter’. Police have been told to avoid recording trivial incidents and reduce the

Steerpike Steerpike

Nadine Dorries goes for Sunak (again)

It’s getting a bit dirty in the Tory leadership race now. Over the weekend, briefings heated up between the Sunak and Truss camps. Both accused each other of being ‘soft’ on China; the former’s introduction of free ports has been attacked by the latter while Sunak’s schooling has also come under fire from allies of the Foreign Secretary. Good luck to whoever has to unite this party after 5 September… In these troubled times, it would take a master diplomat to try to hold the fraying Tory ties together. So cometh the hour, cometh the Culture Secretary, to pour oil on troubled waters. Nadine Dorries has been something of a

Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford

Can the new PM survive the winter?

Climate and energy have been peripheral issues in the Conservative leadership campaign thus far. In the early stages, only Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman indicated a desire for meaningful change, both calling for a serious reassessment or even suspension of net zero targets. Green activists were alarmed. Yet even now, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are only offering a programme of dull continuity with Boris Johnson’s green policies. At most, their ideas amount to some window dressing measures: shifting green levies from energy bills to tax bills, and so on. In a few months’ time, however, Badenoch and Braverman may look rather prescient, because the new prime minister will find themselves

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Boris be back?

‘Hasta la vista, baby’ Boris Johnson told the Commons at his final PMQs. But could the fallen leader be seeking inspiration from another Schwarzenegger quote: ‘I’ll be back’? There’s been much excited talk in recent days about whether Johnson could ever make a comeback, with some supporters fearing that the Privileges Committee investigation is an attempt to force him to resign his Uxbridge seat and prevent this from ever happening. And now a few of Johnson’s allies have announced they are not going to accept his defenestration lightly. Lord Cruddas, ennobled by the Prime Minister, and David Campbell-Bannerman, a former Conservative MEP, are trying to organise a grassroots revolt. They

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Macron would prefer Rishi Sunak as PM

France and Britain have been bickering again, this time about the chaos at the ferry ports over the weekend. The ‘clown’, as Emmanuel Macron reportedly dubbed Boris Johnson, may be on his way out, but there seems no end in sight to the circus that Anglo-French relations have become. Might that change with a new ringmaster in No. 10? Maybe, if Rishi Sunak wins the contest to become prime minister. Sunak and Macron are similar in many ways beyond their background in finance; presentable and polished but, so say their detractors, ideologically shallow. In this week’s Spectator Douglas Murray describes Sunak as resembling ‘someone who has floated to the top

Sunday

Glen O’Hara

Why prime minister Truss might surprise us all

Many Labour supporters are quietly allowing themselves to celebrate: if Liz Truss does win the Tory leadership, a Labour government, they think, is much more likely. It may well be so. Among the general public, Truss is on many measures the least popular of the last three Conservative contenders who fought it out last week. YouGov found that even Tory members preferred Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt to the Foreign Secretary. The reason is obvious, and personal. Truss comes across as by turns slightly eccentric, a bit vacant and – well, there’s no easy way to say this – just a tad weird. Truss has failed to win over even

Peter Wood

The two Americas: California vs. Florida

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office. You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. ‘Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.’ Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the 46th governor of the state, Ron DeSantis. Or, ‘Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Hungary’s revenge: Orban is sacrificing EU unity for Russian gas

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke magnanimously while receiving his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó in Moscow this week. He promised that the Kremlin would ‘consider’ Hungary’s request for significantly increased gas deliveries, after Viktor Orbán’s right-hand man said his country won’t manage without more Russian resources as Europe faces a deep-freeze this winter. It’s hard to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the EU: a member state supplicating Vladimir Putin’s regime to keep its people warm after years in which the bloc laughed off criticisms about its energy dependency on Moscow. The meeting was a dream for Russia: one of the surest signs yet that European unity on Ukraine is

Sasha Lensky

The tide is turning in Russia’s war on Ukraine

Could Russia triumph? There’s a growing sense that, as the months wear on, Ukraine’s resistance is faltering. The West is losing interest in the conflict and the unthinkable is being said: Putin is winning the war on and off the battlefield. The image of countless hordes of Russian troops grinding down the Ukrainian defences with a 3-to-1 advantage in artillery is at first glance quite convincing. Meanwhile, off the battlefield, the ruble rate is sky high, and sanctions seem to have no discernible effect on the war. Putin’s fiercest opponent Boris Johnson is leaving office, and the energy-dependency of Europe seems to play right into Russia’s hands. Putin now occupies nearly

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

There’s nothing conservative about climate change

The combination of ’40°C temperatures’ and ‘England’ feels about as natural a pairing as ‘English football’ and ‘winning’; God simply did not intend the two to go together as they did this week. And although it feels odd to have to point it out, there’s nothing conservative about believing climate change isn’t a problem. Turning England’s green and pleasant land into scorched savanna should not really be on the manifesto of the least important backbencher, let alone anyone with an aspiration to influence policy. This message has yet to penetrate the cranial shielding of some MPs. Sir John Hayes told the Daily Telegraph we found ourselves in ‘a cowardly new

Robin Ashenden

Tory MPs will regret giving Badenoch the boot

If the chaos of recent weeks in British politics has clarified anything, it’s the almost complete schism between Conservative MPs and the party’s members. That Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have made it to the final round of the Tory leadership contest, ahead of their more popular rivals, paints the Conservatives as a party that no longer wishes nor deserves to win. Not since a close ally of David Cameron’s described Tory activists in 2013 as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’ has contempt for the party’s grass-roots membership – or rather, complete indifference to their wishes – been so marked.  Were there a credible opposition, this would not matter so much. Yet one has

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Why Erdogan is now happy to snub Putin

Vladimir Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of the Ukraine war was supposed to project power. Instead the Russian president appears to have been left red-faced at a summit in Iran this week after his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, left him waiting in front of the TV cameras. For almost a minute, the man who started Europe’s bloodiest conflict in decades didn’t know where to look as he waited, shifting awkwardly on his feet and pressing his tongue into his cheek, with only the click of camera shutters cutting through the excruciating silence. The irony of the encounter hasn’t been lost in Turkey, where

Seb Kennedy

Putin could come to regret his gas game with Europe

Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed trolling European leaders. As relations between Moscow and Berlin deteriorate over reduced natural gas supplies and Ukraine-related sanctions, Putin is now brazenly gaslighting his German counterpart, chancellor Olaf Scholz. But it’s a move he could come to regret. Putin suggested this week that Germany should give the shelved Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline the go ahead to restore gas flows to normal levels. The amount of Russian gas flowing into Germany along the operational Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea is capped at 67 million cubic metres per day (MMcm/d), or about 40 per cent of its technical capacity. Russia claims this is

Saturday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

What Liz Truss learned from the Brexit referendum

Liz Truss may have been a Remainer but she has learned the political lesson of the EU referendum in the way that her genuine Brexiter opponent has seemingly failed to do.  The point is that in today’s milieu, and especially with an electorate of 160,000 largely Brexit-supporting Tory members, power is with the insurgent. In pinning her colours to at least £30 billion of immediate tax cuts, against Sunak’s steady-as-we-go no-tax-cuts-till-prudent mantra, she has defined herself as the crusader against alleged stultifying Treasury orthodoxy. Every time a credible economist accuses her of risking financial ruin – by pushing up national debt and inflation – all she has to do is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Rishi Sunak heal the NHS?

Rishi Sunak’s big pitch this weekend is to grip the NHS waiting list crisis. It makes political sense, given the terrifying size of these lists now, with some trusts declaring their waits ‘unmanageable’. By the time of the next election, the crisis in the NHS is going to seem monstrous. Ethical concerns tend to end up fading whenever a government has failed to do the long-term planning it could have done The former chancellor is worried that the surge in people seeking private treatment is ‘privatisation by the back door’. James and I discuss the wider context of this on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, agreeing that if people

Ian Williams Ian Williams

HSBC has answered the call of the Chinese Communist Party

HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China. The British bank was responding to a report in the Financial Times that it has become the first foreign lender to install a CCP committee in its investment banking subsidiary in China. While neither confirming or denying the report, an HSBC statement played down the importance of the cells, saying, ‘they do not influence the direction of the

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Zelensky is purging the security services of Ukraine

Could a general of the SBU, the security service of Ukraine, really have helped Russia take the city of Kherson? Could a colonel have tipped off the Russians as to where the Ukrainians had lain mines north of Crimea? The Ukrainian government certainly appears to believe that fifth columnists within the SBU have been Moscow’s secret weapon in this war – this week Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of the agency (and his childhood friend) Ivan Bakanov, along with the country’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova. A total of 651 alleged treason and collaboration cases have now been opened against prosecutorial and law enforcement officials, and more than 60 officials from