Politics

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

Wednesday

13 Jul 2022

Can Penny Mordaunt win it?

Is Penny Mordaunt the dark horse in the Tory leadership race? After topping a Conservative Home poll of Tory MPs, Mordaunt is certainly viewed as a dangerous candidate by her leadership rivals. This morning she held her official campaign launch in a sweaty, crowded room in Westminster’s Cinnamon Club. The former defence secretary struck a patriotic tone as she recalled the Royal Navy’s fleet leaving Portsmouth for the Falklands in 1982. Mordaunt said it made her realise the UK is a nation that ‘stands up to bullies’. Mordaunt suggested she would lead a return to traditional conservative values. Comparing the Tory party to Paul McCartney’s Glastonbury set, she said that while everyone was

Steerpike

Either shut up or get out! Hoyle kicks out Scottish MPs

Prime Minister’s Questions got off to a rowdy start today – which was perhaps not surprising considering that it was the first since Boris Johnson’s resignation last week. But while Boris might have been expecting trouble from the Labour benches, it was parliament’s Scottish MPs who ended up causing trouble. As the Prime Minister began to answer his first question, the session was drowned out by heckling from the Alba party (formerly of the SNP) who began shouting incoherently about another referendum. Not to be outdone, the MPs were promptly shouted down by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who told them to ‘either shut up or get out’. As the heckling continued

Isabel Hardman

Is it really ‘business as usual’ in Boris’s government?

Priti Patel was supposed to be going before the Home Affairs committee this morning, but pulled out, citing ministerial changes in her department and recent events. The Home Secretary is understood to have cancelled the long-planned appearance at 5pm yesterday, seriously angering members of the cross-party committee. It raises an important question of whether the government is running a ‘business as usual’ operation while searching for a new PM This sounds like the sort of thing that only parliamentary nerds could possibly get cross about. But it does raise an important question about whether the government is really running a ‘business as usual’ operation while the Conservative party hunts for

Steerpike

What is Michael Gove up to?

The Westminster rumour mill is in overdrive about Michael Gove’s intentions in the leadership contest. Fresh from bringing down Boris, the Brutus of the backbenches has surprised some by opting to back Kemi Badenoch in the race to find Johnson’s successor. His endorsement of Badenoch impressed some colleagues but many right wing Tories have convinced themselves that it is just part of a plot to split their wing of the party. Steve Baker went public on Monday, telling LBC listeners that: I am given to understand quite authoritatively from a candidate that Michael Gove started with Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove is now backing Kemi Badenoch. And I understand that

Ed Husain

How Joe Biden can woo the Saudis

‘You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing,’ said Winston Churchill, ‘after they have tried everything else.’ After much American talk of a ‘pivot to Asia’ and hence ‘withdrawal from the Middle East’, president Biden and his top team are visiting Israel today. From there, they will head to the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds: Saudi Arabia. Biden is coming from a White House full of young political staffers, most of whom have little respect for age and wisdom. In the Middle East, as with most Muslim-majority nations, a culture of veneration for the elderly still holds. Leaders, families, tribes, faiths, traditions and, with it,

Douglas Murray

Shouldn’t we feel sorry for Hunter Biden?

Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of

Fraser Nelson

Suella Braverman is right about welfare

At a time of a worker shortage, we are somehow managing to keep 5.3 million people on out-of-work benefits. This is too much, says Suella Braverman. My colleague Stephen Daisley fervently disagrees and in his riposte, he quotes various figures about how Britain doesn’t spend very much on welfare compared to other countries. This is precisely what New Labour argued when it was keeping five million on benefits throughout the boom years and the argument didn’t stack up then either. The below shows the problem to which Braverman alludes: it really is quite a scandal and points to massive government failure. Set aside the wasted money: keeping 5.3 million working-age people

Penny Mordaunt

How I plan to turn Britain around

This is the full text of Penny Mordaunt’s Tory leadership campaign launch: We’ve got to stave off a recession, we’ve got huge expectations to deliver on with Brexit, and we have new burdens to shoulder Over the past few days, I have been engaged in a form of speed dating with my colleagues. I’ve learnt a lot. I know that some of them were councillors before they came into parliament, they ran businesses, they worked with the voluntary sector, some of them are still pulling shifts in the NHS or with our armed forces, and many are veterans.They want to serve others. And when I meet people like that I wonder what

Frank Young

The Treasury’s childcare trap

Announcements from Tory leadership pretenders have been noticeably light on big ideas. But one interesting policy suggestion was floated today by the Mordaunt camp who have said that frazzled parents of toddlers should be given ‘childcare budgets’. This is likely to horrify Treasury mandarins who prefer schemes to get parents (in reality, mums) back into work and paying taxes as quickly as possible. Free nursery care for all is the fashionable go-to answer for every right-on lobby group hoping to reverse tanking birth rates. If we could only open up more super cheap nursery places, women would push out children to fill the places. The trouble is new mums don’t

Gavin Mortimer

Could the Tories suffer the same fate as the French right?

Here are some statistics that ought to send a shudder through Tory MPs. Between 1995 and 2012 the French centre-right was in presidential power, first under Jacques Chirac and then the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy. The month after Sarko was elected president in 2007, his party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), won 313 seats in the National Assembly. Today, following a rebrand to become Les Républicans in 2015, they have 62. This is actually better than some expected considering their 2022 presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, won just 4.8 per cent of the electorate’s votes, below the 5 per cent threshold required for candidates to be reimbursed their campaign expenses. Pécresse

Charles Lipson

Biden is the emperor with no clothes

The emperor is naked. The public knows it, and they’re finally beginning to speak the obvious truth. The emperor, in this case, is President Biden. He took office with high hopes from voters and a promise to bring the country together. Those aspirations are dead. The public has lost confidence in Joe Biden – lost confidence that he can do the job, and lost confidence that he is even minimally competent. They certainly don’t think he has brought the country together (though they think Republicans share the blame for that). This sour mood hurts more than the President. It hurts his entire party, and will be extremely hard to reverse.

Fergus Butler-Gallie

What the Tory candidates’ logos say about them

There’s a particularly amusing picture from the 1997 Tory leadership contest of Ken Clarke and John Redwood awkwardly paired up under a blue sign with the words ‘Uniting to Win’ on it. Though their campaign for power was forgettable, uniting to lose against William Hague of all people, they can take solace in being an unlikely pair of trend-setters. Theirs was the first use of a logo and slogan in an internal party contest, the start of a succession of design shockers on the British public ever since. The standard of this year’s leaders’ logos shows a slow decline. Back to basics would be a fine thing. Most slogans have

Nigel Jones

Is Rishi too rich to rule?

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar says of Gaius Longinus Cassius, the chief conspirator: ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look: he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’. None of the eight Tories fighting like ferrets in a sack to succeed our own fallen Caesar, Boris Johnson, looks leaner or hungrier than the former chancellor in his crisply laundered snow white shirt. But would what is beginning to look like his inevitable triumph as prime minister be good or dangerous for the Tory party, and the country at large? Both supporters and opponents of Sunak might care to consider the case of John Major, the man who rose without trace

Robert Tombs

Backing Badenoch is a risk the Tories should take

Whoever is chosen to lead the Conservative party will be plunged into a storm of problems needing rapid and decisive action. This will require a fresh mind, boundless energy and courage. In short, the attributes of youth. This puts Kemi Badenoch and Rishi Sunak – both 42 years of age – at an advantage. Sunak, the current frontrunner, came across as suave and impressive in his leadership pitch yesterday. But Badenoch looks to be the better option for a Tory party – and for a country – in need of radical change. Too many leading politicians seem exhausted by office. At a time of soaring inflation and the threat of a summer of strikes, this

Jake Wallis Simons

Sri Lanka’s revolution looks doomed

Reporting from Sri Lanka over the years has left me with mixed memories. On the one hand, there’s the horror and trauma of the Easter Bombings of 2019, which claimed 269 lives. The traumatic scenes at the hospital and morgue have been hard to forget, as have the eeriness of the tourist spots after all its foreign visitors had fled. On the other hand, there is the country itself. It is relatively poor, of course, and beset by endemic corruption and nepotism, particularly at the top of government, along with its fair share of ethnic tension. But it has an incredibly warm-hearted and hospitable culture, filled with Buddhist gentleness and

Tuesday

12 Jul 2022

Steerpike

George Freeman’s leadership shenanigans

It seems that George Freeman has got his summer flip-flops in early. The (recently departed) science and innovation minister hasn’t had a great few weeks in the Commons recently. First, there was last month’s leadership vote in Boris Johnson in which Freeman initially refused to say which way he had voted. This was then followed by last week’s rather more successful coup against Johnson in which Freeman submitted a public letter of no confidence in the PM . He did not, however, make clear if he was resigning or not, sparking confusion and derision among bemused colleagues and hacks. Having announced that he had, in fact, resigned, Freeman then took

Kate Andrews

Investing today: how tech can change the face of finance

59 min listen

Staying on top of your personal finances has never been easier. Anyone can now buy and sell stocks at the tap of a phone screen, with even more progress in fintech just around the corner. What does this bold new world of investing mean for markets, policymakers and everyday investors? Does smart technology mean easy decisions? Will technology ever replace the human touch? And what tools are out there for the less digitally savvy?

Svitlana Morenets

How Justin Trudeau caved to Putin

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West was certain that its sanctions were worth the pain. But there always was a question as to whether this resolve would last once the domestic difficulties actually started. This week, western countries moved closer to admitting it might be too much to bear. At the time of the invasion in February, a massive Russian turbine was being repaired in Montreal. It was one of many turbines used to send gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline from Russia to Germany. When the Russians moved into Ukraine, it was kept in Canada as punishment. Over the next few weeks and months Russia replied, cutting off

Lloyd Evans

Bleak, vapid and banal: why are the Tory leadership videos so awful?

The Tory candidates have released a set of videos presenting their claim to become Britain’s next prime minister. Frontrunner Rishi Sunak has dubbed his pitch, ‘Ready for Rishi’, which sounds, unfortunately, like the cheapest option at a Hounslow massage parlour. His movie centres on his unstoppable rise to world domination. His mum was a penniless immigrant who passed her exams and worked at a chemist’s shop in Southampton. His Dad was a humble NHS doctor. Scratchy old Kodak photos show us the ‘Sunak Pharmacy’ in all its faded grandeur. He omits his public school days and his City whizz-kid career. And he says nothing about his mega-rich wife. Clearly he

James Forsyth

Who will Priti Patel endorse?

Priti Patel is not running for the Tory leadership. The Home Secretary ruled herself out in a statement released minutes ago. Her decision not to stand makes it much more likely that Suella Braverman can get the nominations needed to get on the ballot and the 30 votes required to stay in the contest. Patel does not say who she is going to back herself. But the speculation is that it will be either Nadhim Zahawi or Liz Truss rather than Braverman, her rival for the support of the ERG. Patel’s support would be an adrenalin shot for the Zahawi campaign which is not yet at 20 publicly declared backers.