Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Cabinet’s half-hearted backing for Boris

In this age of social media, it’s live by the tweet and die by the tweet. And when a Tory PM is in peril, such shenanigans take on an importance of semi-constitutional significance as ministers rush (or hesitate) to signal their allegiances. The most ominous sign for Boris Johnson yesterday was how quiet his Cabinet colleagues were after his dreadful PMQs battering.  The session concluded shortly after 12:30 p.m but it was nearly two-and-a-half hours before the first minister declared their support. The social media silence was in stark contrast to Barnard Castle 18 months ago when minister after minister threw themselves over the top to defend Dominic Cummings. Eventually,

Steerpike Steerpike

Rees-Mogg does his bit for the Union

You know it’s bad when Rees-Mogg does the media round. Ever since his disastrous interview on Grenfell in the 2019 election, Tory party managers have been keen to keep the Old Etonian’s performances on national television to a minimum. But given both the dire straits in which Boris now finds himself and the half-hearted backing of his cabinet, it was cometh the hour, cometh the Mogg. And the leader of the Commons certainly brought the House down.  First Mogg went on LBC to dismiss those calling for Johnson to quit, claiming ‘The people who have come out so far are people like Roger Gale and Douglas Ross who never supported the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The jury’s still out for Boris Johnson among MPs

When Michael Gove addressed Tory MPs on Wednesday evening at a meeting of the 1922 committee, he began with a tribute to Boris Johnson. After a rocky few days for the Prime Minister in which he has apologised to the House for attending a drinks party in the Downing Street garden during lockdown and faced calls from his own side to resign, Gove took the opportunity to remind MPs of Johnson’s selling points. The levelling up secretary told MPs that their leader ‘gets the big calls right’ citing Brexit, vaccines and Johnson’s recent decision not to bring in extra Covid restrictions over Christmas. Given that Gove was one of the ministers calling for

David Abulafia

Why does Priyamvada Gopal find ‘eloquence’ troubling?

Why should anyone feel insulted when they are described as ‘eloquent’? Priyamvada Gopal, professor of post-colonial studies at Cambridge University, felt moved to speak on behalf of David Olusoga when I used that very compliment to describe him. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, I argued that Olusoga’s testimony in the trial of the ‘Colston Four’ was not relevant. After all, it was not a trial of the long-dead Edward Colston but one for criminal damage. Would Olusoga have been called as an expert witness were he not something of a celebrity whose TV appearances are often impressive? I’m not convinced. Yet in the eyes of my Cambridge colleague, my biggest error was to refer

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Have Tory MPs finally had enough?

11 min listen

Boris Johnson has finally commented on the accusations of a Downing Street garden party held in the first lockdown. Yet his defence – ‘I believed implicitly that this was a work event’ – has satisfied nobody. On the episode, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman give their verdict. ‘When I started my career I spent a lot of time in magistrates courts and I have to say, I’ve heard better ones from people who were drunk who were defending themselves in Portsmouth Magistrates Court’, Isabel says. And for James, the problem was Boris Johnson’s own party – ‘The Tory benches were almost totally silent’. Can these MPs really defend Boris Johnson

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Douglas Ross is right: Boris Johnson must go

In May 2020 Douglas Ross resigned from Boris Johnson’s government. Though only a junior minister in the Scotland Office – Ross was not at that time a member of the Holyrood parliament or leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party – Ross was still the most senior figure to resign in protest at how the government handled the Dominic Cummings affair. Ross was clear: Cummings had plainly broken the government’s own Covid rules and, this being so, decency demanded he clear his desk. No-one, not even the great Cummings, could be thought indispensable. As it happens, the Cummings story broke just a couple of days after the Prime Minister

Matthew Lynn

Joe Biden has lost control of the economy

A nudge on interest rates from the Federal Reserve. A gradual winding down of quantitative easing. No more stimulus cheques flying out of the White House window. And rising energy prices dropping out of the annualised headline rate. This was meant to be the month when the spurt of inflation in the United States turned out – as president Joe Biden and his officials insisted it would – to be mostly transitory. We were told that it would die down over the course of this year. For Biden and the US economy, there is now no easy way back But, whoops, if that was the plan, it has already gone

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why Boris might still survive

Haunted. Ashen. Defeated. That’s how the PM looked in parliament this afternoon as he faced the flamethrowers of the opposition. He began with a long apology about the May 2020 party in Downing Street which he said he had attended. And he openly acknowledged the ‘rage’ of the British public. His excuse – embarrassingly flimsy – was that he’d misunderstood the character of the get-together. And he was forced to adopt the lawyerly terms he so decries in others when he referred to the party as ‘the event in question’. So what was it? A wine-tasting? A discreet sherry at sundown? Or a major session with dancing on the tables?

Dr Steve James Dr Steve James

Why should I be sacked for refusing the vaccine?

A few months ago, Sajid Javid was asked how he could justify sacking unvaccinated care home workers if they had been infected with Covid and had natural immunity. The Health Secretary replied as if such people were plainly idiots. ‘If they haven’t taken a vaccine — despite all the effort that’s been made to persuade them, encourage them, provide them with information, introduce them to trusted voices — then at some point you have to move on.’ By ‘move on’ he meant thousands of them should be fired. NHS staff are next in line: we have until 1 April to get jabbed or get out. On a recent visit to King’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Peter Bone’s sly pop at Boris

Peter Bone was up at PMQs today, asking a rare, non-partygate question to our beleaguered Prime Minister on whether he’d abolish the BBC licence fee (answer: no). But not all the Wellingborough backbencher’s maneuverings in Parliament this week seem designed to be so helpful to Boris, as he battles to save his premiership. For Mr S has spotted that Bone has a Private Members’ Bill up in the House of Commons on Friday on… how to replace an incapacitated Prime Minister. As speculation heats up over who could and should replace Johnson, Bone’s timely move seeks to tidy up the question of succession to the post of First Lord of the Treasury. His Bill, which

The Spectator

Boris Johnson owes the country a proper apology

On 20 May 2020, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement on social media which summed up the conditions in the country. ‘Have you been enjoying the hottest day of the year so far?’ it asked. ‘You can relax, have a picnic, exercise or play sport, as long as you are: on your own, with people you live with or just you and one other person.’ To do otherwise, it didn’t have to say, would be a criminal offence. In 10 Downing Street, however, Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary sent out a very different message to more than 100 staff members. ‘Make the most of the lovely weather,’ it said, and

Steerpike Steerpike

The New York Times gets Britain wrong (again)

BREAKING: Britain is plunging into autocracy. Well, according to the New York Times at least. Steerpike has grown used to the witterings from America’s least reliable news source in recent years, as it seeks to portray the UK as a plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole on the verge of democratic collapse but where the trains don’t run on time and swamp-dwelling locals feast on legs of mutton. As a pastiche of foreign news coverage, it’s up there among the best – like Scoop without the fiction disclaimer. The latest dispatch from Perfidious Albion is an opinion column published by a little-known left-wing hack, splashed across the front page of the paper’s international edition. According

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Johnson won’t resign. He’ll have to be removed

Boris Johnson has just made his leadership crisis worse at PMQs. As expected, he started the session with an apology to the public, saying ‘I know the rage they feel with me and with the government I lead’. This sounded promising, but things quickly went downhill, and that was before the questions had even started. Johnson then said ‘there are things we simply did not get right’, claiming that when he attended the party on 20 May 2020, he ‘believed implicitly that this was a work event’ and that he should have sent everyone back inside. He even made reference to the possibility that ‘it could be said to fall

Patrick West

When will firms like Ben & Jerry’s stop lecturing us?

Is anyone else fed up of corporate virtue-signalling? From banks boasting of their commitment to diversity and equality, to train companies changing their liveries to the rainbow flag, or supermarket chains proclaiming they are fighting racism, enough is enough. Thankfully, the moneymen who matter to big businesses – and whom they might actually listen to – are now finally speaking out. Fund manager Terry Smith and leading shareholder in Unilever – owner of the notoriously woke ice cream firm Ben & Jerry’s – has attacked the company for its underperformance, pointing a finger at its obsession with political posturing. ‘Unilever seems to be labouring under the weight of a management which

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Starmer calls for Johnson to resign

It’s unfortunate for Boris Johnson that one of his worst appearances at PMQs has coincided with one of Keir Starmer’s best. The Leader of the Opposition has clearly had his cornflakes today as he tore into the shambling PM and did what many of his party have been wanting for months: calling on Johnson to resign.  The embattled premier was initially somewhat helped by Lindsay Hoyle’s intervention to call for order but Starmer doubled down in his supplementary questions. He referenced the resignations of Matt Hancock and Allegra Stratton and noted Johnson said the former was ‘right to resign’ for breaking Covid restrictions. Sir Keir also cited one particularly moving case of a lady

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Boris apologises for No. 10 party

It’s probably the most difficult PMQs he’ll ever have to face. Boris Johnson is on the back foot today over reports on a garden party which went on in No. 10 in May 2020. Just before he faced questions from MPs, Johnson took the opportunity to finally apologise to the House and to the country, telling them ‘I know the rage’ the public ‘feel towards me’ and saying ‘I must take responsibility. No. 10 is a big department with the garden as an extension of the office’ but ‘I believed implicitly this was a work event. Will that be enough? Here’s the full text of what Boris had to say: ‘I want to

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

To save the Union, ignore Gordon Brown

As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon. The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots’ appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it. From

Steerpike Steerpike

Party-planners troll No. 10

Westminster’s finest are gathering today ahead of Boris Johnson’s much-awaited appearance at Prime Ministers’ Questions. The embattled premier is expected to be grilled shortly in the Commons about the garden party which took place in No. 10 in May 2020, following a morning media round blackout by the government in recent days. Yet while the House should be full today, government whips should not expect many of those on the Tory benches to be there in support. Some tell Mr S they are just there to watch the blood sport, putting in prayer cards to witness the unfolding drama in Parliament. Far more telling than the attendance rate is the number of Tories willing to put

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The sooner Boris is gone the better

People seem surprised and a little doubting that the Prime Minister is incapable of remembering if he attended a party in his own back garden in May 2020. It does not come as much of a shock to me, seeing as he has difficulty remembering how many children he has. Beneath that albino mop resides a brain comprising plasma in a perpetual turbulent flux, like you get in one of those tokamaks used in the pursuit of nuclear fusion energy. Except Boris’s brain does not have the correct-strength magnets to hold it all in place, just a skull. As a consequence he possesses no judgment and nothing in the way

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It’s getting worse for Boris

Talking to Tory MPs this morning, it is clear that the mood today is even worse than yesterday. Even one of those MPs closest to Boris Johnson thinks that it is now 50/50 whether enough letters go in to force a no confidence vote. Ironically, the improving Covid numbers are changing the calculus for some Tory MPs about a contest. A few weeks ago, even the most ardent Boris critics didn’t think you could have a no confidence vote, given the situation with the soaring Omicron variant. But now it is somewhat in retreat, and that restrictions are likely to go on 26 January giving hostile MPs the chance to do so. PMQs today