Politics

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

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

The revenge of the Mayites

Mr S has been keeping a close watch on the number of mounting Plan B rebels these past few days and is delighted to see the numbers totting up to more than 80 at the time of writing. But one thing that did catch Steerpike’s eye was the number of onetime Mayites who look set to vote against Boris Johnson’s Covid plan. For the list of mounting rebels includes both May’s former de facto deputy Damian Green and her ex-PPS Andrew Bowie, who last month quit his post as Tory vice chair. Other names include longtime ministers in her government Harriet Baldwin, Greg Clark and Robert Goodwill.  All this just two days after a flurry

Steerpike Steerpike

Could the Commons have Covid passes?

Today is the big day. MPs are set to vote on the ‘Plan B’ package of restrictions by 6:30 p.m tonight with many Tories publicly denouncing the winter restrictions as a step too far in a society protected by what Boris Johnson once called the ‘huge wall of immunity’ from vaccines.  The big question of course is how big the rebellion will be – 82 Tories are currently named on the Spectator’s list of self-declared rebels. If all were to vote against, it would be the biggest rebellion of Johnson’s premiership, comfortably beating the 55 who voted against a new Covid-19 tier system for England last December, with another 16 abstentions. Labour votes

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Sir Humphrey wins again

The antics of the mandarin masters of Whitehall have long been of interest to Mr S. Back in September, Steerpike revealed that the Director for Civil Service Modernisation and Reform was appointed last year without any external or internal competition. This is despite much hot air and hyperbole from the master of spin himself, Michael Gove, the recently-departed minister for the Cabinet Office. For last year, during the heady days of the Dominic Cummings era, there was much talk of a civil service revolution, with plans to move them out of London, hire specialists in place of generalists and purge the ‘confident public school bluffers’ as part of a ‘hard rain’ on SW1.

Debbie Hayton

JK Rowling is right to call out Police Scotland’s transgender nonsense

How should police record a rape where the culprit has male genitalia? The answer might appear to be straightforward: a man is responsible. Yet in Scotland, where the SNP’s obsession with avoiding offence appears to trump reality, things could soon be more complicated. Police Scotland have said that they may log rapes as being carried out by a woman if the alleged culprit identifies as such. This absurd situation was revealed by Gary Ritchie, assistant chief constable, who set out scenarios where this might happen. It includes ‘where a person born male obtains a full gender recognition certificate (GRC) and then commits rape’ and ‘where a person born male but who

Matthew Lynn

Joe Biden is running out of other people’s money

Abba have reformed. Nato is working out how to deal with an aggressive Russian president. And there are shortages of everything. There were already plenty of clues, but now it is surely official: the 1970s are back. The United States has recorded its highest inflation rate for 32 years, with a 6.8 per cent rate that far surpassed anything even the most pessimistic forecasters expected. In truth, Joe Biden is about to turn into the new Jimmy Carter, a lame duck Democratic president presiding over a failing economy – and the crisis is entirely of his own making. We already knew the US was witnessing a bout of inflation. Even

Claire Fox

Kill the bill: why Boris’s crime law isn’t fit for purpose

Boris Johnson is rightly facing the wrath of Tory MPs over the proposed introduction of vaccine passports, but another piece of legislation put forward by the government should also trouble us. Critics of Boris Johnson’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, often focus on its scale. They have a point. The Bill is simply enormous: made up of 13 parts, 179 clauses and hundreds of pages, parliamentarians of all stripes have treated it as a Christmas tree, hanging on it an endless array of special interest amendments. But size isn’t the Bill’s biggest problem. Even if heavily amended, this act – which is going through parliament today and is set to become law

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Boris’s booster jab plan comes at a price

If you haven’t yet been approached about having a Covid booster jab, your phone is about the spring into life – and it is unlikely to let you forget it until you agreed to have your third dose of the vaccine. The Prime Minister’s announcement on Sunday evening that every adult is to be offered a jab by the end of December, as opposed to the end of January as previously planned, will mean averaging a million jabs a day – even more than the peak of the inoculation programme in the spring. But there is a price to pay, and health secretary Sajid Javid admitted as much on this

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Plan B rebels have safety in numbers

In rebellion, there is safety in numbers. At some point, if enough backbenchers are going against the party whip there is a limit to what those enforcers of party discipline can threaten. There is also the fact that after such a large rebellion, there must be an attempt to bring the party back together: which means there can’t be a blanket bar on promotion for rebels. The Tory uprising against the government’s Covid Plan B has easily passed this tipping point: the whips can’t blackball 75 MPs. This means rebellion is more likely to grow than shrink. The whips can’t blackball 75 MPs. This means rebellion is more likely to grow

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Johnson is imperilled. So why are his enemies helping him?

It’s a topsy turvy world when your friends and allies do you all kinds of damage and then your enemies and detractors accidentally ride to the rescue. But that’s what’s going on in the life of Boris Johnson. His lax approach to the conduct of his own circle is a major factor in his popularity slump. Whether that be backing Owen Paterson, wilfully being taken in by partying Downing Street staffers or over-indulging his wife’s focus on animal rights, utopian environmentalism and support for the Stonewall agenda.  Yet now the cavalry has appeared over the brow of the hill and it is made up of people who wish to bring him down.

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Boris Johnson is becoming a risk to his own Covid rules

‘It feels like a tipping point. Trust in Boris is collapsing. It could be fatal’. So spoke a senior Tory, who hitherto has been a great cheerleader for the Prime Minister. Sunday night’s address to the nation by Boris Johnson won’t, he says, change the perception of Tory MPs that his recent performance has been wholly inadequate. That feeling may in fact be reinforced by Johnson’s choice of simply speaking sombrely down the barrel of a camera lens rather than holding a press conference and taking questions. The point is that — by design — there was no media challenge after Boris Johnson broadcast, in which he said he wants all adults to

Steerpike Steerpike

Defra’s trophy-worthy blunder

The Sunday People is not normally top of Steerpike’s reading list but Mr S was intrigued to see it yesterday trumpeting an exclusive. The newspaper has declared victory in its long-running campaign for an end to the import of hunting trophies. For George Eustice is now backing its bid to end the trade in such objects, with the Environment Secretary quoted as promising ‘one of the toughest bans in the world.’  It breathlessly reports that there will be up to seven years in jail for those caught smuggling skins, heads and other body part ‘souvenirs’ to Britain, with the ban to cover some 6,000 animals deemed under threat from the trade, including the ‘big five’ of lions,

Coffee House

Who said they would vote against vaccine passports?

Note: This article was written in advance of Tuesday’s vote. For a full list of those who actually did – or didn’t – rebel to vote against vaccine passports, please click here. On Tuesday, a vote will be held on Boris Johnson’s new Covid restrictions to tackle the Omicron variant. They will include vaccine passports for large gatherings, compulsory face masks in more places,  and people being asked to work from home when they can (but told they can still go to parties). When the health secretary Sajid Javid introduced the measures in the Commons this week, he was greeted with jeers and calls for him to ‘resign’ from his own party members. There is now a

Sunday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

‘Get boosted now’: Boris Johnson’s third jab plan

‘Get boosted now’ is the government’s new slogan. In tonight’s address to the nation, Boris Johnson announced that he was bringing forward his timeline of offering a booster jab to all eligible adults by one month: from the end of January to New Year’s Eve. The heavy push for third doses is the government’s latest attempt to curb the spread of the Omicron variant, which early evidence suggests is more likely to transmit amongst double-vaccinated people (though there is still no evidence, either way, that the variant undercuts vaccine efficacy for protecting against severe illness). The focus on booster jabs suggests that, temporarily at least, No. 10 has accepted that

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

There’s nothing outrageous about Johnson’s Christmas quiz

Since lockdown, the Mirror has had a good line on Tory lockdown hypocrisy scandals: Barnard Castle and the No. 10 parties. But today’s Sunday Mirror splash does not really deserve to go down in the annals of historic journalistic scoops — despite all the excited chatter this morning. Like all ‘clear breach of lockdown rules’, this turns out to be a mundane event — another feeble attempt to have fun in the middle of a depressing pandemic. It’s the Prime Minister doing a quiz on Zoom. We see a typically dreary video-call snapshot. It shows a bored Prime Minister, flanked by two aides, all looking quite miserable. The only alcohol

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: ‘It looks like’ Boris was breaking the law

If it looked like the Prime Minister was in trouble last week, it seems that was just the tip of the iceberg. The latest needle in Boris Johnson’s side is a photo splashed in the Daily Mirror which shows him hosting a Christmas quiz on December 15 last year. At the time, the capital was placed under Tier 2 restrictions, forbidding social get-togethers indoors for anyone outside their pre-agreed support bubble. The video has raised questions about the legality of the Prime Minister’s actions, and undermined his claims not to have known about any parties taking place within Downing Street, since staff are reported to have played along in teams

Peter Apps

The scandal of the government’s cladding cover-up

The Number 10 Christmas parties during lockdown have dominated the news agenda in recent days – and for good reason. But there has arguably been an even bigger government scandal brewing, one which has largely been overlooked in Westminster. On Tuesday the government told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that it was ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘past failures’ which contributed to the devastating 2017 fire which killed 72 people. Apologies always come in varying forms of breadth and sincerity and this one (as is often the case when delivered by an expensive QC) was carefully limited. The government said that it had assumed fire regulations were being monitored ‘at a local

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s Covid Christmas quiz

It’s hard to recall a more brutal set of Sundays for Boris Johnson. Today’s papers are dominated by ‘partygate’ in one form of another, with the most worrying splash undoubtedly being the Sunday Mirror. It features an image of a Downing Street staffer dressed in tinsel taking a picture of Johnson appearing on a Zoom call to host a Christmas quiz, under the headline: ‘Taking us for fools (again). Held on 15 December 2020, it came at a time when London was in Tier 2 which banned indoor mixing between households. The paper reports that the quiz was supposed to be virtual – but many staff (one source says around 70) stayed

Theo Davies-Lewis

Interview: Rowan Williams on Wales, independence and the King Lear of Westminster

Rowan Williams is no stranger to politics. As Archbishop of Canterbury he was as comfortable criticising Tony Blair over Iraq as passing stern judgment on David Cameron’s austerity measures. Even in these pages, at the height of the global crisis in 2008, Williams was arguing that Marx could teach us a thing or two about financial markets. Still, in recent weeks it just might be that he has embarked one of his most controversial projects yet: a commission to help define Wales’ constitutional future in the UK. As the spectre of Scottish independence haunts Westminster and Welsh nationalism gains momentum, it is a timely mission. In October, Williams was unveiled as head

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Sajid Javid’s underlings let the cat out the bag

Oh dear. The House of Commons is due to vote on the government’s ‘Plan B’ Covid strategy on Tuesday, with speculation mounting about the scale of parliamentary opposition to the proposed vaccine passports. Mr S has been keeping track of the number of Tory rebels with the current figure standing at 65 MPs – potentially the biggest rebellion since the 2019 election. But with Labour having already announced that they will back the government, it seems inevitable the restrictions will pass, regardless of the Covid Research Group’s manoeuverings. Still, amid talk of possible concessions, ministers continue to pay lip service to the notion that Parliament is being consulted on the issue. But now