Politics

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

Thursday

4 Nov 2021

Paterson resigns. Johnson is diminished

What are the long-term political implications of the government’s clown show over Owen Paterson? My guess is that voters won’t pay too much attention, but MPs certainly will. And that could matter at least as much. Start with the public. Do voters feel angry that their Prime Minister doesn’t play by the rules — written and unwritten — of politics and government? There’s a lot to be angry about, and ripping up the rules against cash-for-lobbying certainly justifies rage. And maybe in time, the idea of the PM as leader of a privileged clique who don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us will indeed prove harmful to

Steerpike

COP’s awkward reliance on coal

It’s day four of COP26 and while the big names have already departed, the speeches carry on. This morning some 190 countries and organisations announced their ‘clear commitments’ to phase out coal power. The new ‘Global coal to clean power transition statement‘ requires signatory states to end all investment in new coal power generation domestically and internationally while rapidly scaling up deployment of clean power generation. Eighteen countries have made first-time commitments to phase out and not build or invest in new coal power while the energy source will not be used in major economies from the 2030s and 2040s for the rest of the world. No wonder Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, undaunted from this

Matthew Lynn

The Bank of England’s inflation rate stunt

He isn’t Canadian. He doesn’t dominate the Davos circuit with platitudes about climate change. And he isn’t constantly warning that the British economy will turn into a cross between Ethiopia and Argentina now that we have left the European Union. In many ways, the current Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey is an upgrade on his high-profile predecessor Mark Carney. And yet, in the most important respect, he is turning out to be very similar. He is constantly threatening to raise interest rates, and then backing off at the last moment. An increase in interest rate from the ‘emergency’ level of just 0.1 per cent was not quite

Isabel Hardman

Tory sleaze: How much trouble is Boris Johnson in?

It’s been a dizzying 24 hours for Angela Richardson, who was last night sacked as a junior ministerial aide to Michael Gove, only to get the job back this morning. The reason for this whirlwind? Richardson broke the Tory whip last night by abstaining on the government’s plan to tear up the standards committee regime and put Owen Paterson’s suspension on hold. She said at the time that it was a ‘matter of principle’ for her — but with the U-turn from the government this morning, she found that she was once again on the right side of policy. Tory MPs stopped bothering to defend new policies to their constituents

James Forsyth

How damaging is the Owen Paterson fiasco to the Tories’ reputation?

12 min listen

The Owen Paterson story continues today with the government u-turning quicker than expected. This came after realising that allowing Tory MPs to mark their own homework by scrapping the standards committee might cause more outrage than they first thought. Leaving them now in a situation described by James Forsyth as, ‘an infinitely worse position for absolutely everyone involved.’James is joined by Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls to discuss this, self-inflicted, political nightmare.

Katy Balls

No. 10 U-turns on Paterson sleaze row

Less than 24 hours after Tory MPs were ordered to vote to spare Owen Paterson, the government has U-turned. The former minister had been given a one month suspension from the House of Commons by the standards committee over a breach of lobbying rules. No. 10 tried to block his suspension, instead setting up a new committee to overhaul the current disciplinary system. Speaking in the Commons chamber this morning, Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg said that the government had abandoned the plans, which proposed a committee weighted in favour of Tory MPs. Rees-Mogg said that he accepted there is a ‘strong feeling’ over recent events and said that any reforms to the standards protocol

Steerpike

Insulate Britain block insulation truck

Oh dear. It appears that the UK’s little-loved eco-warriors have managed to cover themselves in glory yet again. Insulate Britain – the protest group surely working as double agents for Big Oil – have today decided to block off Parliament Square, causing yet more misery and frustration among commuters at rush hour. Insulate Britain’s sole demand is that the government reduce emissions by insulating all social housing in the UK by 2025 and retrofit all homes with insulation by 2030. So it was somewhat unfortunate for Steerpike to discover that among the vehicles forced to sit there this morning pumping emissions into the atmosphere was none other than, er, a lorry for insulate giants CCF

Lionel Shriver

Brace yourselves for Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump 2024

For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018 has been the political gift that’s kept on giving ever since. In 2020, the conspicuously inhumane protocol provided a rallying cry for candidates in the primaries and later for Biden as nominee. True, the policy did have a rationale beyond sheer sadism. American law restricts the number of days border agents may detain the underaged and likewise constrains children’s deportation. As migrants are better versed on American immigration statutes than most lawyers, savvy incomers (meaning most incomers) were rocking up on US soil with kids in tow — not always

James Forsyth

Three little words that could cost Boris

Boris Johnson knows the value of three-word slogans. ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ helped propel him to his two greatest electoral triumphs. But another three words that no one would ever put on a campaign poster might determine the success of his premiership: public service reform. Johnson has taken an unusual decision for a Tory prime minister. He has chosen to raise personal and business taxes to put more money into public services. This gamble may pay off if people feel that services have improved. If they do not, he risks an angry electorate who are paying more tax yet not getting anything extra in return. No. 10

The Spectator

The flaw in Britain’s net-zero plan

The COP26 summit is unlikely to be an outright flop. There has been no shortage of drama, with speakers seeming to compete with each other to see who could use the most histrionic language. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to compare the attending leaders to Nazi appeasers. He later apologised. Some progress, albeit small, is being made. A hundred countries have been persuaded, some on the promise of sweeteners worth £14 billion, to sign a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. Brazil, the most important of all, is among them. India has agreed, for the first time, to set itself a date for achieving net-zero

Katy Balls

What the Owen Paterson Tory sleaze row is really about

As world leaders depart from the COP26 summit in Glasgow, a row is brewing in the House of Commons on ‘Tory sleaze’. After the parliamentary commissioner for standards Kathryn Stone found that former cabinet minister Owen Paterson had seriously breached the rules on lobbying, the standards committee recommended that Paterson should be suspended from parliament for 30 days. That recommendation went to a vote in the Commons on Wednesday and unusually (given the suspension ought to be a formality), the government moved to block it. Ever since the report’s findings were made public, there has been talk of a ‘stitch-up’ among Tory backbenchers. The commissioner’s report found that Paterson had approached

Wednesday

3 Nov 2021

Steerpike

Why is the Ministry of Defence so useless?

A new Commons report is out today and it does not make for happy reading. The Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) system of procurement is ‘broken’ with billions of taxpayers’ money wasted, according to a cross party committee of MPs. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) judges that out of the MoD’s 20 largest projects, 13 were running late by a cumulative total of 21 years. This includes the £4 billion farce of the Ajax armoured vehicle — a piece of kit that has thus far managed to inflict more damage on its users than its targets, thanks to its excessive vibration and noise which left crews suffering from nausea, swollen joints and tinnitus. Currently there is ‘no timescale’

Cindy Yu

Has the government misstepped on the Paterson defence?

11 min listen

The row over Owen Paterson has come to a head today as the amendment to lift his suspension – tabled by fellow Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom and backed by the government – has upset many sides. Labour and the SNP are going in hard on accusations of Tory sleaze, with a real possibility of this spreading further than the Westminster bubble; while some Tory MPs who were whipped to vote in favour of the amendment are disgruntled at the position the government put them in (‘It’s fair to say that it has caused deep unease within the Tory party’, Katy says). So what will be the impact of today’s vote?

Gus Carter

MPs vote to overhaul their own watchdog

MPs have voted in favour of overhauling their own watchdog after its decision to ban a senior Tory backbencher from the House of Commons. The committee on standards found that former minister Owen Paterson had breached lobbying rules and recommended he be suspended from the House for 30 days. However, the government backed an amendment to the vote on his suspension — normally treated as a formality — that will now see a new committee set up to fix ‘potential defects’ in the way the current disciplinary system works. Detractors of the cross-party body have accused the standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, of anti-Tory bias. Paterson himself has said that the protracted

Steerpike

It’s Green on Greenpeace at green conference

It’s some time since Steerpike last checked on the Scottish Greens, the minor party in Holyrood’s little-loved coalition government. The indy-loving eco-warriors celebrated their best results in May’s parliamentary elections before quickly resuming their favoured role as SNP enablers-in-chief, taking up ministerial roles as their price to keep Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House. A not-so magnificent seven currently take the party whip up in Edinburgh; among them is Ross Greer, the charisma vacuum best known for hoping for the death of the then critically ill Margaret Thatcher, for calling Churchill ‘a white supremacist mass murderer and declaring that ‘nothing would thrill me more than for Buckingham Palace to burn to the ground.’ In a party led

Isabel Hardman

Boris has no answer to the backlog crisis

Jeremy Hunt asked an entirely reasonable question of the Prime Minister today in the Commons — and got an entirely unreasonable answer. Hunt raised an amendment he is tabling which would require Health Education England to produce regular forecasts for the numbers of doctors and nurses that the UK needs to train. This is quite a small thing to ask for, but Johnson’s response was first to dodge his way around the question, and then to turn the issue into a party political attack on Labour. He said: My right hon. friend is absolutely right that we have to ensure that our NHS has the staff that it needs. That

Lloyd Evans

Rayner nails Boris at PMQs

Angela Rayner is formidable. Until today, that adjective never suited Labour’s deputy leader. She can be combative, authentic, eye-catching and crowd-pleasing — and quite annoying. Clearly she’s as tough as a vintage Land Rover. But at PMQs, she added statesmanship to her roster of qualities. The session was sparsely attended. The press are in Glasgow covering the Frequent Flyers Summit, aka COP26. Boris came south, by jet of course, to put in a stint at Westminster. He was met by Rayner, soberly dressed and steely-eyed. Her tactics were well prepared in advance. She used feints and misdirection to keep Boris guessing and she varied long rhetorical assaults with punchy killer-blows.

The Spectator

Where is the climate plan B?

James Forsyth

The Tories give Rayner an open goal

It sums up Keir Starmer’s political luck, or lack thereof, that he was at home with Covid today rather than at PMQs. The Owen Paterson row is an open goal for an opposition leader. The government has decided to whip Tory MPs to vote for an attempt to change the standards ruling. Starmer wasn’t there to exploit it, so Angela Rayner got to take the shot. She hammered the Tories on the ‘one rule for them, another rule for everyone else’ theme. There have clearly been flaws in the way that the standards commissioner conducts her inquiries. But seeking to change the rules right now looks dreadful. It provides Labour with lots of

Alex Massie

Owen Paterson’s defenders are treating voters with contempt

Nothing more surely demonstrates the Conservative party’s grip on power than its apparent determination that Tory MPs should be able to breach long-agreed, long-respected, House of Commons standards on what constitutes fit and proper behaviour for an MP. The parliamentary party’s decision to save Owen Paterson from the consequences of his own behaviour is itself remarkable. That such efforts are now be supported by the government is something close to breath-taking. They do it because they calculate they can get away with it. And they are, miserably, probably correct to conclude as much. If you wished a demonstration of Tory supremacy and Labour impotence you could hardly ask for better