Politics

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

Saturday

David Frost

Lord Frost: Britain needs low taxes and no vaccine passports

Lord Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit minister and one of his closest allies, has resigned in protest at the ‘direction’ of the government. He has been making his discomfiture clear for a while, most recently in this speech to the Centre for Policy Studies where he said he believed in low tax (Johnson is raising tax) and no vaccine passports (Johnson forced them through with Labour votes last week). Invoking Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech he said – in a clear warning to the Prime Minister – ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the European Union from Britain with Brexit, only to import that European model after all this time’. Here is

Steerpike Steerpike

Osborne’s wallpaper firm blames Brexit

George Osborne hasn’t been shy to take the occasional pop at Boris Johnson’s government and now the reason why seems clear. His family firm Osborne & Little’s annual accounts up until 31 March have just been published and they don’t make for entirely happy reading. The leading wallpaper manufacturer has been forced to report a pre-tax loss of £106,000, down from last year’s profit of £1.4 million, with Brexit cited as having an ‘immediate adverse effect on profits.’  Boris Johnson’s successful efforts to take the UK out of the EU on 1 January 2021 caused the company ‘unforeseen costs’ amounting to an extra £400,000, thanks in part to increased shipping charges and higher

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP Hate-Finder General declares war on refs

Ping! An email in Steerpike’s inbox lands, subject line: ‘SNP’s attack on refs.’ Is this, at last, a moment of nationalist self-reflection? Have the 45 per cent-ers finally clocked most Scots don’t want another plebiscite? Could some SNP drone finally have switched off the autopilot to question the wisdom of a neverendum? Sadly for Scotland, the answer to all these questions is: no. For it seems that James Dornan, the hard-of-thinking MSP who frequently features in Steerpike’s pages, is once again up to his usual tricks. Dornan of course is the ‘racist buses’ conspiracy theorist who claimed in June that an Edinburgh transport company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Boris won’t change. Why should he?

Boris Johnson is not short of troubles, or advice. Most of that advice, from colleagues and commentators alike, comes down to the same thing: he’s got to change. Change his team, change his approach. Change the way he does things. That argument is a familiar one at Westminster. When a Prime Minister hits trouble – and this one has hit it harder and faster than most – those of us who comment on politics reach for ‘change’ as the answer. It’s often good counsel, too. It is logical that the best way out of a situation is to change the fundamental causes of that situation. But there’s a problem with

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why do social workers keep failing children like Arthur Labinjo-Hughes?

Why does the number of children dead from abuse — like poor Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson — stay roughly the same year in, year out? More children are taken into care every year in this country. So why doesn’t this reduce the number of desperate, abused children who are dying at the hands of the people who should be caring for them? The cases of both Arthur and Star reveal a disturbingly casual approach My suspicion is that it’s become normal for over-worked, badly-managed social workers simply to focus on the easier cases, and leave the violent addicts and the psychopathic step-parents alone. And if this is true, what

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Ben Wallace: Britain is ‘highly unlikely’ to send troops to Ukraine

Russia is readying for an invasion of Ukraine. Kiev says that 100,000 Russian troops have now amassed at their eastern border, and the CIA thinks that Putin could have 175,000 soldiers stationed for an offensive by the end of January. If conflict comes, it now seems certain that Ukraine will be fighting alone. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, told Andrew Neil on Spectator TV this week that it is ‘highly unlikely’ that Britain will send troops to defend the country. The Defence Secretary said:  ‘It’s a fact it’s not a member of Nato, so it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to send troops into Ukraine to challenge Russia…

Friday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Omicron is now Britain’s dominant Covid strain

If you test positive for Covid now in Britain, the odds are that it’s Omicron: it’s now the dominant strain in England and Scotland. Data released this evening by the UK Health Security Agency showed that by Tuesday, 54 per cent of PCR tests were positive for S-gene target failure (a proxy for Omicron). For perspective, it has only taken eight days for the variant to become dominant: Delta took nearly a month. North of the border, Sturgeon said that the ‘tsunami [of cases] was starting to hit’ and confirmed that in Scotland more than half of cases were Omicron too. Again, that’s using S-gene dropout as a proxy. Some

Steerpike Steerpike

Did Number 10’s party-prober attend his own parties?

Oh dear. Ever since Boris Johnson announced that Simon Case would lead a probe into last year’s Whitehall Christmas parties, lobby journalists have repeatedly asked questions as to whether the Cabinet Secretary himself was in attendance at any of the lockdown-breaking shindigs. And now it appears that Case was at least aware of parties being held by Cabinet Office staff in December 2020 if not actively in attendance himself. For this afternoon brought not one, not two but three separate reports that the Cabinet Secretary was somewhat compromised to investigate this matter. First Guido Fawkes reported several incidents of drinking in Case’s office – including ‘copious booze and music’ at a party on

Steerpike Steerpike

Verity lieutenants installed at Mail HQ

While Tories in Westminster have ummed and erred about whether to stick the knife in, there’s been no such hesitation over in Kensington. A veritable orgy of executive blood-letting has engulfed the hacks at Northcliffe House as first Geordie Greig and then Martin Clarke were unceremoniously dispatched from their respective posts at the Daily Mail and Mail Online. Paul Dacre meanwhile was barely out of the building’s infamous revolving doors before he was back, re-installed as DMG Media’s editor-in-chief after just three weeks away. One Mail Man sighed to Mr S: ‘It’s all been a bit like The Sopranos.’  Long-time Dacre admirer Ted Verity has been installed as Greig’s successor in the Daily Mail

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Can Boris really blame the press for his defeat?

When asked what went wrong in North Shropshire, Boris Johnson gave a fascinating answer: journalists. Apparently, they have been reporting the wrong kind of stuff. He told Sam Coates of Sky News: Basically, what’s been going wrong, Sam, is that in the last few weeks some things have been going well. But what the people have been hearing is just a constant litany of stuff about politics and politicians. Stuff that isn’t about them. And isn’t about the things that we can do to make life better. The job of the government is to make people like you, Sam, interested in the booster rollout. And in skills. And in housing. And in everything

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are Labour’s sleaze attacks working?

The one crumb of comfort the Tories are trying to take from the North Shropshire result is that Labour didn’t win the seat. Keir Starmer’s party came third with just under 10 per cent of the vote, a fall of 12 per cent from the 2019 result. Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden has been touring the broadcast studios today saying ‘there is no love lost for the Labour party — they should have been surging ahead and in fact they were sinking’. Is this really true? The fear in progressive circles was that voters switching from the Tories would end up being split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, thus meaning

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Year in Review – 2021

42 min listen

Douglas Murray joins Freddy Gray for a look back at yet another tumultuous year in American politics. They discuss the irreconcilable divide between left and right, the origins of Covid-19, the war in Afghanistan, the fallout from the 2020 election and much more, including the temptations of a bottle of Glenmorangie whiskey.

Francis Elliott

How Boris Johnson survives

When the Conservative party looks in the mirror what does it see? Beyond the bruising, what face peers back from the glass? The problem for the party is that no two MPs can agree – and that just might be Boris Johnson’s best chance of survival. Contradictions shatter a unified surface that might once have offered the chance of self-reflection for the Conservative party. Some of the cracks are obvious, such as the one running through Downing Street over the proper size and limits of the state, for example, or that which separates No. 10 from many of its backbenches over Covid public health measures and liberty. It has been obvious

Steerpike Steerpike

How bad is North Shropshire by historic standards?

So, how bad is the North Shropshire by-election result? All across the country, that is the question which Tory members, both in Parliament and out are now asking themselves. Winner Helen Morgan took the seat by nearly 6,000 votes, overturning a Conservative majority of almost 23,000 on a 34 per cent swing. Turnout was 46.3 per cent. The seat voted Leave in 2016 by 60 per cent and had been held by the party since 1832, with the exception of a few years during the Edwardian period. The seat had a 40.6 per cent Conservative majority in 2019 – the equivalent of Labour losing Leeds Central, Cardiff Central, or Islington South, home to Hilary

Steerpike Steerpike

Sleaze scandal scuppers second jobs

So Owen Paterson managed in a month what 100 years of opposition efforts couldn’t: turn his true blue seat to yellow for the first time since the aftermath of the Boer War. Mr S wonders if his newly elected successor Helen Morgan will show her appreciation in her maiden speech – ‘thanks Owen, couldn’t have done it without you.’  But even though he’s gone, Paterson’s influence still seems to be felt on the green benches. For it seems that the sleaze scandal which his downfall triggered has spooked older MPs into quitting lucrative second jobs, judging by the newly-updated register of members’ interests. A number of senior Tories have shed many of these

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris snapped maskless on train

Oh no! Is this another highly unfortunate snap of the Prime Minister caught in flagrante — this time sat maskless on a South Eastern train yesterday? It certainly looks that way.  But closer inspection reveals that Boris Johnson is in fact wearing a mask under his chins, the sort of sloppy face-not-covering that could have us common citizens fined or even arrested if we dared to do the same.  The more beady eyed of Steerpike’s readers might have spotted (another) great Prime Ministerial excuse, however. There appears to be a Greggs bag in the foreground of the image and Boris might be holding a sandwich. Munching on a bit of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The joy of Boris’s bungled by-election

By any reasonable standard the result in the North Shropshire by-election must be reckoned the funniest in years. Perhaps even decades. All governments need checking from time to time and desserts are always served justly. So this is a welcome result and not just because it is, viewed objectively, hilarious. Nevertheless, it is quite an achievement to lose a seat held by the Conservatives, in one shape of another, for 120 years. To do so just two years after winning more than 60 per cent of the vote and a majority of almost 23,000 votes is quite something. To do so to the Liberal Democrats, who took just ten per

Steerpike Steerpike

Bookies turn on Boris

Betting markets are famously more reliable than pundit prognostications or political polls. Steerpike was intrigued, therefore, to note this morning that bookmakers are now saying that Boris will not be party leader by Tory conference next autumn. On the Betfair exchange overnight, the price has moved towards Boris Johnson being gone by autumn as the favourite outcome. At the same time, 2022 is now evens to be the year in which Boris is replaced in No. 10. The more interesting market, though, is who will replace Johnson as Conservative leader. On Betfair’s Sportsbook, the favourite is Chancellor Rishi Sunak at 2/1. He’s followed by Liz Truss at 7/2 and then the perennially ambitious

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris Johnson is now in political purgatory

We have just witnessed one of the most dramatic defeats in the history of British by-elections. A 38 per cent swing against the governing party has happened only a handful of times in postwar politics and tends to be a sign of bad things to come. The last time the Tories lost a safe seat to the Lib Dems was Christchurch 1993, presaging the great Conservative collapse of 1997. So losing North Shropshire is devastating for the Conservatives: they haven’t just lost a stronghold but have seen the all-but-dead Liberal Democrats take it with a huge majority. This happened because so many of voters there — one of the most pro-Brexit, pro-Tory parts