Politics

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

Tuesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Boris Johnson wants a sycophantic civil service

This government may not be good for much but it knows how to manipulate language. Attacks on the ‘establishment’ are the cover it uses to smuggle ideologues and ‘yes’ men into the civil service. We all hate ‘the establishment,’ don’t we? Even when, and especially if, we have never met a permanent secretary. The establishment, by definition, is hidebound and complacent, white, male, Oxbridge and biased. Although the awkward fact remains that you can only join the civil service by passing competitive examinations, that can quickly be dispensed with. Since Lord (Michael) Young, father of the better-known Toby, wrote the The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958, the attacks on

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Does Boris’s ‘new deal’ offer anything new?

Today Boris Johnson launched his ‘new deal’ for Britain – billed as an economic recovery plan to follow the Covid recession.  It sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a new deal. All I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand – a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis. What has changed is the PM’s political positioning, away from the market economy and towards state intervention But were the announcements really a ‘new deal’ – or a new anything? The vast

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What’s so new in Boris’s ‘New Deal’?

15 min listen

The country is facing a post-pandemic recession that will leave millions unemployed and businesses bankrupted, so despite all the noise, is Boris’s ‘New Deal’ tackling the right problems? Our Economics Correspondent Kate Andrews joins the podcast today, and tells James Forsyth and Katy Balls why she thinks today’s announcement was little more than rehashing of the Conservatives’ pre-coronavirus manifesto.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Furious May blasts Gove over Sedwill departure

Theresa May is known for having an icy side – and it certainly isn’t the first Michael Gove has felt the cold. However, those in the Commons this afternoon were subjected to a veritable blizzard when the former PM interrogated Gove over David Frost’s appointment to the role of national security adviser.  May clearly felt a sense of double indignation, first at the sacking of her former ally Mark Sedwill (who she brought into No. 10 having served as her perm sec at the Home Office) as well as Frost’s supposed lack of security nous. Brrr!

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Boris’s relaunch escape the Leicester lockdown?

Boris Johnson had hoped to use today’s speech in Dudley to draw a line under the past 14 weeks of lockdown and return to his election agenda. However, with the government announcing overnight that Leicester is to go into a local lockdown, the ongoing challenge of coronavirus isn’t far away. The Prime Minister acknowledged that some might think his speech on Britain after Covid ‘premature’ but he said it was not sustainable to ‘simply to be prisoners of this crisis’. Instead, the country must ‘slowly and cautiously’ come out of hibernation. Reflecting on the crisis, Johnson did not go so far as to say mistakes had been made. Instead, he said he

Boris Johnson

Full text: Boris unveils his ‘new deal’

It may seem a bit premature to make a speech now about Britain after Covid, when that deceptively nasty disease is still rampant in other countries, when global case numbers are growing fast and when many in this country are nervous – rightly – about more outbreaks, whether national or local like the flare-up in Leicester. Yet we cannot continue simply to be prisoners of this crisis. We are preparing now slowly and cautiously to come out of hibernation and I believe it is absolutely vital for us now to set out the way ahead, so that everyone can think and plan for the future – short, medium and long term

Steerpike Steerpike

Ed Davey’s costly leadership bid

The Liberal Democrats were once the progressive voice of fiscal restraint. Not anymore. Leadership hopeful Ed Davey has tabled nearly 130 written questions over the last two weeks in a bid to generate some much-needed coverage – costing an estimated £140 a pop. According to Mr Steerpike’s back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, these often pointless interventions set the taxpayer back a cool £18,000. Probing questions include a request for information about artworks depicting slave owners around the parliamentary estate, allowing the Lib Dem bigwig to moan to the Mirror about Britain’s ‘shameful’ past. Other time-wasting queries include a question involving sensitive intelligence related matters, which as an experienced parliamentarian Sir Ed must know can’t be answered.  A spokesperson for Davey told Mr S:  It is

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Could Corbynites infiltrate the Lib Dems?

It’s funny how politics works. This time last year, the talk was of whether Labour moderates should leave their party and join with the Lib Dems after some of them had already taken the plunge. Labour’s hard-left was unassailably in charge of the party and it seemed there was no way they could be defeated from within. If you wanted a more reasonable form of centre-left politics, it was becoming a truism that you had to leave. Now, the situation has become perfectly reversed. In the wake of Rebecca Long-Bailey’s sacking from the shadow cabinet, the question is whether it is Labour’s hard-left whose cause is hopeless and if they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What happens if the Leicester lockdown fails?

The government’s decision to lock Leicester down, closing all non-essential retail from today and schools from Thursday for all but the kids of key workers and vulnerable children, is a hugely significant moment. The government’s whole Covid-strategy relies on replacing the sledgehammer of a national lockdown with far more targeted local interventions. Leicester will be the test of whether those interventions can prevent the virus from going regional and then national when there’s already transmission of it in the community. (The successful effort in Weston-super-Mare was about stopping an outbreak spreading from a hospital into the community). If the Leicester lockdown succeeds in stopping the virus spreading out from the

Monday

Matthew Goodwin

Boris Johnson could quickly come unstuck

The Conservative party is no longer the party of the rich, while the Labour party is no longer the party of the poor. That is the central finding of my new report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). Boris Johnson is certainly a prime minister under pressure. Public disapproval of his government is drifting upwards. Public confidence in the economy has collapsed. Johnson’s approval ratings have shed more than 20 points in just two months. MPs openly complain about the workings of his government. And, for the first time, when voters are asked who they think would make the ‘best prime minister’, Labour’s Keir Starmer is now in first place.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will the ‘whack-a-mole’ approach of local lockdowns work?

16 min listen

Leicester is set to lock down locally. It’s an approach that the Prime Minister has dubbed ‘whack-a-mole’, referring to clampdowns on local clusters that will inevitably arise in the coming months. All eyes are on Leicester’s experience now as it signals whether or not the national lockdown is a thing of the past. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson. Also on the podcast: the government’s schools funding and socially distanced weddings.

Oliver Johnson

How worried should we be about a second wave?

Now that we are two months past the peak of the UK coronavirus epidemic, many fear the emergence of a second wave of the disease and remain anxious about any evidence that reopening the country has gone too far. For this reason media headlines like ‘Germany’s R number rockets again – from 1.79 to 2.88’ (Sky News) and ‘UK coronavirus cases no longer falling, ONS figures show’ (the Times) are amplified very quickly. But how worried should we really be by these headlines? By now, we have become familiar with the R number (the average number of people that each infected person will themselves infect) and are alert to the

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The Johnson revolution is decidedly un-British

These may well be the defining few days of the Johnson government. Having failed to make a towering success of the initial response to the Covid-19 crisis – by his own admission on Times Radio this morning – the Prime Minister is now embarked on the kind of structural reform of the machinery of government that will determine whether he will be seen by future generations as a Homeric hero or Homer Simpson. So far we can see the building blocks of the reconstruction, rather than the detail. These blocks include, first, infrastructure investment as a response to the economic calamity that is the consequence of the coronavirus calamity –

Matthew Lynn

Boris’s Roosevelt remedy isn’t what Britain needs

Huge infrastructure projects. A massive rise in public spending, and the creation of public works for an army of unemployed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has started pitching himself as the new Roosevelt, modelling himself on the 1930s American president who spent big to pull the country out of the Great Depression, and re-wrote the rules of economics in the process. At this rate, he’ll be making speeches about there being nothing to fear ‘except fear itself’ and starting fireside chats over the wireless by the end of the week. But hold on. Is FDR a model we really want to emulate? Not really. We don’t face anything like the same challenges,

Steerpike Steerpike

New York Times: Britons crowd into swamps

How did Britons enjoy this recent bout of nice summer weather? Many people certainly headed to a nearby beach. Some opted for a local park, National Trust site or countryside walk. And many people stayed at home in the garden on a sun lounger. Mr Steerpike is fairly confident though that sun-kissed Brits did not crowd into swamps this past week. Someone should probably have a word with the New York Times then, who today claimed that: ‘Britons have coped with a summer heatwave by jamming into beaches, city parks and swamps’ According to the paper, who seem to think Brits are some sort of amphibious creatures, we ‘cavorted by the

Sunday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What Sedwill’s departure means for No. 10’s civil service reform

As we learn of Mark Sedwill’s departure, I talk to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about its wider implications. While the announcement itself has not come as a total surprise (Sedwill was always more of a Mayite appointment than this government’s preference), James points out that it follows on the heels of a speech given by Michael Gove this weekend on civil service reform, in which Gove outlined the vision of a new, sleeker Whitehall. It’s a wish list that includes more technocratic civil servants who are expert in their field, rather than rotated as generalists. Katy points out that Sedwill has often been seen as ‘not on the same wavelength’ as the government

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What Sedwill’s departure means for No 10’s civil service reform

14 min listen

The Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill has announced that he will be stepping down in September, though his resignation letter suggests that it wasn’t necessarily his decision. This move comes as Michael Gove makes a wide-ranging speech on reform of the civil service. The government looks to be gearing up its Whitehall reform, and on the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about how these events are all linked.

Robert Peston Robert Peston

David Frost is a controversial appointment for National Security Adviser

One of Boris Johnson’s closest allies, David Frost – who has been negotiating the terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU – is to become National Security Adviser, succeeding Sir Mark Sedwill, who is standing down both as cabinet secretary and NSA. This is an unusual and controversial appointment because Frost is a political appointment, a special adviser, in his current role – and will continue as a political adviser rather than becoming a member of the civil service. There will be a formal process to find a new cabinet secretary. His appointment is bound to cause a big gulp among the spooks and military top brass Frost

Boris Johnson

PM responds to Mark Sedwill’s resignation

Boris Johnson has responded to the resignation of Mark Sedwill, the now former Cabinet Secretary. The full text of The Prime Minister’s handwritten note is below Dear Mark, Over the last few years I have had direct experience of the outstanding service that you have given to the government and to the country as a whole. You took over as Cabinet Secretary in tragic circumstances, and then skilfully navigated us politicians through some exceptionally choppy water: a change of premiership, an election, then Brexit, followed by the crisis of Covid-19, where you were instrumental in drawing up the plan the whole country has by now followed effectively to suppress the

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Violence against police to be met with ‘full force of the law’, says Priti Patel

Priti Patel – Violence against police will be met with ‘full force of the law’ Sophy Ridge interviewed the Home Secretary Priti Patel, asking her about the difficulties involved in policing Britain under lockdown. Recent weeks have not only seen mass protests on the streets, but also scenes like an illegal street party in Brixton where police officers were attacked. The Metropolitan Police’s chief commissioner Cressida Dick has said that around 140 officers have been hurt over the past three weeks. Patel told Ridge that the government was tightening measures to protect key workers: PP: I’m committed, and we’ll be putting measures in place to double the sentencing on assaults