Politics

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

Tuesday

11 Mar 2025

Steerpike

Rupert Lowe’s team rally around him

It was Alastair Campbell who declared that ‘if a story stays front page news for more than ten days, the chances are it is a real issue.’ Well, we are now on day five of the great Reform fall out and it is still making waves. Nigel Farage spoke to ITV Anglia about Rupert Lowe last night, saying that ‘there is a behaviour problem here – outbursts, anger, that kind of thing’ with regards to ‘these allegations of a bullying culture going on in his offices.’ He added that ‘I could do without this, it’s a huge distraction for the party, for me.’ You suspect Lowe could do without it too… And,

Iain Carter

Why are green groups giving Labour a free pass?

One of the more curious developments in British politics is the apparent willingness of environmental charities to let the Labour government off the hook for policies they once railed against. When Liz Truss’s brief tenure in Downing Street saw proposals for planning deregulation, habitat law reforms, and changes to the Green Belt, these groups reacted with fury. Now, many of those same proposals are back under Labour – yet the response has been muted, even deferential. Heathrow’s third runway, strengthened housing targets, a stronger presumption in favour of development without any extra environmental safeguards: these were once red lines for Britain’s biggest nature charities. Under the Conservatives, such measures were

Gavin Mortimer

Calin Georgescu is a victim of illiberal Europe

Violence erupted in Bucharest on Sunday evening after Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau disbarred Calin Georgescu from standing in May’s re-run presidential election. In a statement, the bureau justified its decision to exclude Georgescu on the grounds his candidature ‘doesn’t meet the conditions of legality’ because he ‘violated the very obligation to defend democracy’. Supporters of Georgescu, who has been described by the BBC as a ‘far-right, pro-Russia candidate’, gathered outside the Central Electoral Bureau to vent their fury, and they soon clashed with police. Until six months ago the name Georgescu was unknown outside Romania. Then the 62-year-old stormed to victory in the first round of November’s presidential election, a

Gareth Roberts

The sad truth about the BBC

When will the BBC get a grip? The corporation which, remember, is funded by licence payers, appears to be strangely overgenerous to its ‘marginalised’ executives with saintly protected characteristics. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), ethnic minority, disabled and female BBC bosses typically earn more money than their colleagues, statistics buried in the corporation’s annual report have revealed. Senior managers who are LGBT earn salaries 15.6 per cent larger than those who are not, the Daily Telegraph reported – while top bosses from ethnic minority backgrounds earn around 12 per cent more than those who are white. This questionable generosity with licence fee cash comes after a slew of other recent

Nigel Jones

Is snobbery behind Rupert Lowe’s row with Nigel Farage?

One aspect of the furious row that has split Reform UK which has yet to receive the attention it deserves is the part the good old British subjects of class and snobbery have played. The row erupted last week after Reform MP Rupert Lowe voiced mild criticism of party leader Nigel Farage in a Daily Mail interview, accusing him of being a ‘Messiah’ and voicing doubts about whether he had it in him to become prime minister. The two men’s relative differences in wealth may have added to the animosity between them Farage promptly hit back by saying that Lowe was ‘completely and utterly wrong’. The row then escalated to toxic levels

Brendan O’Neill

Migrants who hate Jews shouldn’t be allowed in Britain

If you’re a foreigner who hates Jews, should you be allowed to move to Britain? For me it’s a no-brainer: absolutely not. The safety and dignity of Britain’s Jews count for infinitely more than the ‘rights’ of a racist migrant. Does the Labour government agree? Does it agree that overseas anti-Semites are not welcome here? We are about to find out. There are disturbing reports emerging that a man from Gaza with very iffy views has arrived in Britain. He goes by the name Abu Wadee. He is said to be an ‘influencer’ with a substantial following on social media. Last week he reportedly posted a video of himself sporting

Monday

10 Mar 2025

Steerpike

Michael Gove takes aim at Jolyon Maugham

To the Covid Inquiry, the longest-running farce outside of the West End. With costs for the great gravy train now expected to top £200 million, Fleet Street hacks are certainly getting their money’s worth. There was the mammoth grilling of a brooding Boris Johnson in December 2023. The ritual humiliation of ‘simple’ Simon Case back in May. And the spectacular sniping of Matt Hancock too at which the former Health Secretary concluded almost everyone was to blame except, er, himself! So who would be the latest ex-politician to enter into the crosshairs of Baroness Hallett today? Step forward Michael Gove, up before the inquiry to face questions about his role

Hamish McRae

The Wall Street plunge isn’t over yet

The plunge continues. It’s always a mug’s game trying to call the top of any market, but the plunge on Wall Street does feel as though it has got legs, so it is quite possible that we have indeed seen the peak for US equities. Since last week the Nasdaq has moved into correction territory – jargon for a 10 per cent or more fall – and on Monday was off another 3 per cent. I rather like the expression ‘correction’ because it implies that the markets have simply made a bit of an error, a ‘terribly sorry, folks, but we all make mistakes, and give us a few weeks

Steerpike

Mike Amesbury to trigger a by-election

Sound the by-election claxon, Runcorn is a-go! Yes, that’s right – five months after his kerfuffle on the kerb, Mike Amesbury has (for once) done the decent thing. In an interview with the BBC, the disgraced ex-Labour MP today declared it is his intention to resign from the House of Commons ‘shortly’ and trigger a by-election in his Cheshire constituency. It will be the first by-election of the parliament – and a chance for Reform to replace the gap left by Rupert Lowe. Amesbury told the BBC that he will begin the ‘statutory process’ of winding up his office before resigning as an MP ‘as soon as possible’. He was

Michael Evans

What Zelensky needs to do in Saudi Arabia

President Volodymyr Zelensky needs all the advice he can get, as he prepares for talks with American negotiators in Saudi Arabia tomorrow. A statement over the weekend from the Ukrainian presidential office disclosed that the latest western visitor to make the long train ride into Kyiv was Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and veteran crisis negotiator. The meeting between Powell and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, provided further evidence that the UK is currently attempting to play an influential role in moderating what might seem, at present, to be a one-sided effort by the US to bludgeon the Ukrainian president into signing a deal to

Steerpike

BMA consultants sound alarm on assisted dying

As the Assisted Dying Bill continues to make its unceremonious way through parliament, various medical organisations are making themselves heard. The British Medical Association has featured throughout the public debate, so Mr S was struck by one of the motions passed at its annual consultants’ conference last week. Here, senior doctors vote upon motions relating to issues that either impact or are likely to impact health services in the UK. Motion 46 was proposed by the South Regional consultants committee and argued that Kim Leadbeater’s bill raises ‘serious potential moral hazards for consultants, and serious potential adverse impacts on health services.’ The two-part motion argues that, when discussing assisted dying

Stephen Pollard

Why was Syria’s president ever treated like a centrist dad?

There’s an old journalistic maxim: If it bleeds, it leads. But some crucial words are missing from the end: If we can hold the Jews responsible. It’s not by chance that most news organisations have more correspondents in Israel than in the rest of the Middle East put together. True, that’s partly because Israel – unlike its neighbours – is a democracy which allows dissenting voices, and is home to and welcomes a cacophony of both homegrown and foreign media voices. If you want to cover the Middle East, you’ll likely base yourself in Israel. Al-Sharaa’s arrival as Syria’s de facto president was greeted not as the ascension to power

Jonathan Spyer

No one should be surprised about the Syrian massacres

Shock and outrage are appropriate, but no one really has an excuse for being surprised at the dreadful scenes that have emerged from Syria’s western coastal region in recent days. The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total (Alawi sources place the number much higher). Around 125 members of the Damascus regime’s security forces have also died. Video clips, many of them filmed by the perpetrators, show people in civilian clothes being summarily executed by Islamist gunmen; the humiliation of Syrian Alawi men and women; and the inevitable Sunni jihadi battle cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ The specifics of the

James Heale

Have Reform blown it?

18 min listen

Loyal listeners will remember that just three months ago we released a podcast asking: Is 2025 Farage’s year? The answer was ‘yes’, provided Reform UK can keep their five MPs in line… As predicted – and despite all the talk of professionalisation – Nigel Farage’s latest political outfit is following the pattern of the parties that came before: infighting. On Friday night, the Reform party stripped Rupert Lowe of the whip after referring him to the police. Lowe stands accused of workplace bullying and threatening behaviour towards party chair Zia Yusuf. These are allegations that he strongly denies, calling the whole affair a ‘witch hunt’. How long has there been tension between

Michael Simmons

Will Trump cause a recession?

Donald Trump has refused to rule out an American recession. He ‘hates to predict things like this’, he said yesterday. When asked if a downturn was coming this year, the President responded that a ‘period of transition’ was on the cards. On Thursday last week the Atlanta Fed’s GDP ‘nowcast’ model was forecasting that America’s economy would shrink by 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year – a slight improvement on the 2.8 per cent contraction it had predicted three days earlier. If this reading for the first three months of 2025 proves to be true, and things don’t pick up shortly, could the USA be heading

Ross Clark

Think you’re so clever boycotting Tesla?

How difficult life has become for earnest, liberal-minded motorists who like to show off their environmental credentials through their choice of car. Until recently, they were buying Teslas by the car park-load. But now they seem suddenly to have gone off them. European Tesla sales have plummeted since Donald Trump’s election victory brought Elon Musk into government as axeman-in-chief. Nowhere has the plunge been more precipitous than in Germany, where sales fell 60 per cent in January and a further 76 per cent in February – when just 1,429 Teslas were sold. Existing Tesla owners, too, appear to be dumping their vehicles prematurely. In Britain, the prices of a one-year-old

Gavin Mortimer

What Reform can learn from France’s National Rally

The crisis currently ripping apart Reform is nothing new to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Indeed, the reason her party is called the ‘National Rally’ is a result of her ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, which aimed to soften the party’s image. Le Pen ditched its original moniker, the National Front, in early 2018, a few months after her comprehensive defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election run-off. Her father, Jean-Marie, who had co-founded the National Front in 1972, was furious, saying it was ‘totally absurd… a betrayal of the movement’s history’. It wasn’t the first time that father and daughter had fallen out over the party’s direction; in 2015 she

Alexander Larman

Does the King really listen to Beyonce?

Is this really the King’s favourite music? If you’ve ever had sleepless nights wondering what King Charles’s favourite tunes are, Apple has now come to your rescue. A selection has been put out on Apple Music, grandiloquently entitled ‘His Majesty King Charles III’s Playlist’, and the monarch has put out a brief statement to explain his choices. ‘I wanted to share with you songs which have brought me joy. They evoke many different styles and many different cultures. But all of them, like the family of Commonwealth nations, in their many different ways, share the same love of life in all its richness and diversity.’ The lede is hardly buried,

Jane Stannus

Mark Carney will be Canada’s Project Fear PM

Oh no, Canada. The maple smoke has floated up from the Liberal party’s headquarters, and the bad news is out: our new Prime Minister is Mark Carney, banker, Davos darling, and ruthless climate radical. It’s not even Canadians’ fault this time. Trudeau, admittedly, was. But Carney is a Liberal party pick, which sounds reasonable until you learn that the Liberal party didn’t require its members to hold Canadian citizenship – or even be an adult – to cast a ballot to replace Trudeau as leader. The vote took place online, and while around 400,000 people registered as party members, a glitch-ridden verification process meant only around 160,000 were cleared to vote. It’s

James Snell

The slogan that could doom Mark Carney

Mark Carney has won the Liberal party leadership contest by an enormous margin. He will soon be the prime minister of Canada. It’s a moment of triumph for the former governor of the Bank of England, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, a senior banker at Goldman Sachs based in the United States, Japan and Britain, for a former shapeshifting personage of the United Nations, for a Davos regular: for one of the most ambitious, globally ambitious, guys around. It’s a repudiation of the idea that a citizen of nowhere financier type educated at Harvard and Oxford could never rise to the top in our populist age. Things are