Politics Archives

Monday

10 Mar 2025

Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe’s feud helps only one person

Well, that didn’t take long. Despite much 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 one of its five MPs, 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. In turn, the MP for Great Yarmouth denies all the claims and accused Farage and his allies of embarking on a ‘vindictive witch hunt’. Three days on and there is little sign of the row dying down with more accusations over the weekend – including that Lowe

Sam Leith

The moral shortcomings of Palestine Action

Pro-Palestinian activists under the banner of Palestine Action have been waging what it’s not too much of an exaggeration to call a war against companies and institutions in this country that are seen to support Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In one attack last summer at a Bristol facility owned by the British subsidiary of the Israeli defence company Elbit, a van was used to smash through fencing before activists laid about the building with sledgehammers, and two police officers and a security guard were injured in the ruckus. In dozens of ‘actions’, these activists have caused millions of pounds worth of damage to companies that supply equipment not just or even

Michael Taube

Mark Carney won’t be much different to Justin Trudeau

As widely expected, Mark Carney has become the new Liberal party of Canada leader – and will become Canada’s next prime minister. The former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, taking 85.9 per cent of the vote. Former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland finished a distant second with 8 per cent. Carney will now meet with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to set a timetable for the transition of power. The fact that Carney won isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is many Liberals have put their faith in someone who doesn’t have any political experience. Carney has never

James Kirkup

Labour needs lots more special advisers

Labour ministers’ frustration at what they see as a sclerotic civil service is finally boiling over. Most people familiar with the machinery of government would accept that Labour’s Pat McFadden has a point when he says the civil service needs to change so that elected ministers – of whatever party – can do the things they were elected to do. And the fact that it’s McFadden who is driving this agenda means it’s worth taking seriously, since he’s one of Labour’s most effective operators. But – so far, at least – one thing appears to be missing from the Labour civil service plan. The Whitehall reform the government really needs actually involves

James Heale

Mark Carney is Canada’s new PM

The race to replace Justin Trudeau has been not so much a contest, as a coronation. Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, won the Liberal leadership in a landslide last night, obtaining 85 per cent of the vote and crushing rival Chrystia Freeland. He will now be sworn in as Prime Minister in the coming days, with a general election expected to be called within weeks. Speaking after his victory in the two-month-long contest, Carney says his nation faces ‘dark, dark days, brought on by a country we can no longer trust’. That is a reference to the single issue which has dominated his leadership campaign:

Sunday

9 Mar 2025

Ross Clark

Labour will struggle to reform the civil service

The need for the civil service reforms which Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden is proposing is glaring. It can be summed up in the evidence that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey presented to the Commons Treasury Committee last week: that since the pandemic, productivity in the public sector has shrunk by 7 to 8 per cent. We have a civil service which has become swollen in recent years, but without any corresponding increase in output. Over the past 15 years civil service numbers have performed a bungee jump. David Cameron’s coalition made a good start, thinning out numbers by around a fifth. Come the Brexit process, however, and numbers

James Snell

How horror returned to Syria

Once again there is horror on the Syrian coast. The fighting began on Thursday, in the new government’s telling, after a broad uprising was launched by remnants of the old regime and allied militias. In a coordinated series of moves along Syria’s coastal areas and inland, dozens of checkpoints and bases of the new authorities were attacked all at once. Some coastal towns were set ablaze. Overexcited commentators said this was the revenge of Bashar al-Assad, that a counter-revolution was in full swing, and that a new civil war, this time with a different outcome, was beginning. The Syrian coast has a significant Alawi population — the sect from which

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: civil service is in for a ‘whole lot of change’

Pat McFadden: ‘There’s a whole lot of change coming’ to the civil service The government is set to announce big reforms at Whitehall which it hopes will save money and improve performance in a new ‘era of insecurity’. Among those changes are performance-related pay, a faster exit process for under-performing civil servants, and increased digitalisation with the use of AI. On Sky News, senior cabinet minister Pat McFadden told Trevor Phillips that ‘the state has to reform’, but was coy when asked to specify how many civil servants might be cut. McFadden suggested that the headcount might be lower at Whitehall but higher in other areas of the country, and

Philip Patrick

Is Trump going to rip up the US security alliance with Japan?

Another day, another Trumpian bombshell, this one aimed at the country he says he loves: Japan. Trump told reporters this week that the US-Japan security alliance which has bound the two countries together militarily since 1952 and offered military guarantees to Japan since 1960 was ‘interesting’ but unequal as it obliged the US to defend Japan but not vice-versa. Trump added that the Japanese ‘make a fortune with us economically’ a reference to Japan’s trade surplus with the US. Trump was speaking ahead of a visit by Japan’s trade minister who will reportedly ask (perhaps beg) for an exemption from pending US tariffs on steel and aluminium (25 per cent

Patrick O’Flynn

Can Reform survive the rift between Farage and Lowe?

Sometimes politics throws up a happening of quite exquisite irony. Lee Anderson suspending the whip from Rupert Lowe, his party’s most outspoken MP, a year after the very same thing happened to him is such a moment. Poacher turned gamekeeper indeed. Anderson will of course know that Rishi Sunak’s casting of him into outer darkness did not go well – for Sunak or the Tories. The question we must wrestle with now is how the exile of Lowe is going to go for Reform. In an article written for the Sunday Telegraph today, Nigel Farage himself has admitted there is likely to be a cost, observing: ‘If the last general

Ian O’Doherty

Can Ireland win over Donald Trump?

Would Donald Trump invite Irish politicians to the White House for the traditional St Patrick’s Day visit this year? It’s a question that has been asked many times in Ireland in the past few weeks. It’s a tradition which began in 1952 but in the decades since it has grown in stature to become the most important Irish diplomatic moment of the year. With the invitation normally extended by the second week of February and no sign of any offer arriving, it began to look increasingly likely this was going to be a rather pointed snub by the Trump administration. But to the relief of Taoiseach Micheál Martin and his

Steerpike

Reform’s civil war blows up again

Oh dear, it looks like the civil war engulfing Reform UK is showing no sign of simmering down. On Friday, the political party currently leading in the polls went into complete meltdown after it announced that it had reported one of its MPs, Rupert Lowe, to the police and was suspending the whip. Party chairman Zia Yusuf and chief whip Lee Anderson alleged that they had received complaints about serious bullying from Lowe, and accused him of making ‘threats of physical violence against our Party Chairman.’ For his part, Lowe has completely denied the allegations which he says are ‘untrue and false’ and says he is seeking legal advice. He

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why is the LSE hosting a Hamas book launch?

The London School of Economics’ decision to host the launch this week of Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters – a book that attempts to sanitise and fails to properly condemn a terrorist organisation responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – has rightly sparked outrage. It is a shameless attempt to rehabilitate a group that revels in the slaughter of civilians, delights in hostage-taking, and has openly vowed to repeat its crimes. If there were any doubts about Hamas’ true nature, they should have been put to rest on 7 October But while the LSE controversy is unsettling, it is merely a symptom of a much larger

Cristina Odone

Audiobooks won’t help children read better

Shakespeare, Dickens, JK Rowling: Britain’s literary heritage is undisputable. Creativity, emotional depth and universal values have ensured that Hamlet, Oliver Twist and Harry Potter are familiar to school children (and grown-ups) around the world. While other pillars of the proud national legacy – the BBC, the army, the NHS – have crumbled around us, we could still take pride in our peerless literary canon. No longer. The National Literacy Trust, the very institution that should be protecting our literary heritage, is encouraging us to replace reading with audio. They have launched a campaign, #GrowAGenerationOfReaders, that risks pushing teachers and parents to supplant ‘traditional reading’ with audio. ‘Just one in three

Alexander Kolyandr

Why won’t the West use frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine?

Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, there has been a great deal of temptation to seize Russian sovereign assets frozen in the West. There is, after all, an urgent need and moral imperative to make the aggressor pay and use Russia’s money for Ukraine’s cause. But the reality is that unless European governments show urgent determination, Russian money is unlikely to be used to support Ukraine in its totality any time soon. Amid the spat between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump last week, which resulted in the US stopping military aid to Ukraine, the issue of financial support for Kyiv has never been more critical.

Robert Service

It makes perfect sense for Putin to befriend America

Would it really be strange if Vladimir Putin started playing off America against China in geopolitics? If he had greater vision, he would have been doing this in all those years when he fulminated against the US as the global Satan. I wrote about this in 2019 in my book Kremlin Winter as evidence of his long-term ineptitude. But Russian policymakers long ago ceased to offer Putin ideas for a more flexible foreign and security outlook, and his aggressive paranoia dragged Russia into a needless and barbaric war in 2022. Donald Trump was the one American leader whom he always exempted from his tirades. They continue to get on famously. Now Trump,

Saturday

8 Mar 2025

Mark Galeotti

Why Russia has shrugged off Trump’s sanctions threat

While Donald Trump may be threatening Moscow with major new sanctions, as it continues to hammer Ukraine with drones and missiles, the Russians seem unfazed. They assume this is just rhetorical for now – and they are probably right. This week has seen the US progressively cutting off its support for Ukraine, first suspending arms shipments, then pausing intelligence sharing and even access to the satellite imagery used to help target Russian bases and arms depots far from the frontline. The Russian business press has largely ignored Trump’s sanctions threat The Russians, far from resting on their laurels, have responded with an escalated campaign of drone and missile strikes –

Hamish McRae

Are the markets turning on Trump?

China does not like tariffs, but big money in America likes them even less. If one thing has become clear amid the fog of the past week, it is that what will contain Donald Trump are the financial markets. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, attacked Trump on Friday for his imposition of tariffs, adding that major powers ‘should not bully the weak’. While people in Taiwan might find that latter comment a bit rich, his line on tariffs squares with the reaction on Wall Street. The markets do not like it. This week has seen the Nasdaq Composite index of high-technology companies move into a ‘correction’ – a 10 per

Julie Burchill

Who cares if Elon Musk has fourteen kids?

Historically, the richest and poorest men on the planet tend to father a lot more children than the men in the middle. With the former, its because there’s so much for the spawn to inherit, hence all the aristocratic Fitzes; the latter, because so many offspring die in infancy. The men in the middle tend to look disapprovingly – not without reason, as they pay so much of the taxes the other two dodge – at both. It comes as no surprise then that plenty of people have poured scorn on the announcement by Elon Musk’s partner Shivon Zilis that the pair have welcomed the tech billionaire’s fourteenth child. A

Owen Matthews

Russian spying has become a pathetic, amateurish business

Make no mistake: whatever higher moral authority they may have invoked in their defence, Soviet and Russian spies have never been good or honourable people. Kim Philby, the suave Martini-sipping traitor sent dozens of brave anti-Communist volunteers to their deaths. Konon Molody – alias Gordon Lonsdale, Canadian vending machine salesman and kingpin of the Portland Spy Ring – did not balk at blackmailing and threatening his hapless sub-agents into doing the KGB’s dirty work. But as the sordid revelations about the latest crop of Russian spies convicted yesterday in the Old Bailey’s Courtroom Seven reveal, the major difference between Moscow’s agents of yore and those of today is how lowbrow,