Politics

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

Charles Moore

What part does ageism play in the ‘Pestminster’ backlash?

I wonder if a factor additional to those widely mentioned lies behind differing attitudes to the ‘Pestminster’ scandal. It is well known in every generation that the young find it disgusting that old people (by which they mean anyone over 40) should have sex at all. In his own youth, the late Auberon Waugh wrote an article on this theme which enraged the now forgotten but distinguished novelist William Cooper (who used to write a column for this paper called Scenes from Science). Cooper was a passionate advocate and (uxorious) practitioner of sex for the old, and used to curse Waugh at every opportunity. Waugh, however, was probably more in

Isabel Hardman

Barnier’s Brexit deadline highlights May’s political weakness

Given all the rows in Westminster at the moment, it’s easy to forget that there are Brexit negotiations going on. But those involved in the talks from the EU’s side haven’t, and neither have they neglected to notice that Theresa May’s government is looking remarkably flimsy. Hence Michel Barnier’s warning today that there are only two weeks in which to make sufficient progress on the very important questions of the Brexit divorce bill, the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland and citizens’ rights. Barnier knows that the pressure is mounting on May at home to move on to trade talks, and that a Prime Minister as weak as her can’t

Steerpike

Alex Salmond makes life difficult for Nicola Sturgeon

It’s safe to say that Alex Salmond’s decision to host a talk show on Russia Today has not gone down well. The former first minister has been widely condemned for taking the controversial gig on the Russian-funded channel. Nicola Sturgeon has also now joined in, saying that she would have advised her predecessor ‘against RT and suggested he seek a different channel to air what I am sure he will be an entertaining show’. But somewhat embarrassingly for Sturgeon, Salmond isn’t the only SNP figure to make an appearance on the channel. SNP politicians have popped up on RT nearly 50 times in recent years. Admittedly, Salmond himself accounted for

Julie Burchill

The Queen is not ‘one of us’

When Republicans like myself mouth off against the Windsors, we always add the caveat ‘But the Queen’s different!’ What we mean is that among a menagerie of malingerers – her mother left behind £7million in debts when she died; her sister, a sottish snob who crippled herself during a miscalculation with boiling bath water; her husband a mouthy bounder; her sons a hopeless shower – she alone seems to understand that the price a modern monarchy must pay is not to appear to be layabouts who believe that life – and the public purse – owes them a high standard of living.  Stories about the Queen’s down-home decency have permeated

Alex Massie

Alex Salmond has become Russia’s useful idiot

When Alex Salmond became first minister of Scotland in 2007 many people wished him well. You did not need to have voted for the SNP to appreciate that Salmond’s minority administration was a welcome breath of fresh air. It replaced a tired and muddled Labour-Lib Dem coalition with one that had a pleasing sense of purpose and ambition. Scotland was ready to grow and Salmond seemed the kind of statesman who would not embarrass the nation.  A decade later, Salmond is reduced to working for the Kremlin’s propaganda station “Russia Today”. It has been a depressing fall from grace, one to be pitied as much as anything else. You do

My identity crisis

I’m sitting at home working, minding my business, and the mobile rings. It’s DC Lyle from Wandsworth police station. He says that my name was given to Crimestoppers anonymously as a potential witness to the ‘Putney Pusher’ incident. Remember that nutter who barged a woman into the path of a bus on Putney Bridge while out for his morning jog? Well, six months on and they still haven’t found him — and DC Lyle wants to meet. I say I couldn’t possibly help as I wasn’t a witness. DC Lyle says he still needs to meet. I reaffirm there really was no point, I could be of no value; I

Stop the rot

Dealing with a hung parliament was never going to be easy, but no one quite foresaw the decay which now seems to have set in to Theresa May’s government. The best that can be said for the Prime Minister is that the past week’s events have weakened her rivals within the Conservative party. No one is talking up Priti Patel as a potential rival any more and a challenge from Boris Johnson is now highly unlikely, following his loose words about a British woman incarcerated in Iran — which the Iranian regime may use as a pretext to increase her sentence. Like John Major, the Prime Minister benefits from the

My plan for Europe

The European Union has languished and become enfeebled — and we are all to blame. There is a noticeable paucity of ideas and methods. The whole system has capitulated and is at a standstill. Summits bringing together heads of state and of government have become a parody: getting together behind closed doors, repeating lofty principles, changing a word or two in a statement so that it sounds slightly different from the last one. The system is cut off from the world and from real life. What did the Breton farmers I have met in the past few months think? They did not say that they were against Europe, or against

James Forsyth

Boris’s critics risk becoming Tehran’s unwitting helpers

Boris Johnson made a mistake when he said that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran. He and the Foreign Office should have moved to clear up the error far faster and far more comprehensively than they did. But some of Boris Johnson’s critics are risking turning themselves into Tehran’s unwitting helpers. Take, for example, Emily Thornberry’s letter to Boris Johnson saying that he should resign if Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sentence is extended. This proposal would, effectively, hand the Iranian regime a veto over who the British Foreign Secretary should be. All of us talking about this matter should also be aware of what Tehran is up to. They like

James Forsyth

Penny Mordaunt’s promotion shows May’s limited room for manoeuvre

Penny Mordaunt is the new International Development Secretary. After last week’s very unexpected appointment of Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary, Theresa May has done what many observers expected her to do in appointing Mordaunt to replace Priti Patel. The choice of a female Brexiteer maintains the gender and Brexit balance of the Cabinet. Mordaunt has done two minister of state jobs already, she was until today minister for disabilities and before that minister for the armed forces. So, she had claim to be the next cab off the rank. Though, the fact that May is going for as close to a like-for-like replacement as possible is yet another reminder that

Fraser Nelson

The resignation letter blunder

We ran a Steerpike blog entitled “the resignation letter blunder” about how Theresa May put Priti Patel’s name underneath her signature. In fact, the blunder was ours. No10 was following protocol, where it’s normal to put the recipient’s name under the Prime Minister’s signature in such letters. We – and I – ought to have known better.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: May was right to ditch Patel – but she shouldn’t stop there

Another week, another Cabinet minister heads for the exit. Priti Patel’s departure means Theresa May now faces another difficult decision in choosing who should replace her. But was she right to get rid of Patel? The newspaper verdict is unanimous: ‘We like Priti Patel,’ says the Sun: ‘But she had to go’. After all, ‘fierce ambition’ is one thing – it’s quite another to hold ‘unauthorised meetings in Israel’ which show clearly her ‘over-confidence’ and also ‘no little naivety’. Priti is indeed a ‘loss to the Cabinet’, the paper says; she is a ‘working-class Thatcherite’ who, crucially for the Tory party, remains ‘in touch with ethnic minority voters’. But her

Brendan O’Neill

The political class has lost the plot

The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy theories being spouted by Ben Bradshaw and others — the David Ickes of polite society — which imply Putin is puppeteering the Western masses’ brains. It increasingly feels like we’re being governed not merely by fools and incompetents, but by nutters. Incompetence is the go-to explanation for the political class’s current malaise. And it’s a

Fraser Nelson

Salman’s Arabia

There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp. Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old, and his effective seizure of power means he defines the kingdom for a generation. He’s seen in Whitehall as a history maker, whose ruthless impatience might not only liberalise his country but create an alliance with Israel that could change the region. Minsters talk about MbS (as he’s known in Whitehall) with admiration and awe.

Rod Liddle

If you care about kids, give us all the facts

News programmes are as interesting, these days, for what they don’t tell you as for what they do. So, the ten o’clock news on the BBC on Monday night reported the horrible murder of 18-month-old Elsie Scully-Hicks by her adoptive father, without mentioning that the baby had been adopted by a gay couple. There was a fleeting reference to the murderer, Matthew Scully-Hicks, having a husband, which kind of gave the game away. But otherwise it was something the BBC would rather we did not know, and certainly did not dwell on. Whenever they do something like this, I think it’s important to dwell on it for a bit. There

James Forsyth

Why can’t the PM get a grip?

How much longer can things go on like this? That is the question on the lips of Tory ministers and MPs this week. A government that was already facing the monumental challenge of Brexit now finds itself dealing with a scandal that has claimed one cabinet scalp and led to another Conservative MP being referred to the police. At the same time, Priti Patel has been running her own freelance foreign policy. To make matters worse, the Prime Minister’s closest political ally is caught up in the Westminster scandal. Damian Green is under investigation by the Cabinet Office for his personal conduct. If he has to go —and several of

Matthew Parris

The sex scandal is what psychologists call ‘displacement activity’

There are three reasons why Britain’s political and media world finds itself in the present ludicrous uproar over sexual misbehaviour at Westminster, and only one of them has anything to do with sexual misbehaviour. But let us start with that. And, first, a caveat. Can there be an organisation anywhere in discovered space which, subjected to the intense media scrutiny that the House of Commons now attracts, would not generate a comparable stock of report and rumour? Imagine a workplace — indeed imagine a workplace like our own august Spectator offices – peopled by a lively mixture of creatives, eccentrics, wannabes, rascals, saints, absolute bricks, total pricks and drones. Now

Tom Goodenough

Priti Patel resigns from the Cabinet

Priti Patel has resigned from the Cabinet. Patel said that she accepted her decision to hold meetings with Israeli officials during her summer holiday without the prior say so of the government meant that her ‘actions fell below the high standards that are expected of a secretary of state’. The secretary of state for international development went on to ‘offer a fulsome apology’ to the Prime Minister. Theresa May responded by saying ‘now that further details have come to light’ about exactly what Patel got up to on her summer jaunt, ‘it is right that you have decided to resign’. Her resignation tonight is not much of a surprise. Westminster has spent

James Forsyth

Who might replace Priti Patel in a reshuffle?

Priti Patel is currently on her way to Downing Street, where she is expected to be fired by Theresa May. The early signs are that Number 10 is looking for a Leaver to replace her as International Development Secretary, to preserve the Cabinet’s Brexit balance. But this would be the wrong way to think about the reshuffle. Trying to replace Patel with someone who matches her profile as closely as possible would just be another advertisement of how weak May’s position is. In parliamentary terms, though, May is, obviously, in a weak position, Getting a clean EU withdrawal bill will be very difficult. (Indeed, the position of the Scottish Tories