Politics Archives

Saturday

6 Aug 2016

Brexit gives Theresa May the perfect excuse to stay in Britain

Just now, Theresa May understandably feels the need to fly to a great many European countries to introduce herself to their leaders. But one of the eventual benefits of leaving the European Union ought to be that prime ministers can mostly stay at home. The number of leaders’ meetings that ‘Europe’ generates is terrifying. It takes heads of government out of their own country virtually every working week. Being a Type 1 diabetic, Mrs May is particularly vulnerable to funny hours, exhausting journeys and enormous banquets. With Britain out of the EU, she could flourish by staying here and — as good prime ministers used very successfully to do —

James Forsyth

Why an early election would be bad for the Tories

Ten points ahead in the polls, Theresa May regarded as the best Prime Minister by a majority of voters and both Labour and Ukip in disarray. It is little wonder, as I say in The Sun today, that some Tories are beginning to get excited about an early election. But going for an early election would be a massive mistake for the Tories. First, what the public seem to like about Theresa May is that she is a no nonsense politician who gets on with the job in front of her. Voters appear to like her refrain that politics isn’t a game. But calling an early election would destroy all

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The real hate crime scandal | 6 August 2016

Since the vote for Brexit, the media has fallen over itself to cover the apparently large upswing in the number of ‘hate crimes’ being reported. One of the trends noted is a particularly high occurrence of such incidents in areas that voted ‘Leave’. In his Spectator cover piece, Brendan O’Neill argues that there is an ‘unhinged subjectivity’ to hate crime reporting, which has skewed statistics in favour of self-critical moralisation. So, has there really been a post-Brexit surge in hostility towards minority groups or is our metric for recording these crimes simply off-kilter? Brendan O’Neill joins Kevin O’Sullivan, who was recently cleared after spending 20 months defending himself from a

Lucy Vickery

An ode for Theresa May: Spectator poetry competition winners

There was a good response to the call for poems on a political theme entitled ‘May day’ but the mood was overwhelmingly bleak despite the efforts of a relentlessly optimistic few, Tim Raikes and Alanna Blake among them. There was much to admire though, including a neat riff from Frank McDonald on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 — ‘Shall Maggie be compared to Theresa May/ Who is more cautious and more temperate?’, a ‘Jabberwocky’-inspired submission from Andrew Bamji and Alex Lynford’s clever Blakean turn. Nicholas Hodgson, Martin John, George Simmers, G.M. Davis, John Whitworth and Michael Copeman were on top form too. The winners are printed below and earn their authors £30

Geoffrey Alderman

Will Labour finally stop sweeping anti-Semitism under the carpet?

In February, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, resigned after having publicly accused the Club of harbouring and articulating rank prejudice against Jews and other minority groups. Mr Chalmers – who is not Jewish – declared that a ‘large proportion’ of Club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews‘. He also suggested that individual members of the Club’s executive had employed offensive language ‘with casual abandon’, and that some had gone so far as to voice support for Hamas, the terrorist organisation that currently controls Gaza and which is proud to be governed by a charter that calls upon its followers to murder Jewish people. These

Friday

5 Aug 2016

Steerpike

Tory MPs turn on Steve Hilton over resignation honours row – ‘pompous arse’

As David Cameron continues to receive flak over his resignation honours list, yesterday his old pal Steve Hilton stuck his head above the parapet to make his criticism be known. Not content with going against his old boss on the EU, Hilton — who is Cameron’s former director of strategy — says the honours system is ‘corrupt’. Alas it turns out not everyone on the Tory benches is so happy about Hilton sharing his views from across the pond. Richard Benyon, the former environment minister, took to Twitter to call Hilton a ‘pompous arse’: Oh joy. I thought we had heard last of @SteveHiltonx but he's back from his Californian

Tom Goodenough

Owen Smith looks to 1945 to inspire Labour

Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith have faced off in their first hustings of what has already proved to be a bitter leadership campaign. That disunity and turmoil was on display on stage in Cardiff last night. The Labour leader hit back at Smith’s dig about the ‘fractured’ state of the party by saying it was hard to preach about unity when Smith and others had ‘resigned from the shadow cabinet’. This was business as usual then. So whilst Corbyn and Smith made it clear they will never see eye to eye, what did they have to say on what they actually stand for? Whilst their clashes on stage only reveal the

Ross Clark

Corbyn’s gong for Chakrabarti is his biggest own goal yet

It is beginning to look like a bit of a trend this year: the Conservatives get themselves into a tight spot, only for Labour to trump them quickly. Just as the Tories seemed to be descending into a bitter leadership crisis on the weekend after the referendum, half the shadow cabinet resigned. Now, just as David Cameron was being mauled from all quarters over the cronies in his resignation honours list (including from the presumably not soon-to-be Lord Hilton), Jeremy Corbyn has directed attention to himself by ennobling Shami Chakrabarti, formerly of human rights group Liberty. The appointment is embarrassing three times over. Firstly, because he said last year: ‘Labour

Thursday

4 Aug 2016

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 4 August 2016

The Daily Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Icap, has been blocked for a peerage by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac). All the indignation just now is against David Cameron’s resignation honours list, packed with his ‘cronies’, who allegedly include Mr Spencer. It is misdirected. The real anger should go against the pharisaical bureaucracy which has been imposed upon patronage. No one is allowed to know why Mr Spencer has been blocked, yet the world knows that he has been because, supposedly, he has ‘the wrong sniff’ about him. His company was fined by regulators for transgressions in relation to Libor, but he

Viv Groskop

Brexit Britain needs a large dose of proper political satire

After Brexit, satire is well and truly dead. Now we have Boris Johnson answering questions at press conferences about how he’ll explain to Hillary’s face that he once said she looks like a nurse in a mental institution. We have an unelected prime minister who got the job largely because another woman baited her about not having children. We have Andrea Leadsom: a non-entity who is swiftly revealed to be exceedingly stupid and tactless and is then rewarded with a serious cabinet role. And we have no opposition, except Jeremy Corbyn with a leadership style entirely lacking in leadership or style. This stuff just writes itself. How can you be funny

Steerpike

Corbyn gives chair of Labour’s anti-Semitism inquiry a peerage

Although Jeremy Corbyn has previously suggested that he is against the creation of new peers, the Labour leader appears to take a different approach when it comes to the chair of his anti-Semitism inquiry. After weeks of speculation that Corbyn was poised to give Shami Chakrabarti — who recently found that the party was not overrun with anti-Semitism — a peerage, today the news has been confirmed in the official resignation honours list: In a statement on the decision, Labour say they are ‘delighted’ to confirm Chakrabarti’s appointment to the House of Lords. They refrain, however, from addressing concerns that this suggests a conflict of interest. It’s particularly awkward timing given that

James Forsyth

Corbyn joins Cameron in giving peerages to pals

David Cameron’s resignation honours have now been published—and it is an extensive list. Cameron has nominated 13 people for peerages including his former chief of staff Ed Llewellyn, the former head of his policy unit Camilla Cavendish and his former head of operations Liz Sugg. The current treasurer of the Tory party Andrew Farmer is another heading to the red benches. But Michael Spencer, the former Tory treasurer and head of ICAP, is not on the list. As the Sunday Times revealed last week, there will be honours for many of Cameron’s closest allies and those who worked with him at Number 10. George Osborne becomes a Companion of Honour.

James Forsyth

Labour’s problems go far beyond Jeremy Corbyn

Owen Smith takes on Jeremy Corbyn in the first Labour leadership hustings this evening. The moderates are desperately hoping that these head to heads can change enough minds among the Labour electorate to give Smith a chance of beating Corbyn, hence their eagerness to have them televised and the Corbynite desire to keep them off air. But as I argue in the magazine this week, Labour’s problems go far beyond Jeremy Corbyn. He is a symptom of what ails the party, not the sole cause of it. Even if he announced tonight that he was off to spend more time on his allotment, Labour would still have big, existential questions

Ross Clark

Can Labour be trusted with Britain’s security when it can’t manage its own?

During the Blair years the security guards at Labour party conferences had a reputation for over-zealous intervention – remember the sight of octogenarian Walter Wolfgang being manhandled out of his seat and ejected from the chamber for daring to heckle Jack Straw over the Iraq War? Appropriately enough, under Corbyn, Labour’s conference security has the opposite problem – it seems to have been unilaterally-disarmed. As Guido Fawkes reveals this morning there is a serious possibility that this year’s event, scheduled to take place in Liverpool next month, will have to be cancelled owing to the party’s inability to organise security for the event. The problem goes back to last year

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The real hate crime scandal

Since the vote for Brexit, the media has fallen over itself to cover the apparently large upswing in the number of ‘hate crimes’ being reported. One of the trends noted is a particularly high occurrence of such incidents in areas that voted ‘Leave’. In his Spectator cover piece, Brendan O’Neill argues that there is an ‘unhinged subjectivity’ to hate crime reporting, which has skewed statistics in favour of self-critical moralisation. So, has there really been a post-Brexit surge in hostility towards minority groups or is our metric for recording these crimes simply off-kilter? Brendan O’Neill joins Kevin O’Sullivan, who was recently cleared after spending 20 months defending himself from a

Claudia Massie

Skye

Glamour. It’s Marcello Mastroianni drinking negronis on the Via Veneto; it’s Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney, Sinatra on the Vegas Strip in ’59… and a composting toilet on the west coast of Scotland. The latter was the only one available when I went glamping in Skye. Glamping is a neologism, an awkward portmanteau word that seeks to persuade us there really can be a satisfactory crossover between glamour and camping, even though most reasonable people have these two concepts pegged in different stratospheres. You can ‘glamp’ all over the place these days, in everything from yurts to airstream caravans, but to do it in Skye you must head to Skye Eco

James Forsyth

Who can lead Labour?

Westminster prefers to concentrate on one drama at a time. That is why the old rule of thumb was that only one party leader could be under pressure at any given moment. Recent events have upended that convention. The Brexit vote precipitated leadership crises for more than one party. But the spectacle of the Tory leadership election has rather overshadowed the fact that Labour is having its own leadership contest. The contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, the party’s former work and pensions spokesman, will run all summer. In Labour circles, Corbyn is regarded as the clear favourite. Once again, the hard left appears to have succeeded in getting

Martin Vander Weyer

Top tips for UK-China trade: grab the cheque and sup with a long spoon

There are reasons why Theresa May might harbour doubts about the Hinkley Point nuclear project — chiefly its unproven French technology and the high probability of time and cost overruns — but the fear expressed by her aide Nick Timothy that ‘the Chinese could use their role to build weaknesses into computer systems which will allow them to shut down Britain’s energy production at will’ sounds — even to a Sino-cynic like me — far-fetched. As I wrote here during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year, ‘The least sinister thing about the Chinese is their money. A ten-digit cheque… even from China National Nuclear Corporation… does not carry a ‘backdoor’ listening

Daniel Hannan

Brexit means sovereignty

We know what people voted against,’ say half-clever pundits, ‘but it’s far from clear what they voted for.’ Actually, it’s very clear: the British voted to leave the EU and take back control of their own laws. They didn’t dictate precisely what kind of deal we should have with our neighbours after leaving: that is for ministers to negotiate. But when Leave campaigners invited people to ‘take back control’, voters understood what that meant: legal supremacy should return from Brussels to Westminster. Remainers spent the campaign trying to suggest that the EU was just one among several international associations in which Britain participated. It was, they wanted us to believe,

Wednesday

3 Aug 2016

Steerpike

Scottish Labour ask entire mailing list to stand in local elections

With Scottish Labour now the third biggest party in Scotland following disastrous election results in May, it’s safe to say that its members have seen better times. However, there does appear to be one positive to the beleaguered party’s lagging popularity: it’s never been easier to get involved. Today Scottish Labour have sent out an email to their full distribution list — including members of the press — asking recipients to stand in the local elections: Alas it turns out the party have now got cold feet about asking members of the media to stand. A second email has been sent out, explaining that it was sent ‘in error’: However, given that the party