Politics

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

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tristram Hunt feels the heat over the EU on Sunday Politics

With the outcome of the EU referendum predicted to be on a ‘knife edge’, there are growing concerns that David Cameron may have misplayed his hand. So, in order for the Remain camp to reclaim a lead in the polls, they need some solid media performances from names the public can trust. Alas, they may soon come to regret Tristram Hunt’s appearance on yesterday’s Sunday Politics. During a tense exchange with Andrew Neil, Hunt struggled to rebut Neil’s questions on immigration, going on to accuse the BBC presenter of offering up his own version of ‘project fear’. TH: In the long run, I think there is a really interesting question about

Sunday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The strange death of left-wing Euroscepticism

Jeremy Corbyn’s eye-swivelling about-face on the EU – he once wanted to leave, now he wants to stay – has become a source of mirth for Eurosceptics and a sign of hope for Europhiles. To the anti-EU lobby, the fact that Corbyn voted against staying in the common market in the 1975 referendum and against EU treaties as an MP, yet now wants us all to vote to stay in, shows what a slippery character he is. For the Brussels-loving brigade it confirms that even the most heathen of EU haters can see the light. The ‘sinner who repents’ – actual words used in the Guardian‘s editorial on the newly

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris v Barack on Brexit

The US President flies into town next week to wish the Queen a happy 90th birthday and to encourage Britain to stay in the EU. Obama’s will be the most high profile, foreign intervention in this referendum yet. His message will be that it is in the interests of Britain, the US and the West for us to remain in the EU. But the Out campaign have their ‘Love Actually’ moment ready, as I say in my Sun column today. Boris Johnson will knock back Obama’s advice shortly after the president has spoken, pointing out—as he did in this BBC interview—that it is ‘nakedly hypocritical’ for the US to urge

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Belgian expat trolls Vote Leave campaign

It’s been a good week for Vote Leave after they were given the official designation to campaign for Brexit in the EU referendum. Despite this, they still have a few problems they need to overcome. One of these comes in the form of Rick Astley, the eighties singer. A Belgian expat by the name of Mario Van Poppel has decided to try and cause some problems for the Leave camp’s digital operations. Van Poppel — who is based in London — has purchased several Vote Leave domains. While the official Vote Leave website can be found at www.voteleavetakecontrol.org, a visit to voteleave.com, voteleave.co.uk, voteleave.net or voteleave.org now leads to a video of Rick

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The BBC sitcom Citizen Khan isn’t Islamophobic – it’s just idiotic

If you’ve never watched ‘Citizen Khan’, then count yourself lucky. It’s a sitcom in the loosest sense of the word and a prime example of a comedy show which would only ever appear on the BBC: achingly unfunny, contrived and featuring entirely unbelievable characters. Crucially, though, if the show is one thing, it’s politically correct, in that it centres around a family of Muslims living in a deprived part of Birmingham. But Labour’s Rupa Huq has decided otherwise. She has claimed the show is ‘Islamophobic’: ‘I feel if I didn’t know what the year is, you would think it’s an every day tale of a Birmingham family of Muslims but they’re really quite

Steerpike Steerpike

Friday caption contest: the three Europhiles

Although Jeremy Corbyn has been slow to get involved with the EU campaign, David Cameron is still keen to show the public the Remain side has cross-party support. So, what better way to prove this than a photo opp with Labour’s Neil Kinnock and Liberal Democrat Paddy Ashdown. Mr S welcomes your caption suggestions for the photo of the three Europhiles. The winner will be revealed on Monday. Update: … and the winner is Alun Morris for coming up with the caption: ‘celebrity threesome fight losing battle to prevent the public knowing the truth’.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The EU has become a victim of Obama’s Middle East policy

A Middle Eastern friend put to me the other day a point so big that I felt silly for not having thought of it. Why are so many people fleeing from Syria and Iraq, and other parts of the region, beyond the huge, obvious reason that they fear for their lives? Because they believe that the Shias have gained the whip hand over the Sunnis. George Bush’s mishandling of Iraq after he conquered it opened the way for Iranian power. Barack Obama’s abandonment of Saudi Arabia, his refusal to restore order in Syria and his nuclear deal with Iran have erected this mistake into a policy. So one of this

Steerpike Steerpike

Paul Mason accused of being a Tory

Now that Jeremy Corbyn is head of the Labour party, his army of Corbynistas are waiting in the wings, ready to brand anyone who shows the slightest sign of disloyalty a ‘red Tory’. Some of the ‘Tories’ so far outed by the hard left include Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, John McTernan, Stella Creasy, Harriet Harman, Tony Blair and Lord Adonis. However, even Mr S was surprised to learn of the latest non-believer to be added to the list. Despite being mocked recently for being a ‘revolutionary Marxist’ by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Paul Mason has now been accused of being a secret Tory. Yes, the former Channel 4 economics editor

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Referendum camps try to enthuse voters as official campaign starts

Rather like the 2015 General Election campaign, the EU referendum campaign feels as though it has been going on rather a long time. And yet today is in fact only the start of the official ten-week campaign. There may be some in Westminster who are filled with great excitement at the thought of another ten weeks of bickering about who has the most negative campaign. But the campaigns do have the difficult challenge of motivating those who back them to get out and vote on the day, and endless fighting and negativity about negativity won’t quite do the trick. So today Boris Johnson is giving a speech in Salford in

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Why Obama’s Brexit intervention will matter whether we like it or not

It now looks likely that Barack Obama’s visit to London next week will see the President calling on Britain to stay in the EU. We’re told that Obama will be giving his views as a ‘friend’ and only if he’s asked about Brexit. Nothing sounds more patronising. And as Jacob Rees-Mogg has said, why should we listen to a President who hasn’t been very good? But the truth is that, whether we like it or not, Obama’s intervention could be key. Whatever many think of the President and the collective failures and disappointments of his time in office, Obama is still loved amongst the group of younger voters in Britain

Thursday

Peter Jones

Tax returns to boast about

As Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell whinge away about how rich David Cameron’s family is, they might consider that in the last six years he has funded schools ’n’ hospitals to the tune of £402,283. How much have they put in? Since wealthy ancient Athenians loved to boast about the vast sums they contributed via property taxes to the public benefit, they would have been amazed that Cameron did not long to reveal how rich he was. The 5th-century BC thinker Democritus argued that there was nothing like the rich giving to the poor to produce concord that strengthened the community. The Greek orator Hyperides (389–322 BC) pointed out that Athenians allowed statesmen

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 14 April 2016

With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’ on Newsnight just before my older brother published his tax returns showing the impressive sums he’s made in journalism and publishing. I can only imagine how the antlers of rival 12-point stags such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts must have drooped as they calculated how many copies the full-time Mayor and MP and bestselling ‘popular historian’ must have shifted to earn royalties running into the hundreds of thousands. Having heard him toot about his eye-watering advance for his forthcoming Shakespeare, I felt only admiration that he paid almost a

Steerpike Steerpike

George Galloway’s battle bus fails to rally the troops

George Galloway has stepped up his London mayoral campaign today by taking his battle bus down Whitehall. In an attempt to rally the troops, the Respect candidate shouted through his megaphone: ‘David Cameron, you couldn’t make it up!’ Alas on Mr S’s watch, Galloway-mania failed to kick-in. While he managed to frighten the horses — of the Household Cavalry no less — when it came to supporters, he only seemed able to fill one of the 72 seats on the double-decker bus with a supporter. Vive la révolution!

Matthew Lynn

The Bank of England should butt out of the Brexit debate

Unelected. Technocratic. Exercising a great deal of power over people’s lives, without much in the way of accountability. Staffed by well-meaning, over-educated experts, big on theories and short on experience, and run by a smooth globe-trotting boss who is immaculately plugged into the Davos set. It is not hard to see why the Bank of England, especially under its Canadian Governor Mark Carney, is instinctively pro-EU. It looks across to Brussels and sees an institution very like itself. So it is no great surprise to see the Bank making subtle, and not so subtle, warnings, about the risks of the upcoming referendum. It was at it again today. Its decision

Steerpike Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith’s extremist attack line backfires

It’s not turning out to be a great week for Zac Goldsmith. While the Conservative MP continues to lag behind Labour’s Sadiq Khan in the polls, he has been accused of running a racist campaign. Despite this, Goldsmith showed no signs of watering down his attacks yesterday in an interview with the Evening Standard. Goldsmith used the interview to criticise Khan for sharing platforms — and posing for a photo — with Suliman Gani, an Imam who says women are ‘subservient’ and speaks at segregated rallies. ‘To share a platform nine times with Suliman Gani, one of the most repellent figures in this country, you don’t do it by accident.’ However, the next time

Margaret Corvid

As I’ve discovered, it’s normal for politicians to visit dominatrixes

When I took up professional domination, I had heard about the stereotype: clients are usually powerful men who want to relinquish their burdens of responsibility, and entrust their bodies and desires to someone else for an hour or so. Instead, I’ve learned that clients come from all walks of life. They are mostly men though, young and old: workers, students, soldiers, sailors and pensioners. Having said that, politicians are often interested in domination. When the news broke that Culture Secretary John Whittingdale had dated a dominatrix, the media roared. But I wasn’t surprised. It showed how much society stigmatises sex work and fetish. Some argued that Whittingdale’s association with a dominatrix may have influenced

Nigel Farndale

Just join Germany

An argument you sometimes hear from those sitting on the Brence (the Brexit fence) is that it’s a pity the EU couldn’t have stayed the same as it was when we first joined it in 1973. Back then, say the Brence-sitters, it was a trading bloc with only nine members, which made sense. Greece wasn’t a member, nor were Spain and Portugal, never mind Lithuania, Latvia and all those other countries ending in vowels. But if we could go back to that better arrangement — play fantasy politics, as it were — would we, with hindsight, want it to include France and Italy, two of the original nine? Their economies

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s plan for a graceful exit all hinges on the referendum

The year 2019 seems a long way away. Whether or not David Cameron can stay in office until then is this week’s hot topic of conversation among Tories. They wonder how many more weeks like the last two the Prime Minister can endure. Before Parliament broke up for Easter, the view among Cameron loyalists was that the Tory party needed a holiday. The thinking went that the recess would remove MPs from the Westminster pressure cooker and let referendum tempers cool. But this break turned out to be a disaster. The government spent the first week trying to get on top of the Port Talbot steel story and the second

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s refocus the Panama story on the bad stuff that really matters

There were moments last week when I was ready to give up journalism and retrain in a less unsavoury profession — chiropody, perhaps. It might have been Jon Snow’s bushwhacking of arts minister Ed Vaizey on the subject of the prime minister’s tax affairs, or Snow’s colleague Cathy Newman shrieking questions about offshore companies at Boris Johnson as she chased him in the street. Or one of dozens of reports and articles oozing malice, self–righteousness, hypocrisy and wilful ignorance of the distinction between tax planning as practised by anyone with a sense of obligation to provide for their family and the dirty business of hiding ill-gotten gains. This being open

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tories expect academy policy U-turn

Tory MPs are increasingly convinced that the government may back down on some of its plans for forced academisation of all schools, I understand. The Commons is currently holding an Opposition Day debate on the plans, confirmed in last month’s Budget. They have upset a good number of Conservative MPs and councillors, not least because they appear to contradict the government’s commitment to localism. A large number of MPs are complaining in the debate about the dangers of imposing the academy model on all schools, and removing the requirement for academies to have parent governors. Nicky Morgan has been arguing that the government doesn’t want to scrap parent governors, but