Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
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What happens after Joe Biden? The President has announced that he won’t run for re-election. Biden has endorsed Kamala Harris, his Vice President, to be the new Democratic nominee. Can she convince Democratic voters, and the rest of the US? The Spectator’s Freddy Gray and Kate Andrews are joined by Tim Stanley, columnist for the Telegraph. This episode was originally broadcast on SpectatorTV. You can watch it here:
Keir Starmer has been in office for less than three weeks, but his government has spent an unusually large amount of time and energy on matters in Northern Ireland. With his newly appointed secretary of state, Hilary Benn, the Prime Minister visited Belfast within days of kissing hands, despite a schedule which also included the Nato summit in Washington. The administration faces a number of pressing problems in Northern Ireland which carry substantial price tags as well as powerful symbolic importance. Harland and Wolff was one of the great icons of Protestant industrial Belfast When Starmer and Benn met Northern Ireland’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, one of
Well, that didn’t last long. Having preached to us about fiscal responsibility and ‘securonomics’, Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to be about to cave in at the first opportunity – by hinting that she will grant 5.5 per cent pay rises to teachers, NHS workers, and other public sector workers. At the heart of Reeves’s problem is the role of pay review bodies The unions feel entitled to pay rises of 5.5 per cent because they have been recommended by pay review bodies – even though that is more than 3.5 percentage points above inflation. But there is a very big problem. Labour’s manifesto – which we kept being told was
Back to Westminster and the looming Tory leadership contest. No one has officially announced their candidacy yet, but the rumour mill is in overdrive as the list of potential runners and riders continues to grow. And who better to pour petrol on the sparks of speculation then Boris Johnson’s longtime ally, Nadine Dorries? She has today taken it upon herself to write a rather public memo to the much-depleted group of (remaining) Tory MPs. ‘These tweets are for Conservative MPs and party members so apologise [sic] for the length in advance,’ she warned her 195,000 Twitter followers, before launching in. Claiming that the leadership campaigns for Robert Jenrick and Kemi
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Last night we had the news that President Biden will not contest the election, announcing in a separate statement that he will support his vice president Kamala Harris for the nomination. As endorsements pour in from other notable democrats and donors it looks like it might be nailed-on for her. But what would a Kamala Harris candidacy mean for Labour unity? Meanwhile, the row over the two child benefit cap continues to swirl. What should we expect this week? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue, is exactly what the company produced: millions and millions of Windows PCs simultaneously succumbed to the Blue Screen of Death, as a company whose whole raison d’etre is averting internet catastrophe caused one. The biggest, supposedly, in history. Is it in bad taste to say that the great internet outage of July 2024 was, in some respects, just a little bit funny? Plainly, it wasn’t funny if you were trying to book a GP appointment, or trying to pass through an international airport,
There was a muted reaction among the French political class to the attempt on Donald’s Trump’s life. Keir Starmer sent his best wishes to the former president in the early hours of Sunday morning, but it was another six hours before president Emmanuel Macron followed suit. The caretaker prime minister of France, Gabriel Attal, made no comment, nor did the man who dreams of having his job, Olivier Faure, the secretary of the Socialist party. Politics in France is a squalid business One or two figures from the left-wing coalition did offer their lukewarm support to Trump. Sandrine Rousseau, for example, a Green MP, wished him a ‘speedy recovery’ and
‘There are two things that are important in American politics,’ said Mark Hanna. ‘The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Kamala Harris, who cut her political teeth in the mega-rich world of west coast Democratic politics, understands that point well. The immediate threat to Harris comes from the right of her party Following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election, she’s already made sure the big money is right behind her. Over the weekend, she and her husband Doug Emhoff successfully wooed the Democratic plutocrats who really decide things. The Soros family, for instance, and the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have already declared their
And so now we have it: the first official contender for the Scottish Conservative leadership contest. Russell Findlay, the party’s current justice spokesperson announced this morning that he was throwing his hat into the ring — after his party’s rather underwhelming general election campaign. In a lengthy article for the Scottish Daily Mail, Findlay first paid tribute to former leader Ruth Davidson, hailing her leadership for making the party a serious force in Scottish politics. ‘We need to build on that legacy, not tear it down,’ the shadow justice secretary wrote. A little less kind to the party’s more recent approach, however, Findlay went on: We’ve not been conservative enough…
He resisted as they tried to force him away. He showed his defiance. Then, after a struggle, he gave in and was removed. That could be a description of the near-assassination of Donald Trump last weekend. Or the words might equally apply to Joe Biden’s experience since his abysmal debate performance last month. There’s a curiously asymmetrical relationship between the two old men now. Whereas Donald Trump, 78, survived his brush with death, Joe Biden’s political career died on that debate stage in Atlanta, Georgia. He staggered on for almost a month but, as leading Democrats queued up to tell him to go, his position was untenable. Now that Biden
Over the past four years, Joe Biden has featured on 18 covers of The Spectator. They range from the upbeat – the halcyon days of 2020 and 2021 when he swore to restore the world order – to the sombre – such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos in the Middle East. Overall though, they clearly tell a tale of a leader in decline, whose fitness for office came to be questioned increasingly loudly throughout his tenure. Eventually, he was unable to silence the doubters no longer, announcing this Sunday that he would not contest the next presidential election. 1 August 2020 Biden edges ahead in the polls
Joe Biden has bowed to the inevitable in withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris. Only now has the presidential race become interesting as the 59-year-old Harris, who is more than likely to receive the Democratic nomination, prepares to face off against Donald Trump. Suddenly the Republican candidate has become the old codger while the probable Democratic one represents generational change. Trump, you could even say, has become yesterday’s news. This is why Republicans would be wise not to underestimate Harris, a former federal prosecutor and California senator whose early years as Vice President were marked, among other things, by public scrutiny of her staff
Kamala Harris seems overwhelmingly likely to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, having been given the blessing of both Bill Clinton and Biden himself. But does she actually have a better chance of beating Donald Trump than Biden did? The betting markets think it’s a done deal: the below shows that other possibilities (Gavin Newsom, Whitmer etc) are nothing more than wild outside bets. So let’s focus on Harris. Since the Trump-Biden debate last month, a handful of polls have shown that voters would be no more or less likely to vote Democrat if Harris replaced Biden as the presidential nominee. In all of these polls, Trump leads (albeit
President Joe Biden – who has announced that he will not run for re-election – has served the United States honourably for five decades, as a senator, as Barack Obama’s vice president, and finally in the highest office in the land. Biden has endorsed Kamala Harris, his Vice President, to be the new Democratic nominee. The best thing for Democrats to do now is to stage a genuinely open competition for who should oppose Donald Trump in the presidential race. Voters deserve a say in who represents them, and Harris was not on primary ballots in either 2020 or 2024. And the competition, even if messy, is likely to strengthen
There are rare few quiet days in politics and today is not one of them. Tonight President Joe Biden has abandoned his campaign to win a second term in the White House, writing that ‘it is in the best interest of my party and country’ to stand down. President Biden has been fast to endorse his current running mate, Vice-President Kamala Harris, for the nomination – calling his decision to pick Harris as his second in command ‘the best decision I’ve made’. The US President has faced growing calls from across his own party to step down after a series of suboptimal public appearances – but what finally convinced Biden
Well, it’s finally happened. After all the speculation, the spin and the denials, Joe Biden has today, finally, announced he is dropping out of the race for the White House. The last President to do so was Lyndon Johnson in 1968, but that was in March of that year, rather than late July. Biden has already endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him, but not all Democrats will be pleased by her likely candidacy. As key figures react to today’s announcement, Mr S has gathered reactions from some of the big players in American politics… Donald Trump Biden’s predecessor reacted in his usual magnanimous way, giving the occasion the gravitas it
After weeks of pressure from Democratic party insiders, Joe Biden has finally said he won’t seek re-election. ‘I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term,’ he said in a one-page letter, offering his ‘full support and endorsement for Kamala [Harris] to be the nominee of our party this year’. So Biden and the Democratic establishment want quick coronation of the Vice President, not any serious contest at the Democrat convention in Chicago. ‘Democrats – it’s time to come together and beat Trump,’ Biden wrote at the end of his letter. ‘Let’s do this.’
Chancellor Reeves adamant she will ‘make sure the sums add up’ Rachel Reeves gave an interview with Laura Kuenssberg this morning in which she emphasised the ‘mess’ she says the Conservatives have left behind, and restated that Labour would not spend outside of its fiscal rules. Kuenssberg asked the Chancellor whether she would be prepared to ignore the recommendations of the independent pay review bodies, which have called for a public sector pay rise of 5.5 per cent. Reeves would not confirm the government’s position, but accepted that ‘there is a cost to not settling’ public sector pay disputes, implying she might be open to above-inflation pay increases. What is
It’s not often that Irish republican party Sinn Féin hosts events in London, but the group included the UK capital in its post-election victory lap this week. Five of its seven MPs gathered in a dimly-lit hall in Hammersmith’s Irish Cultural Centre on Tuesday as the room filled with jubilant supporters, with many a Guinness in hand. There is certainly cause for celebration in the party: Sinn Féin has achieved a ‘perfect hat-trick’, as Belfast West MP Paul Maskey described it, becoming the largest group in local government, the Stormont Assembly and now Northern Irish party in Westminster. Retaining all seven of its seats, Sinn Féin increased its vote share
Uh oh. While Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity has had a post-election bounce (with an approval rating now at 19 per cent compared to -1 before the Labour win) not everything is looking rosy for the new Prime Minister. Splits over certain policy stances are beginning to emerge and the two-child benefit cap is taking centre stage. Rosie Duffield is one of the latest Labour MPs to hit out at the scheme – blasting it as ‘social cleansing’ and an ‘unequal piece of legislation’. Calling on Starmer’s army to scrap the rule, Duffield writes in the Sunday Times today that: It is a heinous piece of legislation and the reason above all others