Politics

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

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

We want our campervan back, demand Nats

The SNP finance saga continues to drag on – but today it’s taken a rather strange turn. Last year, a £110,000 motorhome was seized by police from outside Nicola Sturgeon’s mother-in-law’s house as part of Operation Branchform into the party’s finances. On the same day, Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell was arrested, while Sturgeon and the SNP’s treasurer were taken in for questioning at later dates. All three were released, though the campervan purchase is currently being investigated alongside other transactions, including gardening equipment and, er, women’s razors. The unused vehicle, said to have been purchased for campaigning, caused a stir last year when SNP treasurer Colin Beattie admitted that he

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will Penny Mordaunt be the next prime minister?

Could Penny Mordaunt lead the Tories into the election? This is the talk this weekend after several papers splashed on a push by Conservative MPs on the right of the party to oust Sunak and replace him with his former leadership rival. The Daily Mail reports that these MPs met with supporters of Mordaunt this week to discuss the possibility of coalescing around her should Sunak face a confidence vote in the coming months. The argument goes that Mordaunt is the only person that would improve the party’s chances after polling suggested she was the only candidate who would fare better than Sunak (by seven points according to one poll).

William Moore William Moore

William Moore, Sean Thomas, Matt Ridley, Lionel Shriver and Kate Andrews

41 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: William Moore questions if the Church of England is about the apologise for Christianity (1:19); Sean Thomas recounts his experience taking ayahuasca in Colombia (8:13); Matt Ridley argues that private landowners make better conservationists (16:40); Lionel Shriver warns against pathological niceness in the debate about immigration (28:37); and, Kate Andrews reviews a play at the Olivier about Nye Bevan (36:57). Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Nigel Farage on Reform, the Red Wall and 14 years of Tory failure

30 min listen

On this special edition of Coffee House Shots, Kate Andrews interviews broadcaster, and honorary president of the Reform Party, Nigel Farage. They discuss Lee Anderson’s defection to the Reform party, how Nigel won the Red Wall for Boris Johnson, and whether he will return to front line politics. This was taken from The Week in 60 minutes on SpectatorTV. For the full episode, and more, click here.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How Putin will rig the Russian election

Pity the poor political technologists, as Russia’s professionals in the dark arts of spin, propaganda, gerrymandering and outright ballot box stuffing are known. They are not only expected to produce the exact expected election result – that’s the easy bit, when you control the count – but they are meant to make it look as plausible as possible. That’s the rub. As Russia goes to the polls, there is no question whether Vladimir Putin will be re-elected by a landslide. Indeed, it has long been rumoured that the presidential administration has already decided on the result: a clear first-round victory for Putin with 70-plus per cent of the vote on

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will France’s Olympians embarrass Macron?

France host England tonight in the final match of the 2024 Six Nations. ‘Le Crunch’, as this fixture has come to be known, is never for the faint-hearted but this evening’s atmosphere is likely to be especially febrile. The match is being played in Lyon, in the south-east of France, instead of the Stade de France in the north of Paris. There’ll be 20,000 fewer fans because of Lyon’s smaller stadium but the noise they will generate will be far greater than the corporate crowd in Paris. Lyon is rugby territory. There are several famous clubs within a 100 mile radius and the chance to barrack les Rosbifs ­– the French retort

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The price we’ll pay for citizens’ assemblies

Citizens’ assemblies will transform Britain. That’s the promise made by activists from groups like Extinction Rebellion. Labour has also mooted introducing the assemblies if it wins power, even if it did later backtrack on the plans. In Waltham Forest, north-east London, the revolution has already begun: a citizens’ assembly is underway there that will determine ‘the future of neighbourhood policing.’  I entered a large gym where about 50 delegates and volunteers, seated around six tables, were listening to presentations from criminologists and youth workers. The procedures of the assembly are multi-layered and distracting, as if designed to keep everyone engaged by giving them small chores at regular intervals.  This sounds

Paul Morland

Hamas blew Gaza’s golden opportunity

Whatever else the arguments concerning the Gaza War, none is more wrong-headed than the suggestion that Gazans were living in such straitened circumstances that they had no choice but to ‘break out’ on 7 October. Palestinian solidarity protestors routinely describe Gaza as a ‘prison camp’. Even the Foreign Secretary David Cameron has previously used that term to talk about Gaza. In the wake of the Hamas massacre, the UN Chief Antonio Guterres insisted that the events of 7 October ‘did not happen in a vacuum’. Although he later denied that this was a ‘justification’ of the murders, rapes and kidnappings of Israelis by Gazans, Guterres’s comments tied in with a

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to sell The Spectator

No foreign power will ever be allowed to buy a UK newspaper or magazine: that’s the upshot of this week’s debate in parliament. The new law, due in a few weeks, is also expected to rule out minority stakes. So what next for us – and the Telegraph? It has been said that the Emiratis may have been our best bet because no one else wants to invest in newspapers and magazines. The opposite is true. It’s a point that needs to be more widely understood, so I’d like to say something about the auction we came so close to completing last December. Neither The Spectator nor the Telegraph need a penny of anyone else’s money Some 22

James Lewisohn

How Ozempic fattened up Denmark’s economy

It’s official: weight-loss wonder drug Wegovy (also marketed as Ozempic) makes US celebrities shrink but makes the Danish economy grow. This week, the most amusing Oscars clickbait featured not the typical best- and worst-dressed actors, but instead celebrities who have experienced recent miraculous weight loss. The Daily Mail helpfully split this award category between those confirmed to have taken Wegovy, and others who have merely inexplicably and rapidly shrunk. Their collective weight loss is Denmark’s economic gain: this week, Denmark’s statistics agency confirmed the Danish economy grew 1.8 per cent in 2023 – but without the contribution of Wegovy’s owner, Novo Nordisk, it would instead have shrunk 0.1 per cent. Free market

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss blasts Labour for putting ‘ideology’ before children

Oh dear. Things haven’t quite gone to plan for Liz Truss. (Where have we heard that before?) The former prime minister was hoping to debate her private member’s bill in the Commons this afternoon — but MPs ran out of time.  In the same week that puberty blockers were banned for children, Truss’s Health and Equality Acts (Amendment) Bill would alter the current Equality Act to enshrine the legal definition of sex as ‘biological’. It was understood that the government were poised to back Truss’s bill, before amending it at a later stage. Despite rumours of Tory support, at third on the order paper it was never guaranteed that the

Steerpike Steerpike

Porn project received thousands of pounds of Scottish taxpayers’ cash

Good heavens. Just when you think events north of the border can’t get any more ridiculous, they do. Now it has emerged that the director of an, er, hardcore porn project managed to secure £85,000 from government-backed Creative Scotland in January. The production, directed by Leonie Rae Gasson and titled ‘Rein’, was set to involve ‘pornographic processes’ to film in the Highlands, while research for the project included a nine-minute sexually explicit film that aims to take viewers on a ‘magical, erotic journey through a distinctly Scottish landscape’. What’s more, recruitment ads for Rein, which offered a daily fee of £270 for ‘hardcore’ acts, were advertised on the websites of

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

It’s time to declare Putin an illegitimate president

For the next three days, Russians are heading to the polls supposedly to choose the country’s next president. Except we already know, as do most Russians, who the winner will be. It is a foregone conclusion that after this weekend Vladimir Putin will win another six years in power.  But just because the Russian elections are a sham doesn’t mean they are insignificant. In fact, quite the opposite. This weekend marks a threshold in Putin’s grip on Russia: regardless of the margins by which he will claim to have won another presidential term, he will no longer legitimately hold power. Putin’s fifth term will shortly see him overtake Stalin as the second

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak rules out general election in May

Rishi Sunak has finally confirmed what most MPs already knew: there won’t be a May general election. Speaking to ITV News West Country on Thursday night, the Prime Minister was asked if there would be a general election at the same time as the local elections on 2 May. He replied: ‘There won’t be a general election on that day but when there is a general election, what matters is the choice.’ It’s been clear for some time that Tory election strategists were not keen on going to the polls in May. While there have been some in No. 10 keen on the idea previously, the fact that the UK

Jawad Iqbal

Welsh politics is in a terrible state

The contest to be the next leader of the Welsh Labour Party, and more importantly First Minister of Wales, has been something of a snooze fest. The race kicked off in December, when Mark Drakeford, first minister since 2018, announced that he was stepping down. There are two candidates – Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles – vying to succeed him. Voting, which began last month, has now closed, with the result due tomorrow. Only Labour members and those who belong to an affiliated organisation, such as a trade union, are allowed to choose, with an estimated 100,000 people allowed to vote. Everyone else, in a country of three million people, doesn’t get

Natasha Feroze

Rishi Sunak rules out general election in May

9 min listen

Rishi Sunak has finally confirmed what most MPs already knew: there won’t be a May general election. Speaking to ITV News West Country on Thursday night, the Prime Minister was asked if there would be a general election at the same time as the local elections on 2 May. He replied: ‘There won’t be a general election on that day but when there is a general election, what matters is the choice.’ So, when will it be?  Also on the podcast, after James Heappey became the latest MP to announce he will step down at the next election, can the Tories stop the exodus?  Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine has brought the war back to Russian soil

Ukraine can’t stop Vladimir Putin’s re-election as Russian President on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shatter the perfect image of his sacred day – by bringing the war once again to Russian soil. Throughout the week, Ukrainian drones have been striking oil refineries and energy facilities deep inside Russian territory, while anti-Kremlin Russian militias fighting on Ukraine’s side have crossed the border on tanks and started a fight with Russian forces. This incursion into Russian territory wasn’t unprecedented: last spring, exiled Russians fighting on Ukraine’s side infiltrated several Russian towns in the Belgorod region, fought for several days, and then withdrew. The dire state of Russia’s border defences hasn’t improved

Eliot Wilson

Is this the beginning of the end for Humza Yousaf?

Humza Yousaf might have hoped for a better week. On Wednesday, the First Minister gave a speech at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, setting out why Scotland’s economic future would be brighter if it was an independent country. Some in the room were enthusiastic, but the Scotsman quietly drew attention to an LSE study from 2021 which had found that ‘the economic costs of independence are two to three times greater than the impact of Brexit’. The report went on to conclude that independence would mean ‘an income loss of between £2,000 and £2,800 per person every year’ and that it would make little difference whether

Steerpike Steerpike

Meghan launches new lifestyle brand

Never able to keep herself from the spotlight for long, Meghan is back on Instagram. After her Archetypes podcast series failed and her previous blog The Tig bombed, the Queen of Privacy is embarking on a new venture. Now, the Duchess of Sussex is launching a lifestyle brand which she plans to use to resurrect her image by selling cookbooks, tableware and, er, marmalade. Eagle-eyed social media users were quick to spot a brand new Instagram account called ‘American Riviera Orchard’ this week, the biography reading: ‘By Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.’ The account name is thought to be inspired by the location of Meghan and Harry’s luxury dwelling in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Does it matter that Emmanuel Macron doesn’t have children?

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the French press this week and passed on a message to the people. ‘Your children are not going to die in Ukraine,’ he said. He made his remarks 24 hours before the French parliament voted on a bilateral security agreement that Zelensky signed with President Emmanuel Macron last month. The vote, which went the way of the government by 372 to 99, is symbolic but it allowed parliament to voice their opposition to Macron’s recent belligerent rhetoric towards Russia. The left-wing La France Insoumise voted against the agreement, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally abstained. A leader without a child is more likely to think