Politics

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

Friday

5 Sep 2025

Angela Rayner is the victim of a convoluted tax system

Here is a rather delightful fact. For 13 years between 2010 and 2023 Britain had a quango called the Office for Tax Simplification. You may never have heard of it, but it really did exist. Its annual report for 2021/22 shows that it was chaired by someone called Kathryn Kearns and had a budget of £1.057 million, £868,000 of which was paid in staff wages. But here’s the thing. In 2010, when it was founded, Tolley’s Tax Guide – the accountant’s bible – ran to 867 pages. The 2023 edition – the year the Office for Tax Simplification was wound up – ran to, er, 1,020 pages. No one should

Stephen Pollard

The truth about the Fabian Society

It’s a strange feeling finding out that you have been part of a revolutionary group that secretly controls Britain and, er…didn’t realise it. For four years in the 1990s, I was the Research Director of the Fabian Society. It was a wonderful job, at a time when Labour under Tony Blair was open to new ideas and policies. As a Labour-affiliated, mildly left-of-centre organisation, the Fabians were very well placed. Earnest thinkers, networkers and youngsters finding their feet in politics all had a space in which they could come together and think about and discuss politics and ideas in an environment where questioning the received wisdom was the point, rather

Lara Brown

What has Hollywood done to Wuthering Heights?

‘Come undone’, the billboard reads. Two hands are clasped together. On another a blonde-haired woman lies prone on a fuzzy peach mattress, her hands tightly gripping the sheets. ‘Drive me mad’, implores the caption. In theatres Valentine’s Day 2026. Despite appearances, this isn’t the latest boilerplate steamy romance for women to drag their boyfriends to in February, but the official marketing for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. The trailer, released on Thursday, sets the tone for an apparent massacre of Emily Brontë’s magnum opus. It opens with a shot of Aussie heart-throb Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, sucking the fingers of erstwhile Barbie Margot Robbie while her not-insubstantial breasts heave out of an

Mark Galeotti

Putin doesn’t want to live forever

‘Rejuvenation is unstoppable, we will prevail,’ blared the editorial in the Chinese newspaper Global Times. The subject was China’s resurgence, but it looked oddly apposite in light of an inadvertently overheard conversation between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Some Western journalists have mistaken this as evidence of Putin’s hubris and his personality cult ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing,’ commented Putin as the two men walked towards the podium in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the military parade to mark 80 years since Japan’s surrender in World War Two. ‘In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a

Sam Olsen

The centre of gravity is shifting to Beijing

Beijing gave us a glimpse of the future this week. Across Tiananmen Square rolled column after column of tanks, missile launchers and robot dogs. Above, sleek new J-35 stealth fighters cut through the smog, together with drones and surveillance aircraft. The centrepiece was unmistakable: gleaming hypersonic and ballistic missiles, designed to extend China’s military reach across continents. Reviewing all this was Xi Jinping, flanked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It was military theatre, yes. But it was also a declaration: China is no longer just a regional power. It intends to set the rules of a new world order. Trump staged a piece of political nostalgia;

Coffee House

The Spectator at Conservative conference 2025: events programme

The Spectator is delighted to be at Conservative party conference in Manchester this year. Join us in Exchange 11, MCCC. Our schedule is below: Sunday 5 October Coffee House Shots Live – welcome reception 3.30-4.30pm Join The Spectator’s team to kick off party conference with a glass of wine. Meet Michael Gove, Tim Shipman, James Heale and subscribers from across the country to toast the start of three days of stimulating discussion and debate. Private drinks reception: The Spectator in association with Santander 5.30-7pm The Tories have traditionally prided themselves on being the party of small business. But is that still the case? Ahead of Rachel Reeves’s second Budget, Sir Mel Stride will argue that it

Thursday

4 Sep 2025

Steerpike

Nadine Dorries defects to Reform

On the eve of Reform’s annual conference, the party has dropped another bombshell. Former Tory culture secretary Nadine Dorries has defected to Reform UK – a move Nigel Farage has gushed he is ‘absolutely delighted’ about. In an explosive interview with the Daily Mail, Dorries has declared ‘the Tory party is dead’ – and advised party members to ‘now think the unthinkable and look to the future’. Dorries’ defection follows the ex-cabinet minister’s three decades as a Conservative party member. As reported by the Mail, her talks with Farage did not involve a guaranteed place in a Reform government. Yet while the once-vociferous Boris Johnson ally is not currently a

Lucy Dunn

Bell Hotel asylum seeker found guilty of sexually assaulting teenager

Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia who was staying at the Bell Hotel in Epping, has been found guilty of two counts of sexual assault, one count of attempted sexual assault, inciting a child into sexual activity, and harassment without violence. Kebatu did not react as he was found guilty at Chelmsford magistrates’ court of all five counts he was charged with, keeping his hand held to his face. During the proceedings, the court heard that the 38-year-old asylum seeker had approached a group of teenagers and asked a girl back to his room at the hotel to ‘make babies’. The judge told Kebatu the evidence against him was

Steerpike

Reform to launch new campaign app

Reform UK kicks off party conference season tomorrow. Thousands of attendees are expected to flock to the Birmingham NEC to hear from Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf and others. A year after the last jamboree, the party is keen to emphasise how much it has grown in the 12 months since: 700 councillors, the Runcorn triumph and four months of poll leads to boot too. And now, in the party’s bid to make further gains next May, Steerpike can reveal that the party is launching its own campaign app to co-ordinate Reform’s 230,000 members across 400 active branches. Chairman David Bull will be touting the new ’ReformGo’ app in the coming

Gareth Roberts

Reform’s camp following, masculine rage & why do people make up languages?

51 min listen

First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters’. ‘From Farage on down,’ Roberts argues, ‘there is a glorious kind of naffness’ to Reform: daytime-TV aesthetics, ‘bargain-basement’ celebrities and big-breasted local councillors. ‘The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying they had won it’, but ‘the John Bulls and

Freddy Gray

How scary is China’s military?

Freddy is joined by Harry Kazianis, editor in chief of the National Security Journal, to assess China’s military rise. He argues Beijing aims to dominate the Indo-Pacific with missiles, drones and naval power, posing a growing threat to U.S. influence and Taiwan.

Steerpike

Linehan in court over criminal damages charges

To Westminster magistrates’ court, where Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan appeared today to face charges of harassment and criminal damage against a teenage trans activist. The court heard today that the comedian smashed the phone of a transgender activist, 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, and made targeted ‘vindictive’ social media posts between 11-27 October 2024. The comedy writer has been accused of damaging a £369 phone belonging to Brooks at a Westminster conference on 19 October last year. The prosecuting barrister Julia Faure Walker said today that the Irish comedian had began to post about the trans activist ‘relentlessly’ after falsely accusing Brooks of disrupting the LGB Alliance conference last year by

Madeline Grant

Paraffin Powell comes to Angela Rayner’s defence

Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess. Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not to out themselves as perverts over the summer break. Inevitably this was accompanied by self-back-patting on how much more family-friendly parliament was under Labour. Well, it increasingly resembles a crèche, of that there is no doubt. I pity Jesse Norman, one of the unambiguously impressive and intelligent MPs left in parliament. He has to suffer

Paul Burke

Angela Rayner is no working-class hero

First of all, some poverty top trumps: I’m one of five kids. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a labourer but only when he was well enough to labour. For much of my childhood, he wasn’t, so we had to subsist on state benefits, free school meals and clothes that arrived in bin bags from the local church. My childhood was scarred by poverty and petty crime. However, before you reach for the violin, it was a childhood leavened by love and laughter which I wouldn’t have swapped for the world. Not least because, all these years later, it’s given me a natural understanding of Angela Rayner and why

Steerpike

Tories beat Labour and Reform in donations

They may be trailing both the party of government and the unofficial opposition in the polls, but it’s not all bad for the Conservatives. The latest Electoral Commission figures show that the Tories have managed to out-fundraise all other political parties when it comes to donations – for the third quarter in a row. Talk about a silver lining, eh? The figures for the second quarter of 2025 – between April and June – show the Tories have topped the donation charts, accepting £2.9 million. Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blues managed to fundraise £300,000 more than Labour, which received £2.6 million (£1.6 million of which came from trade unions) –

Tim Shipman

Can Rayner survive tax row?

16 min listen

24 hours after Angela Rayner admitted underpaying tax, the pressure remains on the deputy prime minister as Westminster now waits the outcome of the probe by the Prime Minister’s standards adviser. The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman and the Sunday Times’s Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund join Patrick Gibbons to discuss whether Rayner can retain her briefs. As Gabriel points out, regardless of the outcome of the ethics probe, Rayner was seen as Labour’s ‘sleaze-buster in chief’. So how damaging is this to ‘brand Ang’? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

David Spencer

The questions the Met must answer over the Graham Linehan debacle

Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year. A senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been

Ross Clark

The real scandal is how much stamp duty Angela Rayner had to pay

Angela Rayner must resign as Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, obviously. How could she sit on the front bench through a tax-raising budget without everyone’s eyes gravitating towards her, as the minister who thinks tax rises are for everyone else, not her? But the fate of Rayner obscures the bigger scandal here, which is stamp duty itself. No one should be facing a £70,000 bill for buying a two-bedroom flat – nor, for that matter, a £30,000 one, which is the what the bill would be for someone who is genuinely buying a main home for £800,000. The latter sum is not far short of the annual average salary.

Steerpike

TaxPayers’ Alliance invite Rayner to join anti-stamp duty campaign

It would be putting it mildly to say that Angela Rayner has had better weeks in politics. The Deputy Prime Minister has been in the spotlight over the last few days after admitting on Wednesday that she had underpaid stamp duty on her third property. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a spirited defence of his second-in-command in PMQs, a number of her lefty colleagues are turning against her over the tax affair mess. One Labour MP remarked to the Telegraph: ‘She said she had thought about resigning, and she should give that some more thought now.’ Ouch. But it’s not all bad. The palaver could lead to an unlikely

Laurie Wastell

Labour can’t be trusted to protect free speech

The outrageous arrest of Graham Linehan this week seems almost designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the British government. Just a day after the news broke, Nigel Farage was already raising the case at a free-speech Congressional committee in Washington, DC, where the Reform leader happily played prime-minister-in-waiting as he opined gravely about our values having gone astray. The row comes as US trade talks loom, where free speech will be high on the agenda. The cause célèbre of Lucy Connolly, arrests for prayer in abortion buffer zones, and the effects of the Online Safety Act on US companies will all be discussed. Now, a beloved comedy writer – already forced