Politics Archives

Sunday

1 Oct 2023

Is a path to victory opening up for Rishi Sunak?

A new Rishi Sunak is being launched at Tory conference and one I saw first hand being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Manchester this morning. This version is more feisty, ignores attempted interruptions and is, in general, spoiling for a fight. The Prime Minister is trying to ditch his timeshare-salesman image and is seeking to become a slayer of dragons but without (so far) any actual dragons. He’s not doing much, but his enemies react so wildly as to exaggerate what he’s actually doing. I was critical of Sunak’s five pledges and still regard them as nonsense. But in this week’s Spectator our leading article is far more positive because

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak vows to ‘do things differently’

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg this morning, as the Conservative party conference gets underway in Manchester. With polls currently predicting an election defeat for the Tories, Sunak was noticeably combative in his interview, insisting that he would do what he ‘believes is right’ for the country. When Kuenssberg accused him of shifting away from pledges made in 2019, Sunak acknowledged that people would be critical of him, but said he was ‘prepared to change things’. Sunak: ‘My job is to deliver for people’ Kuenssberg showed Sunak a word cloud indicating that the public heavily associate him with his wealth. She asked him if he was worried

Steerpike

Priti Patel accuses Suella Braverman of attention seeking

It’s Tory conference – which means the Conservatives are at each other’s throats once again. This morning, Priti Patel took a pop at Suella Braverman, accusing the Home Secretary of attention seeking. Patel also suggested Braverman was guilty of focusing on words over action. The slap down came a few days after Braverman used a speech in Washington to suggest multiculturalism had failed. In an interview with Sky’s Trevor Phillips, Patel was asked whether Braverman’s comments were helpful to Rishi Sunak. Here’s what Patel had to say: ‘To me, this is very much making interventions, statements, but actually Trevor I think we have to be realistic here to know that

Katy Balls

Sunak comes out fighting on net zero in tetchy Kuenssberg clash

Rishi Sunak is in Manchester for what could be the final party conference ahead of next year’s election – and, if that vote goes as many expect, his last as Tory leader. In order to avoid that fate, the Prime Minister hopes to use the annual meet to enter a more pro-active stage of his premiership, in which he will start to change things (such as on net zero) and speak ‘hard truths’ even if it leads to a backlash in parts of his party. Sunak has been offered a small ray of light overnight with a new Opinium poll suggesting Labour’s poll lead has fallen to 10 points. Were

Steerpike

Why did the Observer bury a poll showing Starmer’s shrinking lead?

As Conservative conference kicks off, there is a crumb of comfort for the Prime Minister in the latest polling in the Observer – but you’d be hard pressed to actually find it in the newspaper’s write-up. The Opinium survey for the paper of more than 3,000 voters – including over 900 people who voted Tory in 2019 – shows that Labour’s lead has shrunk to just ten points over the Tories. Sunak’s party now has 29 per cent of the vote share, compared to Labour’s 39 per cent. Mr S doesn’t think the Tories should get too excited just yet. But it does mark something of a turnaround in the party’s fortunes,

Robert Tombs

The endless myth of British decline

The former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, recently compared the British economy with that of Argentina. This was typical of those Remainers who cannot imagine that a country ignoring them could possibly succeed, and who often seem to will it to fail. That Carney’s sneer did not merely provoke laughter is because far from being a random remark, it stems from generations of negativity about Britain. This hangs albatross-like round our collective neck. So deeply has it penetrated our culture that I suggest it accounts for much of the failure to profit from the Leave vote. Over and over again, British policy has been marked by apology,

Coffee House

Day one at Conservative conference 2023: The Spectator guide

It’s the first day of the annual Conservative party conference in Manchester. Grant Shapps, who is making his first major speech since being promoted to Defence Secretary, is the headline act on the main stage. Here are the rest of the highlights: Main agenda – from 14:00: 1400: Greg Hands MP, Chairman of the Conservative Party 1415: Chris Heaton-Harris MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland 1430: Andrew RT Davies MS, Leader of the Welsh Conservatives in the Senedd 1445: David TC Davies MP, Secretary of State for Wales 1500: Douglas Ross MP, Leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionists 1515: Alister Jack MP, Secretary of State for Scotland 1530:

Richard Kelly

Tory conferences don’t have to be dull

The former Tory MP Christopher Hollis wrote for The Spectator in 1960 that ‘a Conservative conference is, and is intended to be, the dullest thing that ever happened. Party members come not to hear their leaders but to see them. One sometimes wonders if it would be best to cut out the speeches altogether.’ Hollis duly recalled the view of former Tory leader Arthur Balfour, who claimed he would sooner take the advice of his valet than that of a Tory conference. Among academics, the Balfour-Hollis view is generally endorsed. Compared to the annual conference of the Labour party, which officially ‘makes’ Labour policy, the Tories’ own gatherings have generally been

Gavin Mortimer

Paris has become the city of love, rats and bugs

There are said to be six million rats in Paris. I met one last week when I was retrieving some winter clothes from a bag in my cellar. Neither of us was particularly keen to make the other’s acquaintance. Such a brief encounter may not please the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. In the summer her office announced the establishment of a committee to study how the city’s three million human inhabitants can learn to ‘cohabit’ with their furry neighbours. Animal rights’ groups and green politicians expressed their satisfaction that the societal scourge of rat shaming is finally being challenged. Paris councillor Douchka Markovic has said the word ‘rat’

Tim Stanley

What have the Conservatives done for us?

Assuming this is the Conservative party’s last conference in power, I decided to investigate what kind of country they leave behind. Thirteen years on, are we richer, poor, happier or sadder? I started by asking MPs to name their biggest achievement. No one said ‘the economy’; Ukraine and Brexit were popular. Two replied: ‘Kept Labour out’, which, considering Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn ran the opposition, is low hanging bananas. Nevertheless, ‘winning’ is what the Tories have done best. They slipped into office via a coalition, won a majority, then a minority, and finally a historic victory built on Red Wall seats that had backed Labour since the Norman Conquest.

Saturday

30 Sep 2023

Steerpike

Labour is ‘not the natural party of governance’, says David Lammy

There’s just over a week to go before what might be the Labour party’s last conference before the general election. But while the mood in the wider party might be one of optimism, it seems that caution is the order of the day on Keir Starmer’s front bench. Appearing on a panel called ‘Is Labour’s election triumph inevitable’ at the Cliveden Literary Festival, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy revealed that during Starmer’s party leadership campaign in the spring of 2020, he had some words of warning for the future leader. ‘I cautioned Keir not to suggest that Labour could win the election in one cycle,’ he said, ‘He didn’t accept

James Heale

When conferences go wrong

13 min listen

The Conservative party conference begins in Manchester this weekend. Where have conferences gone wrong for previous Tory party leaders, and what will Rishi Sunak want to get out of this one? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Craig Oliver, dormer director of communications in No. 10 under David Cameron.

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray, Kate Andrews & Lloyd Evans

20 min listen

This week Freddy Gray takes a trip to Planet Biden and imagines what would happen if little green men invaded earth and found a big orange one back in the White House (01:15), Kate Andrews finds herself appalled by the so-called ‘advice’ routinely handed out to women that can be at best, judgemental, and at its worst, slightly bullying (12:51), and Lloyd Evans spills the beans on searching for love on his recent blind date, courtesy of the Guardian (07:13). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran

Robin Ashenden

What happened to the Russia I loved?

I first came to Russia as a travelling English literature-lecturer in the late 1990s. This wasn’t a job given to me but one I’d devised myself, sending off snail-mail begging letters to different university departments all over the Former Soviet Union – Barnaul to Minsk – outlining my services and occasionally, weeks or months later, being taken up on the offer. With a rucksack full of books, I’d catch a train – sometimes a days-long journey – to the next destination, where I’d be given a list of students to teach, a guided tour of the city and three weeks in a student hall of residence. Here cockroaches could outnumber

Dan Neidle

Britain’s tax system is a mess

The last time a Conservative Chancellor was in the business of cutting taxes, he pointed out that they reduce the incentive to work, invest, and start a business. This was why Kwasi Kwarteng proposed to abolish the 45 per cent additional rate of income tax last year. We really, really, shouldn’t have a tax system that can have a 68 per cent marginal rate, let alone a 20,000 per cent one He was right about the impact taxes have on incentives, but he was wrong to focus on 45 per cent as the highest rate of tax people pay in the UK. In fact, there are millions of people paying

Friday

29 Sep 2023

Nicholas Sheppard

There is still everything to play for in New Zealand’s general election

With two weeks to go before New Zealand’s general election, the contest is so close that many have stopped bothering to make predictions over who will win. And yet, despite such competition, one would be hard-pressed to call the parties’ campaigning lively. The election is being contested by a pair of unprepossessing men named Chris: wonkish, technocratic, affably bland on the stump, they have been crisscrossing the country in a spirit of hokey conviviality. One making cheese rolls, the other dressing up as a pirate; one wedged himself into a tot’s chair to stir goo at a children’s centre, the other drove a tractor ten yards. Neither candidate has been

Katy Balls

Is the UK doomed to be a high tax country?

10 min listen

Tax levels in the UK are at their highest since records began 70 years ago and are unlikely to come down, or so says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in their report today. How has the tax burden increased over the four years of this parliament? What’s driving up taxes? Also on the podcast, there are reports today that Rishi Sunak will stop councils imposing 20 mph zones, is Rishi on the side of motorists? Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Fraser Nelson. Keep up to date with The Spectator’s data hub: https://data.spectator.co.uk/ Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

GB News civil war intensifies

It’s safe to say that this hasn’t been GB News’s finest week and there’s no sign of the drama stopping any time soon. First Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton were suspended from the channel for their, er, discussion about political commentator Ava Evans. Now Calvin Robinson has become the third presenter to be disciplined after posting a lengthy defence of Wootton online. Robinson’s defiant post appears to have set off alarm bells at GB News HQ. The Deacon’s fury at his colleague’s suspension was channelled into a 326-word long Twitter rant about the ‘pandering’ of his bosses to the ‘woke mob’. Wootton, he raged ‘brought so many people on board…

Christopher Snowdon

Rishi Sunak is right to get rid of 20 mph zones

Are we seeing the real Rishi Sunak at last? Since telling the nation on 20 September that his government will be taking a more realistic approach to reducing carbon emissions, the Prime Minister has announced – or, more often, refused to deny – that he intends to introduce a whole bunch of policies that horrify bien pensants but go down rather well with the general public. Nine days ago, the Economist warned that ‘If Mr Sunak hopes attacking its green plans is a way to turn around the polling figures, then he is almost certainly wrong.’ Within days, Labour’s lead in the opinion polls had been slashed by eight points according

Edward Howell

Don’t read too much into North Korea releasing a US soldier

Perhaps he was not so useful after all. Yesterday, North Korea’s decision to expel Private Travis King, just over two months after the US soldier bolted across the inter-Korean border, quashed speculation that he would be held captive for years. A month after admitting that King had been detained, Pyongyang decided to ‘expel’ the man who ‘illegally intruded’ into the country. Once again, he remains in custody, but this time in the hands of the United States, as they decide his fate following not only the border-crossing, but also charges of assault and destruction of public property while stationed in Seoul. True to form, North Korean state media revealed little