Politics

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

Saturday

Andrew Liddle

The by-election that could shape Scotland’s political landscape

By-election wins rarely presage great victories at a general election. If they did, the Liberal Democrats would enjoy perpetual government. But the fact they are not a forecast for national contests does not mean by-elections are always insignificant. In fact, they provide a good reflection of public mood at a given time and, particularly, sentiment towards the governing party. This has been true throughout recent history and remains true today – despite the excitement that will be generated by a Scottish Labour victory over the SNP at the coming by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. The current MP, Margaret Ferrier, faces being removed by her constituents. She has been sentenced to 270 hours community

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Phillip Schofield resigns and admits affair with ‘younger male’ 

And so the extraordinary Phillip Schofield row rumbles on. Earlier this week it was announced that Schofield was steeping down from the TV show This Morning, amid reports that his relationship with his co-host Holly Willoughby had collapsed.  Now Schofield has admitted that he had an affair with a ‘younger male colleague’ and has resigned from ITV with immediate effect. After his departure from This Morning, Schofield was still scheduled to host the British Soap Awards next weekend. He has now confirmed that he will no longer take part in the event. Schofield has also been dropped by his agent of 35 years.   ‘I am so very, very sorry, as I am for having been

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The misdirected talent of Mizzy, the ‘TikTok terror’

Tessa Jowell once ignited a furious political row by claiming that inner-city youths active in criminal gangs were exhibiting a misdirected spirit of enterprise. ‘These people have very formidable entrepreneurial skills which they have put to bad use,’ she claimed. I was put in mind of her observation when watching the teenage TikTok miscreant Mizzy being grilled by Piers Morgan on television this week. For the benefit of the vanishingly small number of people still unaware of the exploits of Mizzy, real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, this youth has become notorious for videoing himself carrying out extremely unpleasant and traumatising ‘pranks’ on unsuspecting members of the public. These have included taking

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Hunt’s honesty on a recession to tackle inflation is refreshing

The government has been claiming since the start of the year that it’s on a mission to ‘halve inflation’ – despite having virtually no control in this area. Still, this week Rishi Sunak ramped up the narrative when the latest set of data showed the headline rate falling from 10.1 per cent on the year in March to 8.7 per cent in April. It was false optimism. And it’s backfired. Markets quickly saw past the headline rate and looked at all the worrying news underlying it: mainly that core inflation actually rose, nearing 7 per cent on the year in April. Borrowing costs have spiked since then: 10-year gilt yields hit 4.37 per cent

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why are borrowing costs surging?

13 min listen

James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews about the news that borrowing costs are back to being the highest since last Autumn. What could this mean for the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt?

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Does a ‘Pride progress’ flag really make rugby more inclusive?

The Rugby Football Union will fly the ‘Pride Progress’ flag at Twickenham this weekend, when a World XV team play the Barbarians invitational side.   According to the Daily Telegraph, the RFU’s decision is ‘in response to the selection of Israel Folau’ in the World XV. The 34-year-old Folau was a regular in the Australian team for a number of years before he was sacked in 2019 for airing his views on homosexuality. A devout Christian, Folau has subsequently represented Tonga, from where his family – and faith – originates. Why do some bourgeois progressives appear incapable of respecting the beliefs of Christians and Muslims? It is 200 years since missionaries from

Steerpike Steerpike

Penny Mordaunt to woo the Thatcherites

Throw a right-wing political shindig these days and you’re guaranteed to make a splash. Last week it was Suella Braverman at the National Conservatism conference; before that it was Priti Patel at the ‘Borisfest’ in Bournemouth. And now Mr S has two more dates pencilled in his diary for potential mischief-making: the Northern Research Group (NRG) conference in Doncaster on 9 June and the Margaret Thatcher conference at the Guildhall three days later. And it’s the line-up of the latter convention which has caught Steerpike’s eye. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary and dark horse leadership candidate, is due to give the opening address – an opportunity to burnish her credentials

Anna Arutunyan

Is Yevgeny Prigozhin having second thoughts about the Ukraine war?

Something strange is happening to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The chief of Vladimir Putin’s mercenary army in Ukraine has begun withdrawing his forces from Bakhmut, has all but conceded defeat in one of his most bizarre interviews yet, and, to top it off, now the journalist who interviewed him has been fired. ‘We came in boorishly, trampling all over Ukraine’s territory in search of Nazis. And while we searched for Nazis, we fucked up everyone we could,’ Prigozhin told the pro-war political journalist Konstantin Dolgov in an interview on Tuesday. ‘The special military operation was done for the purpose of ‘denazification’…But we ended up legitimising Ukraine. We’ve made Ukraine into a nation

Thursday

Iain Macwhirter

Is Police Scotland ‘institutionally racist’?

‘Dear transphobes, we have a phobia of your behaviour…Yours, Scotland’. That was just one of Police Scotland’s ‘Letters from Scotland’ campaign posters that started appearing across Scotland five years ago. Misogynists, racists and religious bigots were warned by the chief constable Sir Iain Livingstone, who fronted the campaign, that they’d be dealt with the full force of the law. So it is more than a little ironic that, according to Sir Iain himself, the haters have been hiding in plain sight in the ranks of his own force. ‘Police Scotland is institutionally racist and discriminatory,’ Sir Iain announced today to the Scottish Police Authority. It is also institutionally sexist and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Sadiq Khan really taking air pollution seriously?

London is killing us. That’s the conclusion of Sadiq Khan’s alarming new book, Breathe: Tackling the Climate Emergency, which he publicised last night at a 90-minute event held in the Royal Festival Hall.   The sales pitch for Khan’s book was disturbed by hecklers and protestors who blew whistles and shouted constant abuse at the mayor. ‘F*** off, Joseph Goebbels, you c***,’ was a typical insult.   Khan ignored the protests as he introduced himself at the podium and read out a page from his book. He seems perfectly accustomed to being screamed at in public by the electorate. A hapless gang of stewards tried to curb the disruptions and they

Steerpike Steerpike

Car smashes into Downing Street gates

There was drama in Whitehall this afternoon after a car smashed into the gates of Downing Street, prompting the closure of half of SW1. Police cordoned off the area after a small hatchback was seen at the entrance to the famous street, besides the great iron gates erected during Margaret Thatcher’s era. The Met Police subsequently confirmed that: At around 16:20hrs a car collided with the gates of Downing Street on Whitehall. Armed officers arrested a man at the scene on suspicion of criminal damage and dangerous driving. There are no reports of any injuries. Enquiries are ongoing. Good luck getting home from Westminster tonight…

William Moore William Moore

Ukraine’s next move

39 min listen

This week: In his cover piece, journalist Mark Galeotti asks whether Putin can be outsmarted by Zelensky’s counter-offensive. He is joined by The Spectator’s own Svitlana Morenets to discuss Ukraine’s next move. (01:08) Also this week:  Journalist David Goodhart writes a moving tribute to his friend Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s much-missed Low Life columnist who sadly passed away earlier this week. David is joined by Cass Pennant and Freddy Gray, The Spectator’s deputy editor, to remember the life and writing of Jeremy Clarke. (12:52)  And finally: The Spectator’s deputy features editor Gus Carter writes this week about the curious business of fertility. He is joined by Nimco Ali co-founder and CEO of The Five Foundation. (27:06) Presented

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Does Gary Lineker deserve Amnesty’s human rights award?

‘We need to be careful with the language we use,’ said Gary Lineker as he picked up an award from Amnesty International in Rome for his ‘strong commitment towards immigration and human rights issues’. It was an interesting line to take, given it was Lineker’s intemperate tweeting – particularly his referencing of 1930s Germany in relation to language used by Home Secretary Suella Braverman – that boosted his social justice warrior profile and probably helped win him the award. Having collected his gong, Lineker claimed in a waffly interview with Channel 4 to be a believer in freedom of speech. ‘But,’ the Match of the Day host said, ‘in my

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is a referendum the answer to solving France’s migrant crisis?

Paris has a problem. The city currently houses some 5,000 migrants in hotels, much to the chagrin of the capital’s hoteliers. France’s capital is hosting two major tournaments in the next year: the Rugby World Cup in September and the Olympics next summer. An enduring headache for president Macron is where supporters will stay; hotels have been clamouring for permission to free up their rooms for tourists.  The solution Macron has come up with is to move the migrants out to the sticks, thereby freeing up those hotels. Their facilities were commandeered by the government because the numbers of homeless in Paris (the majority of whom are migrants) have overwhelmed

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

When will the Tories come clean on their migration plan?

Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.  As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the

Steerpike Steerpike

Ministers to curb Boris’s animal agenda

Boris Johnson is back in the news this week, with Partygate rearing its ugly head once again. And it’s in that spirit of 2021 that Mr S returns to the ill-fated animal crusade which Johnson embraced during his premiership, as part of his bid to rebrand Brexit as an eco-cause. There was the Animal Sentience Act, the Net Zero agenda and, of course, the ill-fated evacuation of Pen Farthing’s animal sanctuary: a project that has now resumed under the Taliban regime. But now word reaches Steerpike that ministers are planning to curb one of the outstanding pieces of this green agenda. The Kept Animals Bill – aimed at improving animal

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Just Stop Oil’s Chelsea Flower Show protest is a new low

You have to sink low, very low, to target the Chelsea Flower show for an environmental protest. But the boys and girls of Just Stop Oil are, it seems, up for tormenting even the most blameless and benign element of society: gardeners. One of the show gardens, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, was sprayed with orange powder. I’m not sure what was its offence. Hervey Brooks can’t have been sponsored by Shell. Maybe there’s a clue in what one of the protesters shouted before being marched off by security: ‘What’s the use of a garden if you can’t eat?’. Well, I agree that this particular garden wasn’t big on fruit and veg. It

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Net migration hits record high – but is significantly lower than expected

It’s three years since the UK formally left the European Union and cut off free movement, and net migration has reached a record high: 606,000 in 2022. This total (measured by the number of new arrivals, minus people emigrating from the UK) is 118,000 higher than last year. This is certainly an increase from 2021, but nothing like the estimates that had been floated in recent weeks that suggested the net figure would be at least 700,000 – possibly even as high as one million. The estimates originally came from a Centre for Policy Studies report, which calculated (based on visa approval statistics) a series of net migration scenarios. The

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

DeSantis’s presidential ambitions are crashing to earth

People imagine that the real world is similar to the dark side of the TV show Succession. For some reason we enjoy thinking that media barons and tech tycoons pull the strings of global power, creating the election-deciding narratives which the bovine public then swallows whole.  But the truth, as Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis showed so spectacularly with their disastrous campaign announcement on Twitter last night, is much more like the funnier bits in Succession. It’s cock-up not conspiracy.  His candidacy makes so much sense in theory. But he’s slipping further and further behind Trump in the polls People mocked Elon Musk last month when his big SpaceX launch