Politics

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

Monday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

A Lib-Lab coalition would be hilarious

Talk of a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition is in the air. This is piquantly nostalgic to those of us whose earliest political memories were forged in the fire of the red-hot excitement of David Steel and Jim Callaghan’s short-lived Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. My initial reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was a guttural ‘oh God no’. But a moment later a different aspect of it occurred to me, in a fine example of what the young people call ‘cope’. My banter senses started to tingle. Because, yes, it would drag out and exacerbate the country’s current despairing decline. But it would also be hilarious. PR might very well

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Suella Braverman’s immigration speech ruffles feathers

How should Rishi Sunak govern? Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his MPs have plenty of views on the matter at the moment – and many are keen to air them publicly. In the face of disappointing local election results, a couple of hundred members of the pro-Boris vehicle the Conservative Democratic Organisation gathered in Bournemouth over the weekend (James Heale writes about the event here) where its members reminisced about the Johnson days and critiqued Sunak. Tonight Sunak is due to host a coronation garden party for all MPs, but ahead of that charm offensive a number of ministers and MPs are heading to the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for

Patrick West

Let’s stop pretending the culture wars aren’t real

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they’re an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘The culture wars…may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’ We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense. Many on

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron finally taking on the cult of net zero?

Hell hath no fury like an environmentalist scorned and Emmanuel Macron has felt a wave of green wrath since his declaration last week that France has gone far enough in pursuit of net zero. ‘We are ahead, in regulatory terms, of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world,’ said Macron in a speech at the Élysée. ‘We must not make any new changes to the rules, because we will lose all the players,’ he continued.   Calling for a ‘pause’ of more EU environmental red tape, Macron said member states required stability if they were to attract future investment.  One could argue that 21st century western workers

Steerpike Steerpike

Brit-bashing Eurovision entry finishes second bottom

It’s fair to say there was some controversy about the selection of Mae Muller as Britain’s entry to this year’s Eurovision song contest. Muller is a 25-year-old Corbyn supporting Twitter devotee, whose past efforts include posted a number of messages on Twitter critical of Boris Johnson, including one post in which she declared ‘I hate this country’. In others she wrote ‘fuck the Tories’, called the governing party ‘racist and elitist’ and sneered at the then Prime Minister being admitted to an ICU in April 2020 for Covid: ‘The same nurses that can’t even afford protective wear, and are literally dying because of you. Boris does not have my sympathy

Steerpike Steerpike

Varadkar red-faced after his boyfriend’s coronation messages leak

Oh dear. It was all meant to be going so well for British-Irish relations. Earlier this month both the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Republic’s president, Michael D. Higgins, flew out to London for King Charles’ coronation – the first Irish nationalist leaders to attend a British coronation in over a century. Even Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s First Minister, managed to swallow her pride and make the visit, saying ‘I am an Irish republican. I also recognise there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is a hugely important occasion.’ It appears that some did not treat the ceremony with quite the same respect though.

Owen Matthews

Erdogan faces runoff vote in the Turkish elections

Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can – in theory at least – be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate. With over 99 per cent of the votes of Sunday night’s presidential vote counted, it looks like neither the 69-year-old Erdogan nor his challenger, the 74-year-old veteran leader of the Republican People’s party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have managed to break the required 50 per cent threshold to prevent a runoff. Erdogan is currently on 49 per cent, according to estimates by the official Anadolu Agency, while Kilicdaroglu is on 45 per cent.

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Ousting Boris was a mistake, says Rees-Mogg

‘Managed decline’, or ‘steely determination’? The fallout from the Conservatives’ disastrous local election results continued this week, with the inaugural conference of the rebellious Conservative Democratic Organisation. During the conference, former home secretary Priti Patel accused Rishi Sunak of presiding over the ‘managed decline’ of the Tory party. Energy Secretary Grant Shapps was determined to spin his party’s predicament in a more positive light however, telling Sophy Ridge there was an atmosphere of ‘steely determination’ among his fellow MPs:  Shapps – ‘Sunak’s pledge was to grow the economy and we’re starting to see it grow’ Shapps rejected the notion that the Conservatives needed to make significant changes. He told Laura

James Heale James Heale

Tory grassroots plot to ‘take control’

Insurrection was in the air in Bournemouth this weekend as MPs and activists descended on the seaside town for a Tory grassroots jamboree. ‘Take control’ was the aim of the Conservative Democratic Organisation’s inaugural meeet, with 250-odd diehards defying the ‘communist barricades’ of the rail strikes to pitch up at the Bournemouth International Conference. The venue was the scene of Margaret Thatcher’s final conference and the long shadow of the Iron Lady looms large over her greying party today. Most attendees were middle-aged with fond memories of the Thatcherite heyday: of party conferences by the seaside, Mrs T in her pomp, three election triumphs and nights out celebrating in Blackpool

Zoe Strimpel

What Miriam Cates gets wrong about working mothers

Miriam Cates and I have a different idea of what Thatcherism was all about. To me, the Lady T era was more feminist than any other before or after because it included all people, including women, in its vision of work, wealth, power and success. It did so without all the carry on about menstruation and endometriosis and menopause and who knows what else that comes with female empowerment discourse today.  ‘I felt like nothing more than a drudge,’ said Thatcher in a 1954 interview in Forward, a Conservative pamphlet, of being at home with two babies and the housework after the mental stimulation of chemistry and law. Later, she

Daniel Thorpe

Erdogan is unlikely to go quietly

The Turkish election is just hours away, and an opposition victory seems more likely than ever under president Erdogan’s rule. Everywhere from cafés to the civil service, from social media to newspapers, the big question on everyone’s lips is whether Erdogan will concede after 21 years in power. Fears of escalation and violence on the streets are high. As Turkey’s electoral system is old-fashioned and analogue, irregularities and small-scale fraud are common, especially in rural areas. However, the system leaves little to no room for mass election fraud. Losing an election does not necessarily mean the end of a strongman In the 2019 local elections, the opposition Republican People’s party

Norman Davies

How Russia lost Kazakhstan

Prior to Russia’s invasion in February 2022, few westerners knew much about Ukraine, and even less about Kazakhstan. We all suffer from Moscow-centred perceptions and the bad habit of equating the Soviet Union with Russia.  But now we know that Putin is driven by spurious historical theories, in which Ukraine has no right to exist, one needs to ask how they might apply to other ex-Russian provinces. Nowhere is more affected than European Russia’s eastern neighbour, Kazakhstan, which separates Muscovy from China, in the same way that Ukraine and Belarus divide it from the EU and Nato.   Ukraine is half as big again as France or Germany. But ‘KZ’

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What if Rishi fails to deliver all five pledges?

When Rishi Sunak delivered his five key pledges at the start of January, the latest data we had for the inflation rate was for last November. It was up 10.7 per cent on the year, having fallen from a peak of 11.1 per cent the month before. Everyone thought this was the start of a fast and spectacular fall, with virtually all forecasts showing a welcome decline in the rate of inflation. Off the back of those forecasts, the Prime Minister oozed confidence when he promised to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of this year. Speaking to an audience in Stratford, Sunak promised that an ‘ease’ to the cost-of-living crisis and greater

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The Black Sea is Nato’s new front line against Russia

Earlier this month, an unarmed Polish aircraft monitoring potential human smuggling and illegal fishing on the Black Sea almost ditched into the sea when a Russian Su-35 fighter engaged it over international waters. It was a reminder that while attention is inevitably focused on the land battles anticipated when Kyiv launches its spring counter-offensive, this is also a war playing out at sea. It was also a reminder that what happens offshore has far wider implications. The twin-engine L-410 Turbolet, more commonly used as a small commuter aircraft, was being used by Frontex, the European Union’s border security agency, as part of its Western Black Sea 2023 operation. It was

David Martin-Jones

How a small Welsh village became embroiled in a slave trade controversy

You’ve probably never heard of Abergynolwyn, which sits in the Dysynni valley in Merioneth in Wales. The village, established in the nineteenth century to house workers at the nearby Bryn Eglwys slate quarry, is home to just 400 people. But now Abergynolwyn has found its name besmirched by tenuous links to the slave trade. Abergynolwyn falls within the jurisdiction of Gwynedd council, which manages ‘the slate landscape’ on behalf of Unesco. In April, the council announced that this tiny village must publicly acknowledge its relationship to the slave trade. As part of what Gwynedd council, led by Dyfrig Siencyn (Plaid Cymru), sees as its broader plan to expose the slate landscape’s links to slavery, a

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Rees-Mogg rallies the troops behind Rishi

To Bournemouth, where two-hundred odd attendees of the Conservative Democratic Organisation are meeting for their first conference. The CDO has been labelled a ‘Tory Momentum’ and a ‘Bring Back Boris’ effort by its opponents, though its chairman David Campbell-Bannerman insists that it is nothing of the sort. ‘We are not enemies of Central Office’ he told attendees this morning, despite warning that current membership trends suggest ‘the party is dying as an institution’ and bemoaning the ‘coup against Boris.’ Lord Cruddas, the CDO’s president, went further still, under the watchful eye of the Eastleigh enforcer Paul Holmes, CCHQ’s man on the scene. Cruddas lambasted the ‘shameful behaviour’ of the MPs

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Coffee House Shots Live: Coronation special

71 min listen

The coronation will commemorate the start of a new era, but what will this mean for the United Kingdom? How will Charles III secure his place in history – and what kind of monarch will he be? From pageantry to the polls: will the coronation distract voters from the Tories’ predicted heavy losses in the local elections? And will Rishi Sunak be able to turn his party’s fortunes around for the general election? Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls and special guests Camilla Tominey and Matthew Goodwin for a special edition of Coffee House Shots Live.

James Heale James Heale

Where next for Richard Tice and Reform?

The local elections last week proved to be a disappointing night for Reform UK. Prior to polling day, its leader Richard Tice had talked up the ‘huge appetite’ among voters for Reform but the party averaged a mere six per cent of the vote in the wards where it stood. It won just half a dozen seats on on Derby City Council out of 471 hand-picked seats. Ukip, its effective forerunner, lost all its remaining councillors, going from almost 500 in 2016 to zero. Tice’s response was to argue that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and to focus instead on the next electoral test: the London mayoralty. Petrolhead Howard

Terry Barnes

Trudeau’s ‘coronation gift’ is just lip service to the monarchy

Cynically dressed up as a coronation-related gift to the Canadian nation, just days after the coronation, the country’s leader Justin Trudeau has unveiled a Royal Crown of Canada.   Trudeau is paying lip service to the monarchy Canada shares with Britain and the King’s other realms Not a physical gold and jewelled crown, mind you, but a virtual crown, designed to replace St Edward’s crown – the very crown placed on the King’s head a week ago – on Canada’s coat of arms, official documents, and armed forces and Mountie badges and insignia.  This new Canadian crown replaces the crosses and fleur-de-lys of St Edward’s Crown with stylised maple leaves. The rim is

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The SNP’s Brexit strategy is bound to backfire – again

The SNP has announced that if the next general election results in a hung parliament it will, as power brokers, ‘undo Brexit as far as possible’. Alyn Smyth, the SNP’s EU accession spokesperson, said his party would demand the UK has a close relationship with Brussels in any negotiations with a minority Labour government. There might be a few titters at this and jokes about signing cheques that can’t be cashed from a scandal-beset party whose relevance and even long-term viability is in serious doubt. But the SNP clearly think this is a winning strategy that can arrest their decline and boost their chances. Whether it truly is, and whether