Politics

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

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Will James Cleverly stand with Hong Kong?

Another day, another speech on China. Tonight it’s the turn of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, speaking in all his finery at the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet at Mansion House. Clad in his best glad rags, Cleverly is expected to argue that isolating China would be against the UK’s national interest. The two nations instead ought to work together to solve ‘humanity’s biggest problems’, with Cleverly arguing it would be ‘wrong’ to ‘declare a new Cold War’ but urging Beijing to honest about the ‘biggest military build-up in peacetime history’. Jolly good luck convincing Xi Jinping’s jingoistic goons on that… One aspect of Sino-British relations which trailed versions of Cleverly’s speech

John Armstrong

Climate activism must not be allowed to undermine climate science

Student activist Edred Whittingham baffled the snooker world last week by jumping onto the green baize at the Snooker World Championships in Sheffield and detonating a package of orange chalk across the table in a bid to end global warming. A few days earlier, the German government had baffled scientists by shutting down their three remaining nuclear power plants; this despite a despairing open letter from scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, explaining the plants’ potential to reduce Germany’s carbon footprint by up to 30 million tons of C02 per year. As these stories show, there is no shortage of good intentions to save the planet, but there remains scope for

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why did Rupert Murdoch fire his most successful host?

Ever since it began in 2016, Tucker Carlson Tonight has been easily the most interesting news show on American television. It was never, as Carlson’s many detractors claim, Trumpist propaganda. On the contrary, Carlson was a rare bright spot of originality in a boringly partisan media landscape.   And now he’s gone: fired directly by Rupert Murdoch, I’m reliably told, with no reason given, just a few days after Fox News paid out $787 million to settle with Dominion Voting Systems.  ‘It was the older Aussie,’ says my source: ‘the 92-year old-who just called off his engagement and settled for 800 million so that he wouldn’t have to go to

Steerpike Steerpike

Was Tucker Carlson getting too big for his boots?

All change at Murdoch Towers: Tucker Carlson has hosted his last primetime show at Fox News. His departure was clearly a shock: his 8 p.m. show was being trailed on Fox and Friends this morning. In a rather neutral press release, the network announced that: Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. The reasons for Carlson’s shock departure are unclear – Steerpike understands from a source with knowledge that no reason was given. Rumors had been circulating in the Fox offices that a big dismissal could follow the $787

Steerpike Steerpike

Michael Gove ‘desperate’ to star on Strictly

Is Michael Gove planning to dust off his dancing shoes? Eighteen months after the Levelling Up secretary was spotted throwing shapes in a Scottish nightclub, it seems that the 55-year-old Aberdonian has high ambitions for his return to the dance floor. According to his former wife, journalist Sarah Vine, Gove is ‘desperate’ to take a spin around the ballroom on the BBC hit show Strictly Come Dancing. Speaking today on GB News, Vine hinted that her ex-husband might enjoy the limelight of the small screen and added, ‘Well, he would, because there’s endless videos of him dancing.’ Vine didn’t say what she thought of Gove’s chances of taking home the glitter

Steerpike Steerpike

Cabinet Office spends £140k on new anti-bullying platform

So. Farewell then. Dominic Raab. The Justice Secretary might be gone but the debate about office behaviour rumbles on. And, with exquisite timing, Mr S spotted that one government department is doing its own bit for Whitehall workplaces by today publishing details of a £140,000 contract for IT services for a new ‘Bullying harassment and discrimination reporting platform’ for civil servants. The new service will allow staff to anonymously report incidents and is going to be run by Culture Shift, a company which promises to give ‘organisations the insight they need to monitor and prevent bullying and harassment in educational institutions and workplaces.’ It claims to enable organisations to take

Steerpike Steerpike

Poll: voters still swung by Liam Byrne’s ‘no money’ note

After thirteen years in office, the Conservatives face an uphill battle to keep their seats come the next election. But don’t despair true blue Tories, for the new party chairman Greg Hands has a cunning plan: endlessly tweeting out pictures of that infamous Liam Byrne note. The 2010 letter by the then Labour minister in which Byrne joked that ‘I’m afraid there is no money!’ has been resurrected by Hands in an audacious bid to paint Labour as the party of fiscal mismanagement. Whether it’s doubling as a Pret serviette or a giant novelty placard, Hands has been photoshopping and firing off copies of the letter at every opportunity. Pity

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why are we allowing solar panels to swallow up our farmland?

We have spent a year talking about energy security, but with inflation in food prices running at 19 per cent, how much longer before the debate turns to food security? Ideally, we would have policies which prioritise energy security as well as food security, but sadly the latter seems to have been forgotten. National self-sufficiency in food (the percentage produced relative to the percentage consumed) has been allowed to fall from 74 per cent to 61 per cent since the mid-1980s. Worse, energy and climate policy is damaging food security. There is no better example of how the latter is being sacrificed in favour of the former than Project Fortress, Britain’s

Mark Nayler

Real Madrid and Barcelona go to war over their links to Franco

A match-fixing scandal centred on Barcelona FC has spilled over into politics, showing that decades-old divisions die hard in Spain. Triggered by the so-called ‘Negreira Case’, which concerns payments of 6.7 million euros (about £5.9 million) allegedly made by Barca to a company linked to a Spanish refereeing official between 2001-18, Real Madrid and their greatest rival are accusing each other of links to Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled the country from 1936 to his death in 1975. The row started last week, when Barca’s president Joan Laporta claimed that if any Spanish club should be subject to suspicions of referee favouritism, it’s Los Blancos, which he provocatively

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Could Diane Abbott return to Labour?

17 min listen

Katy Balls, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss Diane Abbott’s suspension from the Labour party. Given her hasty apology, could Keir Starmer allow such a key figure to Labour’s left back into the party? Also on the podcast, what has been the fallout from Dominic Raab’s resignation? And how is Rishi Sunak trying to woo business leaders? Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Joe Biden win again?

In America last week, a 92-year-old media titan agreed to pay out a $787 million (£632 million) settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on behalf of his network Fox News. This morning, the 80-year-old Democratic president has announced that he is running for re-election next year, even though polls suggest 70 per cent of Americans don’t want him to. Joe Biden will probably end up facing the 76-year-old Donald Trump, the man at the heart of that Fox/Dominion defamation. Welcome to America, the land where dinosaurs rule.  President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David running through his re-election agenda. His video campaign announcement has just aired, kickstarting another 19 months of

Theo Davies-Lewis

The backlash to ‘renaming’ the Brecon Beacons is a gift to nationalists

‘As tedious as a tired horse…worse than a smoky house’ was how Shakespeare’s Hotspur described Wales’s national hero, Owain Glyndŵr. Perhaps, as the late Jan Morris wrote of these words for The Spectator, it could be a timeless characteristic of all Welshmen. The Welsh can be defensive, melancholic and (whisper it quietly) prone to self-pity, particularly when it comes to relations with England. Having the English next door, medieval conquerors turned modern ignorant neighbours, will always transfix Welsh imagination and provoke tension. Yet how futile Anglo-Welsh relations have become that the modern-day battlefield of two nations with a rich, shared history, has been entangled into the culture war, with the ‘renaming’

Dalibor Rohac

A Chinese diplomat has let slip the truth about Beijing’s foreign policy

The off-colour comment by Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, that post-Soviet countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not enjoy ‘an effective status within international law’ was not a gaffe or a case of a Chinese official gone rogue. Instead, Shaye’s remark, which he made on Friday night on France’s LCI channel, must be seen for what it is: a telling admission of Beijing’s real thinking about international relations, which is far cruder and Hobbesian than most Europeans are willing to admit. Why should we take Lu at his word when he says that for Soviet Republics including the Baltic states ‘there’s no international accord to concretise their

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Can Meloni and Sunak unite to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis?

The number keep rising. Italy’s Interior Ministry announced at the weekend that 35,085 migrants have arrived on their shores this year, an increase of 27,000 on the same period in 2022. In England meanwhile, 497 migrants landed on the Kent coast on Saturday, a new daily record for crossings.  So the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s visit to London this week is well timed. She and Rishi Sunak will have much to discuss, aware that to a large extent their political futures hinge on whether they can stop what some of their ministers have termed an ‘invasion’.  Last week, one of Meloni’s cabinet went further. Agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida enraged

John McTernan

It’s time to forgive Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott is a giant figure in the modern Labour party. As the first black woman ever to be elected to the House of Commons, and the longest serving black MP, she is an inspiration to black and brown communities – especially women – across the country. Abbott also wrote a crass and offensive letter to the Observer, in which she unfortunately, and utterly unsuccessfully, sought to distinguish racism from prejudice – in the process deeply offending the Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities. For a life-long campaigner against racism, this was an especially egregious error. It appears it is now impossible to accept a sincere apology

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman’s Sunday Round-up – 23/04/23

11 min listen

Isabel Hardman hosts highlights from Sunday morning’s political shows. Today’s shows focussed heavily on Dominic Raab’s resignation from Rishi Sunak’s government. Whilst new deputy PM Oliver Dowden described Raab as a ‘man of his word’, Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth was less flattering, calling him: ‘Not just a bullying minister, a failing minister’. Education was also a hot topic. In the aftermath of the tragic death of headteacher Ruth Perry, questions have arisen over whether Ofsted is a positive influence on the sector.  Produced Joe Bedell-Brill.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will Diane Abbott now face the same fate as Corbyn?

It’s the fate of Labour MP Diane Abbott rather than former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab that is dominating the news this afternoon. Although the Sunday papers are filled with details of the series of events that led Raab to tender his resignation following the report into allegations of bullying against him, it’s a letter from the former shadow home secretary – and key Jeremy Corbyn ally – sent in to the Observer that is now making waves. As Steerpike documents, Abbott said in response to a comment piece from last week’s paper suggesting ‘Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from racism’, that prejudice is not ‘interchangeable’ with racism.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diane Abbott’s surreal U-turn

It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’’ That captures the comical extent of Ms Abbott’s course correction. The letter as published took issue with the writer Tomiwa Owolade for a piece in which he’d argued, under the headline ‘Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue’, that Irish, Jewish and

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Raab ‘a man of his word’, says Dowden

Is Dominic Raab a bully? Dominic Raab resigned as Deputy Prime Minister this week, after an investigation into bullying upheld some of the allegations against him. He didn’t go quietly however, claiming some ‘activist civil servants’ had been trying to block reforms they did not like. His successor, Oliver Dowden, told Sophy Ridge he had nothing to add to the findings of the investigation, but he hoped there wouldn’t be any lessening of the high standards civil servants are held to. He described Raab as a ‘man of his word’: ‘Not just a bullying minster, a failing minister’ The Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions was less sympathetic in his

Patrick Porter

Why China might attack Taiwan

China may well attack Taiwan. According to the CIA, President Xi Jinping has instructed his armed forces to be able to strike by 2027. Nothing is certain, and there are no signs of mobilisation for an imminent attack. But beyond that, Beijing’s behaviour is consistent with Xi’s orders. It builds up its assault forces. It strengthens its nuclear arsenal. It steps up its military drills. It increasingly molests Taiwan across the board. And it makes its economy more resilient to sanctions.   We can’t know Beijing’s intent for sure. We do know it covets reunification with Taiwan as the centrepiece of its declared project to restore full Chinese nationhood and create