Politics Archives

Thursday

1 Jun 2023

Steerpike

Does Sadiq Khan have a woman problem?

Nominations for the Tory mayoral race closed last week, with a final shortlist of two or three expected to be published a week on Sunday. So far nine candidates have declared their interest in taking on Sadiq Khan, with Paul Scully, the Minister for London, the early favourite. But Mr S wonders if the real juicy match up could be between Susan Hall, Khan’s longtime bête noire during her six years of service on the Greater London Assembly. Hall, who quit her role as head of the GLA Tories to run for Mayor is certainly not shy of a fight, as shown by a typically punchy article she penned last

Gareth Roberts

The Tories need to get serious about the Blob

The government has paid a whacking out-of-court settlement of £100,000 to Anna Thomas, a whistleblower sacked after she tried to warn them about the infiltration of the DWP by political activists. Baroness Falkner, chair of the equality watchdog, was placed under investigation after a spurious ‘dossier’ of complaints was compiled by staff, which just so happened to coincide with her steering the ship in a political direction some staff members didn’t approve of. The RAF despairs of ‘useless white men’; a civil service ‘diversity adviser’ describes women’s rights groups as ‘far-right’ and ‘genocidal’. Home Office staff are threatening to strike rather than implement the government’s Rwanda policy. These are merely

Nigel Jones

Could Russia try to assassinate British officials?

You only have to hear the words of Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President and Vladimir Putin’s long term chief sidekick, to realise just how far Russia has propelled itself from the circle of civilised nations. Putin’s Russia not only uses state assassinations as an instrument of policy, but jokes and boasts about it too Dmitry Medvedev has recently made a habit of outdoing even his boss in blood curdling rhetoric. His latest outburst is typical: a direct threat to the lives of British officials. Britain, he declared, is waging an ‘undeclared war’ on Russia through its support for Ukraine, and because of that all British officials have now become ‘legitimate

Stephen L. Miller

Is Trump taking Hillary’s road to oblivion?

A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more. After his announcement to seek the presidency for a third time last November (he ran as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, remember), he has held one campaign rally, one town hall on CNN, made one stop in Iowa and another where he canceled a much-hyped rally. He has spent much of his time taking shot after shot

Patrick O’Flynn

Immigration is the ultimate threat to Rishi Sunak’s political survival

Rishi Sunak’s pet theory that voters are relaxed about the level of legal immigration – so long as the government is in charge of it – and only really care about illegal immigration has just collapsed. New polling from YouGov shows that among 2019 Conservative voters, concern about immigration and asylum is now running nip and tuck with the state of the economy as their number one political issue (61 per cent include the economy and 60 per cent immigration when asked to name the top three issues). A vague undertaking from the Prime Minister about reducing immigration from the astronomical levels he has inherited isn’t going to cut the

Lionel Shriver

The case against Ulez – by a cyclist

Whether you’re more afraid of the forces of order or the forces of chaos is generally a matter of disposition. A natural anti-authoritarian who despises being told what to do – especially when told to do something stupid – I’m more horrified by excesses of order. Granted, my greater fear of the state may simply betray that I’ve largely lived in an orderly western world, and after a few dog-eat-dog nights of mayhem and carnage I might change my tune. Nevertheless, during the Covid lockdowns, for example, I was less distressed by the odd neighbour who dared to invite a friend to tea than by most Britons’ blind, bovine compliance

Wednesday

31 May 2023

Max Jeffery

Do the Tories really hate ‘the Blob’?

8 min listen

Boris Johnson’s team today suggested that they would be happy to hand over his WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic to help the Covid enquiry. Why has the civil service got itself in such a muddle over this, and why have the Tories failed to reform Whitehall? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery.

William Atkinson

Is it time to scrap the Covid inquiry?

Why do we have inquiries? The late Geoffrey Howe suggested six principal reasons: to establish the facts, to learn from the events, to provide catharsis for those affected, to reassure the public that matters are being resolved, to allocate accountability and blame, and the political urge to show something is being done. By those metrics, the Covid inquiry is not only failing, but becoming a farce. The row over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps between the Government, the ex-PM, and the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett may end up in court. The inquiry looks set to conclude its public hearings in the summer of 2026. Subjects such as Covid contracts and decisions on

Steerpike

SNP Westminster group submits audited accounts on time

Talk about going down to the wire. With today’s deadline fast approaching, the SNP Westminster group has made, at the eleventh hour, a significant announcement: they have finally submitted their audited accounts. Had the group been unable to do so, they would have missed out on £1.2 million of public funds, so-called ‘Short money’, making it a little more difficult for them to carry out parliamentary work. Now, at least one SNP crisis has been averted and the Westminster group’s treasurer, Peter Grant MP, couldn’t sound more relieved: I’m pleased to confirm that the annual return for the SNP Westminster Group’s ‘Short money’ for 2022/23 has received a clean audit

James Heale

The battle with the Blob

Most prime ministers fall out with the civil service at some point. David Cameron attacked the ‘enemies of enterprise’; Tony Blair spoke of ‘the scars on my back’ from battling the public sector. But the premiership of Boris Johnson brought relations to a new low, with prorogation and partygate fuelling paranoia on both sides. Under Rishi Sunak, tensions have been reignited by Dominic Raab’s resignation and the Cabinet Office’s attempt to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries to the Covid inquiry. For some Conservatives, the mandarins involved in these dramas are the embodiment of ‘the Blob’. The etymology of this term shows how Tory criticisms of the civil service have changed

Kate Andrews

Red Rishi: the Prime Minister’s political makeover

What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise the national insurance rate, he did so partly to send his party an important message: the borrowing and spending has to stop. Now Sunak is in No. 10 and Boris Johnson isn’t around to demand more spending. There has been a Budget and a list of priorities – and Sunak’s agenda is starting to emerge. It

Matthew Parris

Price caps are a slippery slope

Sometimes it’s the little things that depress most. I groaned last week to hear the news item. The government is contemplating a ‘price cap’ on ‘basic items’ in ‘supermarkets’. Forgive the quotation marks, but each of these terms is so horribly problematic that one has to start by asking what they even mean. Has Conservatism in the 2020s lost its ideological moorings? Or perhaps one should start with a quick recapitulation of the history of this idiotic idea, because price control has been tried before, first by a Labour government, and then by their Tory successors who went on to consolidate the folly. The background to those repeated attempts to

Isabel Hardman

The mystery of Boris Johnson’s missing WhatsApp messages

Where have Boris Johnson’s diaries and WhatsApp messages gone? The row over the demands of the Covid Inquiry for evidence from the former prime minister and his aide Henry Cook took another twist yesterday, with his team insisting that he has already handed over all the relevant material to the Cabinet Office and that it is in fact the government that’s holding the whole thing up. The inquiry wants all messages from Johnson’s phone, and had demanded them by 12 May, then 4 p.m. yesterday, and now there’s another deadline extension of 1 June. The Cabinet Office had disagreed with the extent of these requests, saying not all of it

Euan McColm

The SNP’s deranged stance on the deposit return scheme

When it comes to dealings with their political opponents, Scottish nationalists have only one setting: furious outrage. No matter the subject, Scotland’s ruling parties – the SNP and the Greens – may be depended upon to move swiftly to apoplexy. Everything the Conservatives and Labour say, no matter how benign, must be twisted and reshaped into an attack on Scotland. Good faith is an alien concept. Nat attacks on evil Unionists and their dastardly plans and plots grow ever weaker because they’re so damned predictable. But the problem with being permanently angry is that, well, it gets rather exhausting for everyone, doesn’t it? Nat attacks on evil Unionists and their dastardly

Sasha Lensky

Russian children are being groomed for the war in Ukraine

As we pass the 15-month mark of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it’s clear the Putin government is in a fix. It cannot win this war nor afford to lose or stop it. But with another mobilisation politically risky and tens of thousands of Russian citizens now fallen on the battlefield, it’s evident they will need all the volunteers they can lay their hands on. There is a problem facing the regime: the war itself is significantly less popular with the young in Russia than with the middle-aged and elderly. Over half the 55+ age-group in the country support the current war, while for 18- to 24-year-olds the figure falls to 26 per cent.

Tuesday

30 May 2023

Steerpike

Oxford students disrupt Kathleen Stock’s talk

Oh dear. It seems the dreaming spires are having a nightmare. Professor Kathleen Stock is addressing the Oxford Union tonight, but not all students approve. One trans activist, Riz Possnett, glued themselves to the floor of the Union in protest before Stock even began speaking. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘No More Dead Trans Kids’, Possnett refused to move despite boos from members of the audience. One attendee called for ‘free speech’ and another urged attendees to ‘listen to Kathleen Stock’. Free speech at a university? It’s a novel thought… Outside, hundreds of trans activists reportedly began a march on the, chanting ‘cut your system, fuck your hate,

Stephen Daisley

Millennials have no reason to vote Conservative

For some time now, critics of the Tories’ strategy of soaking millennials to buy votes from boomers have been pointing out its fatal flaw: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative. This argument has typically been waved away with some bromide about how everyone becomes more conservative as they get older. And with that, the Tories returned to over-taxing young workers, preventing them from owning a home and taking away their freedom of movement. How is this approach working out? A mega-poll of 8,000 voters aged 25 to 40 finds that 72 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Six

Lucy Dunn

NHS Scotland waiting lists reach record levels

Scotland’s NHS has seen its waiting lists, once again, reach record levels. New figures from Public Health Scotland reveal that the equivalent of one in every seven Scots is on a waiting list. Care targets aren’t being met either, and the NHS is falling short on targets set for inpatient and day case waits. A lot of the blame is being directed at Scotland’s new First Minister Humza Yousaf. From the time he took over as health secretary to the month he left the role, there was an increase of over 175,000 patients on NHS waiting lists, with 779,533 patients on lists at the end of March. Worse still, over

Freddy Gray

Does Biden actually care about gay rights?

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practising Catholic, has travelled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as Senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: ‘My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!’ Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to

Natasha Feroze

Should Rishi Sunak ban vapes?

Natasha Feroze is joined by James Heale and Fraser Nelson to discuss the Covid inquiry’s requested release of Boris Johnson’s unredacted Whatsapp messages and diary entries. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has spent the day in Kent looking at ways to clamp down unsafe vaping. But he won’t go as far as other countries who intend to ban them.