Politics

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

Tuesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

ERG criticises Sunak’s Brexit deal – but could still back it

What scale of rebellion will Rishi Sunak face on his Brexit deal? There had been hopes in Downing Street and the whips’ office that this could be in single figures when the deal is put to a vote tomorrow. However, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has said his party – all eight MPs – will vote against (notably, the Ulster Unionist party today described it as ‘an important stepping stone’), leading to concerns that Tory Brexiteers could follow suit. Today, the European Research Group (ERG) met to discuss its ‘Star Chamber’s’ legal findings – and it doesn’t make for pretty reading for the Prime Minister. While Sunak would like the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Who wants Boris back?

18 min listen

Boris Johnson has today made his defence of partygate, before he is questioned by the Privileges Committee tomorrow. He accepts that he misled the House of Commons, but insists he made his statements ‘in good faith’ and that he ‘would never have dreamed’ of doing so intentionally. But who’s going to support him now? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and Paul Goodman.

Alexander Horne

Does Boris Johnson’s partygate defence stand up to scrutiny?

This morning, Boris Johnson’s response to the accusations against him was published in a substantial dossier to the Privileges Committee. It comes just a day before the unprecedented hearing that is likely to determine his political future. This submission was a long time coming. In its interim report, published on 3 March, the Committee noted that it had first written to Johnson asking for his version of events as long ago as 21 July last year. Spectator books editor Sam Leith – who worked with Johnson in his former role as Daily Telegraph comment editor – suggested that this late submission was very much ‘on brand for the great man’. What

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Immigrants are Sunak’s only hope for growing the workforce

Just how does Rishi Sunak intend to grow the economy? It’s the second of his five pledges; last week’s Budget was full of Tory talk about the virtues of getting people off benefits and into work. But the data shows a rather different picture: five million are on benefits while mass immigration – now running at record levels – is once again the only major factor expanding the workforce. The OBR envisages this problem continuing, with immigration running at near-record numbers while Brits claim sickness benefit at the rate of about 5,000 a day. An odd and expensive economic model – some data out today puts it into more perspective.

Iain Macwhirter

Nicola Sturgeon has destroyed her own reputation

I don’t know about voter’s remorse but there was precious little remorse from Nicola Sturgeon on Loose Women on Monday for the chaos she inflicted on her party by resigning in pique without giving it a chance to organise an orderly transition. She showed all the insouciance of a teenager who had just wrecked the family car. Nothing to do with me – it’s really your fault for giving me the keys. It was fitting that Nicola Sturgeon should have decided to deliver her valedictory, not to a committee of her peers in parliament – she reportedly sidestepped an invitation from the Scottish Affairs Select Committee – but to a gaggle

James Heale James Heale

Johnson makes his partygate defence

Boris Johnson has today published his long-awaited ‘partygate’ defence, ahead of his appearance before the Privileges Committee tomorrow afternoon. In the 52-page submission, Johnson accepts that he did mislead the House of Commons when he said that ‘the rules and guidance had been followed at all times’ during Covid. But he insists he made his statements ‘in good faith’ and that he ‘would never have dreamed’ of doing so intentionally. The committee claims that his submission ‘contains no new documentary evidence’; sources close to Johnson dispute this. Johnson’s defence broadly relies on three familiar arguments. The first is the absence of any smoking gun which proves that he definitely knew

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has government borrowing really been brought under control?

To what extent have the public finances really been brought under control? This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics reveals that public sector net borrowing reached £16.7 billion in February. This is more than double the figure from February 2022 of £7.1 billion, and also well above the consensus estimate of around £11 billion.    It is the highest February borrowing figure since records began, primarily driven upward by the Energy Price Guarantee, which continues to see the government cap the unit price of energy and subsidise the rest. Last February, Russia was only starting its illegal invasion of Ukraine; now the public sector net borrowing figure reflect all that’s

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Beijing is already bankrolling Putin’s war

It hardly seems like the most propitious time for Xi Jinping to be visiting Moscow. There’s an international arrest warrant out for his host Vladimir Putin for war crimes, and the man Xi has described as his ‘best friend’ spent the weekend inspecting land he’s snatched from Ukraine – in gross violation of the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, which Xi endlessly trumpets. On the eve of today’s formal talks in the Russian capital, the US said Xi should press Putin to end his barbarity. ‘We hope that President Xi will press President Putin to cease bombing Ukrainian cities, hospitals and schools, to halt the war crimes and atrocities

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Stormy Daniels case won’t stop Donald Trump

The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow.  According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’ Cohen insists he doesn’t want to see images of Trump doing a ‘perp walk’ because, he says, ‘he respects the institution of the presidency.’  Trump may despise Stormy Daniels, but he would surely respect the hustle   Cohen, a convict himself, is hardly the most credible source. But because he’s a witness against Donald Trump, the media and,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Has Emmanuel Macron become France’s ‘Caligula’? 

The government of Emmanuel Macron won a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly on Monday by a mere nine votes. The cross-party no-confidence motion, tabled by a Centrist coalition fell just short of the 287 votes it needed to bring down the government.  To succeed the no-confidence motion required the support of the centre-right Republican party, augmenting the votes of the left-wing NUPE coalition and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, both of whom are opposed to the government’s reform bill that was passed last Thursday without a parliamentary vote. Instead, on Macron’s orders, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne used a controversial clause in the Constitution, Article 49.3, to pass

Owen Matthews

Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?

Vladimir Putin has his story, and he’s sticking to it: the destruction of three of the four Gazprom-owned Nord Stream pipelines on 26 September 2022 was the work of the American government. Speaking to reporters in Siberia last week, Putin insisted that the Nord Stream attacks had been carried out on a ‘state level’ and dismissed as ‘sheer nonsense’ a slew of recent stories pointing the finger at a group of freelance, Ukrainian-backed divers operating off a small hired yacht. But reported facts have been stacking up against Putin’s version of events. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a detailed investigation that suggested that the blasts were, in fact,

Monday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Don’t rush for tickets on Nicola Sturgeon’s farewell tour

Nicola Sturgeon’s valedictory address to the RSA was her ‘And now we turn to the liars…’ speech. The outgoing SNP leader’s remarks were nominally about inequality and climate change but she was really there to talk about the distorting impact of social media on democratic politics. Given her departure was possibly hastened by the pushback against her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which saw women’s rights campaigners and others organise via social media, it’s understandable that the First Minister would feel a little irked by these disruptively democratic platforms.  The ‘nature of the discourse’, Sturgeon opined, was ‘undermining our ability… to address the big issues’. The ‘damage’ social media was doing

Mike Gifford

How Russia’s neighbours are falling out of love with the Kremlin

Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine has united the West. Nato has been strengthened and there has been much support for the sanctions against the Kremlin and its supporters. Public opinion in the UK is firmly behind the Ukrainian people in their suffering, even if many remain wary of direct military entanglement. For the countries bordering Russia, however, the calculations are different, and nowhere can more ambivalence be seen than in Kazakhstan, the leading economy in Central Asia. Although it is the ninth largest country in the world, Kazakh foreign policy has long been dominated by the need to carefully manage relations with its two even bigger neighbours: Russia and China.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why is bitcoin surging following SVB’s collapse?

For more than a decade, bitcoin bores have been banging on about cryptocurrency as the future of money. The emergence and spectacular growth of digital currencies, according to these evangelists, prove that the financial system upon which we all depend is broken. Bitcoin was after all created in 2009, after the great meltdown of 2008, as a revolutionary concept to fight the corrosive global power of central banking. Bitcoin was pitched as the new digital gold. It was limited in supply and could not be centrally controlled – its value couldn’t be distorted by quantitative easing and morally bankrupt governments hooked on debt. Bitcoin wasn’t just for buying illegal stuff

Andy Maciver

Jason Leitch’s lockdown regrets

You may have been forgiven for thinking that the only story in town up here in Scotland is the election of the leader of the SNP, and Scotland’s next First Minister. However, for a day at least, some of the headlines have been stolen by a man who became almost as well-known to Scots as the outgoing First Minister: Professor Jason Leitch. ‘Lockdown,’ Leitch concluded, ‘is an old fashioned approach to managing a disease that is going around the world in an aeroplane.’ Scotland’s National Clinical Director, Professor Leitch was at the side of Nicola Sturgeon during the entirety of the Covid pandemic, the country’s equivalent of Sir Patrick Vallance,

Natasha Feroze

Is the DUP’s protocol verdict a blow for Sunak?

11 min listen

Ahead of the vote on Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP has said he will not back the key parts of the Windsor Framework. How much could this become a problem for Rishi Sunak? Also on Wednesday, what are the possible outcomes of Boris Johnson’s probe into Partygate? Natasha Feroze, Katy Balls and James Heale take a look at the week ahead.  

Steerpike Steerpike

Budget Poll: half of voters see Tories as a high tax party

It wasn’t so long ago that the Conservatives won a landslide on Boris Johnson’s pledge not to put up income tax, national insurance or VAT. But four years on, and after 13 years in office, it seems the Tories have lost their hard-won reputation for low taxes. Mr S has done some polling and last week’s Budget only served to harden the increasingly common view of the Tories as a party of high taxers. A whopping 50 per cent of voters now associate the Tories with raising taxes, up from 42 per cent who thought so a week prior to the Budget. More than a third of voters – 38

James Heale James Heale

Sunak’s deal fails to get the DUP’s support

There was bad news for Rishi Sunak this lunchtime as Sir Jeffrey Donaldson confirmed that he and the seven other DUP MPs will vote on Wednesday against the Windsor Framework. Few in government were expecting the party to vote for the deal but some harboured hopes that the party might abstain or register a more muted protest. In a statement, Donaldson said there had been ‘significant progress’ but that ‘there remain key areas of concern’. Chief among them is Sunak’s much-vaunted ‘Stormont brake’ which would not apply to existing EU laws. The DUP Westminster leader said that ‘whilst representing real progress the “brake” does not deal with the fundamental issue

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin struggling to maintain his strongman image?

China’s president Xi Jinping has arrived in Russia for the start of a three day state visit. The aim of the trip, according to the Chinese, is to strengthen relations between the two countries in a world threatened by ‘acts of hegemony, despotism and bullying’.  Xi and Putin will meet in person this afternoon, before holding bilateral talks tomorrow. Their meeting comes just weeks after China published a twelve-point ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine calling for the ‘sovereignty of all countries’ to be respected. This morning, the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Ukraine would be discussed by the two leaders: ‘President Putin will give exhaustive explanations so that President Xi can get Russia’s view

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP MP attacks the press (again)

It seems to be all going to pot for the SNP. The party’s chief executive and its top spinner are heading for the exit as the ongoing shambles of a leadership race continues to claim more scalps than a Scorsese flick. And it seems the pressure is getting to some of the SNP’s grandees, judging by their touchy attitude towards the reinvigorated Scottish press. Today it was the turn of Alison Thewliss, the party’s Home Affairs spokesman at Westminster, who threw a very public fit on Twitter after having her regular column spiked in the Daily Record last week. ‘I had never been told what to write until this weekend,’