Politics

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

Monday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

In pictures: Bolsonaro supporters storm Brazil’s presidential palace

A few days after the anniversary of the 6 January events in Washington DC, thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s congress, its presidential palace and supreme court to protest against the inauguration of Lula da Silva. They were evicted within hours, but that they got so far – in the face of a heavy military police presence – made worldwide news. Here are pictures of events as they unfolded: 3:30 p.m. local time: Protesters dressed in Brazil’s national green and yellow colours are repelled with tear gas outside Planalto Palace, official residence of the Brazilian president. Da Silva, 77, himself was not in the city yesterday, visiting flood victims

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Barclay and Sturgeon get a grip on the NHS crisis?

Both the Westminster and Scottish governments are trying to show they have a grip on the crises in their respective National Health Services today. Neither currently find themselves politically in a strong place on the winter crisis.  English Health Secretary Steve Barclay is giving a statement to the House of Commons when it returns this afternoon in which he will reheat two existing policies. He will confirm details of a £200 million plan for speeding up the discharge of patients from hospitals and into care settings. This was something the government did fund during the early months of the Covid pandemic, but which the Treasury quickly shut down, despite abundant

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is a Boris comeback really on the cards?

As MPs return to parliament after the Christmas break, Rishi Sunak is under pressure both on the NHS and strikes. Union leaders have been invited for talks with ministers today in a bid to find a landing zone (though there still seems to be a rather large gap between the two sides). Yet while aides in Downing Street worry about domestic issues, it’s another story that had MPs animated over the weekend: the prospect of a Boris Johnson comeback. Key Johnson ally Nadine Dorries penned a piece for the Mail on Sunday declaring the Tories ‘must bring back Boris or die’. In her article – which referenced a report in

Steerpike Steerpike

Prince Harry’s defence of Lady Hussey comes back to bite

One of the more surprising moments in Sunday night’s ITV interview was when Prince Harry sought to defend Lady Susan Hussey, the late Queen’s former lady-in-waiting accused of racism. ‘Meghan and I love Susan Hussey,’ declared Harry, ‘[Meghan] thinks she’s great. And I also know that what she meant, she never meant any harm at all.’ The Duke also used the same interview to play down suggestions that his family were racist, attempting to distinguish between unconscious bias and racism with regards to alleged comments about his son’s skin colour. Big mistake. Those comments have triggered something of a furore on both sides of the Atlantic among those who previously

Steerpike Steerpike

ITV’s interview with Prince Harry was a missed opportunity

For days now, there has been great excitement about Prince Harry’s first UK television interview. Here, at long last, was a chance for a member of the great British press corps to ask the tough questions of the dilettante Duke of Sussex. Not for them, the soft-soaping, credulous quasi-therapy of an Oprah Winfrey light entertainment host. This would be probing, incisive, hard-hitting and accountable journalism at its finest. So it was something of a disappointment then that Tom Bradby, ITV’s chosen man for the task, failed to live up to the hype. To be fair to Bradby, he had a tricky challenge. A longtime friend of the Prince, he was

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Corbyn’s £200k in defence funds

It’s a tough gig politics. One minute you’re leader of HM Loyal Opposition, the next you’re an independent backbencher likely to lose your seat come polling day. For Jeremy Corbyn, the witless, whip-less Member for Islington North, it’s been a tough few years. He lost the election in December 2019, lost the Labour leadership in April 2020 and then lost the party whip in October 2020 after claiming that antisemitism in the party had been overstated for political reasons. Luckily for Corbyn though, one group has come to his aid in these tough times. After having the whip withdrawn, backers of the ex-leader set up a company to fund his defence

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak – my healthcare arrangements are ‘a distraction’

Rishi Sunak – The NHS ‘is under pressure’ Laura Kuenssberg kicked off her first show of the new year with an interview with the Prime Minister, who now has a maximum of just two years to turn his party’s ailing poll numbers around. The National Health Service has always posed its fair share of political problems, but with the system now suffering from industrial action, alongside what some are calling a ‘twindemic’ of Covid and flu cases, Kuenssberg asked Rishi Sunak if the NHS was in crisis: My healthcare arrangements are ‘a distraction’ Kuenssberg inquired as to whether Sunak used the NHS himself. Sunak was not comfortable being as frank

Rishi Sunak (BBC)
Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sunak’s NHS position is on life support

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to say that the NHS is ‘in crisis’. He’s held meetings on ‘NHS recovery’ this weekend, and will have been told in no uncertain terms by healthcare leaders that this is a crisis, probably the worst one the health service has faced in its history. He told Laura Kuenssberg in an interview broadcast this morning that ‘the NHS is under pressure’, and there were ‘unacceptable delays’ in emergency care, but would not accept the ‘crisis’ word. This is because, as I’ve said before,  it is hard for the Tories to blame anyone else for said crisis at this stage of the political cycle.  The line

Steerpike Steerpike

The Observer’s embarrassing John Stonehouse blunder

Oh dear. In their endless Tory-bashing quest, it seems that the Observer has blundered again. The release of a new ITV show on a dodgy 1970s politician with a propensity for scandal prompted columnist Catherine Bennett to write how he ‘paved the way for today’s sleazy Tory MPs.’ In an article that appears in today’s newspaper, she mused how this politician’s ‘rackety life and faked death… seems almost quaint compared with the brazenness of members of his party today.’ There’s just one problem of course – the new ITV series is about John Stonehouse, a Labour MP. You might have thought that, while watching the series, claims about Soviet contacts

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Starmer grilled on Lammy second job hypocrisy

It’s the first Sunday broadcast round of 2023. Ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big grilling on the BBC, Sir Keir Starmer was up on Sky News, keen to depict Labour as the party of change. So it was jolly bad timing then that Sky chose this week to unveil their ‘Westminster Accounts’ project with Tortoise Media: a huge dossier on politicans’ outside earnings based in part on their declarations in the register of MPs’ interests. And while most of the top ten MPs with outside earnings are Conservative, one Labour member has been coining it in since the 2019 election. David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary and a key player in

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The chart that will decide Rishi Sunak’s fate

After his five key pledges speech this week, one can only conclude that Rishi Sunak must have been shown the chart.  The chart in question crops up in a regular update that polling firm YouGov puts out on the key political issues, as seen by various segments of the electorate. It measures the priorities of those who voted Conservative in 2019 and therefore have it within their collective power – and potential inclination – to grant the party yet another term in office. And it has told a consistent story for the past two years. The three biggest issues for voters – miles ahead of anything else – are the

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

‘Apartheid’ posters appear in Starmer’s seat

Away from the gun-toting, field-romping antics of the dilettante Duke of Sussex, normal politics carries on as usual. And this weekend will see the first in-person Jewish Labour conference since 2018. Much has changed since then, when the party’s antisemitism crisis was at its height. Chair Mike Katz reflected in Jewish News how, back then, the group was ‘marginalised and ostracised by the Labour establishment under Jeremy Corbyn’ but that ‘the difference in our experience under Labour leader Keir Starmer is like night and day… he has acted to demonstrate zero tolerance of antisemitism.’ Indeed, Sir Keir has been vocal on the issue, apologising to the Jewish Chronicle for the

John Armstrong

It’s not just social science that could do with more mathematics

The physics department at King’s College London offers a module called ‘Gender Action’. Students studying this module go into schools and nurseries to work on projects related to the elimination of gender stereotypes. The course is run in association with a charity, also called Gender Action, who explain on their website that the problem with phrases such as ‘boys will be boys’ is that they imply ‘a person’s biological sex is fixed.’ A study which is required reading for one week of the course explains how ‘the most propitious means for dismantling patriarchal language’ is to modify discourse ‘to consider sexual difference as contiguous, rather than hierarchical.’ Anecdotally, the course is disproportionately popular with non-binary students. The

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Russia’s military disaster could lead to famine in the Caucasus

Two years ago, 13-year-old singer Maléna was rehearsing for Eurovision Junior when war broke out. While her rivals battled in Warsaw on stage, she stayed home in Armenia. Young men picked up AK-47s to fight against their Azerbaijani neighbours in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 4,000 never returned. A year later, Maléna re-entered Eurovision Junior and won, giving her country the right to host Eurovision Junior in December 2022. Armenian authorities staged celebrations in the capital, Yerevan. Crowds huddled around outdoor televisions in the central square to watch the show. A group of young musicians from Nagorno-Karabakh joined the party in Yerevan, coming into the capital on the

Matthew Lynn

The UK has finally chalked up a Brexit win

We haven’t lowered tariffs on food. We haven’t done many new trade deals, and certainly not one with the United States. Hardly any rules and regulations have been repealed, and if anyone thought it was going to help fix the NHS then the winter crisis will have disappointed them. Six years since we voted to leave, and two years after we finally severed our ties with the European Union, Brexit wins have been noticeable mainly by their absence. But hold on. We may finally have one – a partnership with the drugs developer BioNTech to pioneer cancer treatments.  The German company, best known for developing the Covid vaccine that was jabbed

Stuart Ritchie

Stuart Ritchie, Mary Wakefield and Toby Young

This week: Stuart Ritchie asks whether we should worry about declining sperm counts (0:29). Mary Wakefield wants to end the term ‘making memories’. (9:00), and Toby Young shares his disastrous Airbnb winter break (15:10). Produced and presented by Natasha Feroze.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Trussonomics really dead?

16 min listen

Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Heale about the former prime minister’s lunch with her loyalists at Ma La Sichuan, and whether her ideas might be mounting a comeback.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How long before Rishi Sunak goes off his own pledges?

When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful for a bunch of cash-strapped students as we could effectively decide which Tuesday the food would spoil by, rather than throwing it out.  I thought of that lettuce this week when Downing Street decided to make one of Rishi Sunak’s five ‘immediate priorities’ – to have NHS waiting lists falling – impossible to meet. The release

Steerpike Steerpike

Five times Harry invaded other people’s privacy

‘It never needed to be this way,’ sighs Prince Harry in the trailer for his forthcoming ITV interview: ‘the leaking and the planting… I want a family not an institution.’ The Duke has long-despised the meddling machinations of Fleet Street’s finest, telling Andrew Marr in 2016 that: Everyone has a right to privacy. Sadly that line between public and private life is almost non-existent any more. We will continue to do our best to ensure that there is the line… Everyone has a right to their privacy, and a lot of the members of the public get it, but sadly in some areas there is this incessant need to find out every

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why Rishi Sunak doesn’t need to fear the unions

The calendar for January is already pock-marked with strike dates for railway workers, ambulance staff, postal workers and others. But does the current situation really deserve to be compared with the Winter of Discontent in 1979, when the rubbish piled high in Leicester Square and dead went unburied (as the gravediggers went on strike)? The answer is surely no – or at least not yet. So long as the government holds firm against wage demands, Rishi Sunak should have no fear of being humiliated as Jim Callaghan was then. As was the case 44 years ago, the unions are engaged in a raw exercise of power. Yet they are struggling