Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
10 min listen
Rishi Sunak is in Hiroshima for the G7 summit. President Zelensky has said he’ll be making a surprise appearance, and Sunak will be meeting with President Modi on the sidelines. What does Sunak want from the trip? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman.
‘Think without borders,’ declares the masthead of the New European. But while the pro-EU paper claims to be an advocate for unity and tolerance, it seems they hold no qualms about stirring up division on Fleet Street. Its star columnist, Will Self, has filed a bizarre 2,300-word rant this week about the Guardian’s editorial choices, titled ‘My obsession with Adrian Chiles’ column.’ The basis for this punny headline is the relationship between Graun columnist Adrian Chiles and editor Katharine Viner. Chiles has written weekly articles for the paper – usually peppered with inoffensive observations, whimsical witterings and banal anecdotes – since February 2019. In April 2020, he began dating Viner,
Recollections may vary when it comes to Meghan and Harry’s car chase. The Sussexes’ statement this week supplied fodder for the front pages, and, more importantly, my group chats. ‘Near fatal is such a great phrase,’ one friend said, ‘anything can be near fatal if you squint hard enough.’ She’s referring to the press release put out by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on Wednesday, which claimed that they were ‘involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi.’ ‘This relentless pursuit,’ they said, ‘lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and
After months of flat denials, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence has admitted that Kyiv is carrying out a campaign of sabotage and assassination inside Russia. But why change the official line now? Even if this is a good cop/bad cop routine, it still risks embarrassing the president, raising questions as to how far he is fully in control of HUR Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), has become one of the media stars of this war, not least thanks to an artfully curated public persona that a senior US intelligence official characterised as ‘George Smiley meets Jason Bourne.’ This week he took
Humza Yousaf’s regime is not exactly a government of all the talents. There’s Patrick Harvie, the Zero Carbons minister, whose list of achievements is shorter than his fuse. There’s Shona Robison, resurrected five years after taking Scotland to the top of the European health league for, er, drug deaths. And then there’s the First Minister himself, the reverse Macavity who finds himself at the centre of every scandal. But amid this galaxy of mediocrity, one star shines brighter than the rest: Lorna Slater, the Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity. Slater has managed to distinguish herself in her 21 months in office through her special blend of personal
Rishi Sunak’s promise to close down the Confucius Institutes in UK universities when he pitched for the Tory leadership sounded like a good idea. Sadly it was also ill thought out. In a liberal democracy it’s difficult just to close down organisations you don’t like by governmental order. His backtracking on that promise this week was therefore both predictable and understandable. Unfortunately the way he has chosen to do this has been a terrible exercise in bad judgment. To this extent the right of the Tory party are absolutely right to call him out. In Europe and Nato, the last thing Sunak needs now is a reputation for being soft on illiberal
It looks like a textbook case of what Nicola Sturgeon insisted never happens. A transgender butcher in the Scottish borders picks up a primary school girl, takes her to ‘her’ home to ‘look after her’ and then sexually assaults her for 27 hours. Fortunately, the girl escapes. ‘Man abducted and sexually assaulted schoolgirl while dressed as a woman’, said the headline on the BBC News website, for once not worrying about misgendering Amy George, whose dead name is Andrew Miller. The High Court in Edinburgh was told that Miller, who pleaded guilty to abduction and sexual assault, ‘identifies as transgender’ and is in the process of transitioning to female. Cases
26 min listen
Dambisa Moyo is an economist, life peer and author of five books: from Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa to her most recent, How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World. Born in Zambia, Dambisa grew up in a house where discussing politics was a regular occurrence at the family table. Dambisa has a large portfolio of academic qualifications from all over the world and has consulted both public and private sector banks. Having sat on numerous boards, Dambisa received a life peerage this year. On the podcast, Dambisa talks about growing up in Zambia, six years after
9 min listen
James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson about Rishi Sunak’s response to the impending migration figures and what could be in Keir Starmer’s plans to ‘make Brexit work’.
45 min listen
This week: Spectator editor Fraser Nelson writes in this week’s cover story about how Brexit has led to Britain having more, not less, immigration – Rishi Sunak’s government is masking dysfunction in the welfare system by bringing in people to fill vacant jobs. To make his case, Fraser joins us alongside our economics editor Kate Andrews. (01:04) Also this week: Novelist Elif Shafak writes about the Turkish elections in the diary for this week’s magazine. Ultranationalism and religious fundamentalism were the real winners in last Sunday’s poll. To tell us all about it. Elif joins us alongside Spectator contributor Owen Matthews. (23:18) And finally: Is reality television ruining sport? The Spectator’s online editor Tom
Oh dear. It seems that FBPE’s (Follow Back, Pro EU) favourite journalist is paying the price for her accusations against Arron Banks. The Court of Appeal costs have just come through against Carole Cadwalladr after making claims about Banks’ ties to Russia. And with costs on both sides in the region of £1.6 million, the judge has said that the Observer hack has to pay for 60 per cent of Banks’ costs – as well as 100 per cent of her own. That could put Cadwalladr’s total costs in the region of £2 million or so. Ouch. Steerpike caught up with Banks earlier this afternoon and spoke to the multi-millionaire mogul as he
A frantic round of last-minute lobbying is already underway. Officials are trying to stitch together a deal. And the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is pushing hard to find a compromise that works for both sides. There are lots of negotiations over ‘rules of origin’ for electric vehicles that will allow Vauxhall to keep its plants open. But hold on. Although we should expect a deal to be done, as it usually is between the UK and the European Union, that should not obscure the bigger point. We are not going to be big players in EVs, and there is no point in trying to become one now. We are not
The Corbynites might have been routed but there’s still one area where they hold sway. In Islington North, the home patch of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour members are still staying loyal to their local MP and former party leader. The magic Grandpa has sat for the seat for 40 years but was blocked from standing as a party candidate earlier this year. Yet that didn’t stop members of Islington North CLP overwhelmingly endorsing Corbyn last night in an act of open defiance. By a whopping 98 per cent they passed a motion at its monthly general meeting: This CLP would like to thank our sitting MP J Corbyn for his commitment
Here’s something that will make John Cleese splutter on his cornflakes. The Cambridge Footlights – whose alumni include Peter Cook, Clive James and David Mitchell – is now recruiting for a new ‘sensitivity reading’ service to ensure that ‘all student comedy’ is as ‘inclusive and welcoming as possible’. This is ‘to check for potential oversights regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism, or any other kind of sensitive or upsetting material’ to suggest ‘things that could be rephrased or improved, or things that should be cut.’ The new ‘optional request for any student-written comedy’ will involve a member of the Footlights Committee offering to vet submissions and conferring with
13 min listen
Keir Starmer promised in an interview with the Times today that as prime minister he would back the ‘builders not the blockers’. But is it all bluster? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman.
What a nonsense debate the fight over the green belt has become. Today Keir Starmer has been – rightly – stoking it up arguing that councils should be given the freedom to build on green belt land. The Labour leader told the Times: ‘It cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you or will you not build on the green belt. This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.’ The green belt holds a special, if strange, place in the British psyche. Its primary function is to prevent urban sprawl, rather than safeguard particularly green and
53 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about a very new version of a very old book. Leo Africanus’s The Cosmography and Geography of Africa was the first book to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe. Part Baedeker, part-natural history, part-memoir, part-history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of years. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Richard J Oosterhoff have just published the first new English translation in more than 400 years, and they talk to me about its tangled manuscript history, its mysterious author, and what it gets wrong about giraffes.
The party leaders were absent today so the understudies stepped in. Angela Rayner filled the vacuum that is Sir Keir Starmer, while Oliver Dowden performed for Rishi Sunak. Rayner had prepared for the encounter by spending the entire morning in hair and make-up. Result, a sharp off-white jacket and matching slacks. And her famous ginger locks spilled out luxuriously over her padded shoulders. An eye-catching display, certainly, but perhaps not the right wardrobe for the deputy leader of the people’s party. She looked like a Miami sales assistant who flogs yachts to billionaires. She was gracious in welcoming Dowden to the despatch box and joked that he was the ‘third
Students have had a rough deal over the past years. They’ve had their degrees interrupted by Covid and teaching strikes, they’re set to graduate into an economic crisis, and they’re saddled with record amounts of debt which they’ll repay earlier and for longer. So for many, the proposed ‘marking boycott’ might feel like the last straw. In April, the University and College Union, which represents academics and university support staff, announced that they planned to stop ‘all summative marking and associated assessment activities/duties’, including ‘assessment-related work such as exam invigilation and the processing of marks’. This decision has left students in limbo, with no idea whether their work will be
Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, popped up on television at the weekend to explain that the cost of installing a heat pump is only about £3,000, the same as a gas boiler. Hmm. Good luck with that. That number is only true once a £5,000 grant from the government (of which only 90,000 are available) has been considered. It ignores all the costs of insulation and pipework. A friend of mine with a heat pump says about £15,000 is a more accurate number. A lower carbon economy is a good thing, but the Net Zero policy as legally implemented in the UK has been a disaster Inflation, largely a consequence