Politics

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

Wednesday

Eliot Wilson

Are we sure the Afghan data debacle won’t happen again?

‘Afghanistan’ was the heading of Defence Secretary John Healey’s statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday – a word that hardly does justice to a three-year saga involving a catastrophic security breach and loss of data by the Ministry of Defence, a superinjunction and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Ministers and civil servants cannot be allowed to make policy and spend taxpayers’ money without any kind of oversight. That is not how a democracy works The bare bones of the story are these. In February 2022, the details of nearly 20,000 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK after the Taliban had seized power, as well

Mel Stride

Mel Stride: ‘what I would do differently’

12 min listen

Last night, Rachel Reeves was the headline act at the Mansion House dinner. In her speech, she made the case that ‘Britain is open for business’ and that we must ‘stay competitive in the global economy’. Critics would say it is hard to claim to be open for business while having also overseen a £25 billion national insurance tax raid that is now known to be costing thousands of jobs. She began by stressing that, despite what recent reporting might suggest, she is ‘okay’ – the economic indicators, however, suggest that the economy is far from okay. Just this morning, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that inflation hit

Steerpike Steerpike

Rael Braverman quits Reform after attacks on Suella

A day is a long time in politics. Just 24 hours ago, the husband of former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman was a signed-up member of Reform UK. This morning, however, Rael Braverman announced that he has left Nigel Farage’s party – ‘effective immediately’. Life comes at you fast, eh? It comes after the party hit out at Suella on Tuesday following the revelation that a Ministry of Defence leak in 2022 had endangered the lives of thousands of Afghans, resulted in launch of top secret Operation Rubric and cost the taxpayer over £7bn. Taking aim at the former Conservative government, Reform UK’s ex-chairman and current head of DOGE Zia

Alexander Larman

MasterChef must die

As Oscar Wilde didn’t quite put it, for one MasterChef presenter to depart because of a scandal may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness. After Gregg Wallace received his P45 from the long-running BBC cookery show, his co-presenter John Torode has also been given the boot, having allegedly made a racist remark during filming in 2018 – a claim Torode denies. It is clear that all is not well behind the stove. Wallace and Torde’s antics have made MasterChef a joke Wallace and Torde’s antics have made MasterChef a joke. The stories about Wallace that have dominated the headlines over the last week have long

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain can’t afford to let migrants live on benefits

When the history of the next election comes to be written, we may end up asking: was the turning point for its outcome the moment that Keir Starmer’s government backtracked on its welfare reforms in the face of a backbench revolt? The fiasco, which eliminated the government’s hopes of saving £5 billion a year, has made any welfare reform during the current Parliament impossible.   Britain has become the benefits office of the world The cost of that is becoming more evident by the day. Figures revealed this morning show that there are currently 3.6 million people receiving Universal Credit who are under no obligation whatsoever to look for work. They

Matthew Lynn

Cutting bank holidays for French workers is a bad idea

Banning the baguette, perhaps? Or making it compulsory to eat a sandwich at your desk at lunchtime? If you think hard enough, it is possible to imagine reform that would create more anger in France. Even so, prime minister Francois Bayrou’s plan to scrap two public holidays is right up there. Bayrou wants to reduce France’s 11 public holidays in a bid to kick-start France’s economy. Bayrou said Easter Monday had ‘no religious significance’, and the whole nation had to work and produce more. He said that bank holidays had turned the month of May into a gruyère – a Swiss cheese full of holes. He said that bank holidays had turned

Steerpike Steerpike

Sandie Peggie cleared of NHS misconduct

To Scotland, where the nurse at the centre of a trans tribunal against NHS Fife has been cleared of all gross misconduct allegations. On Tuesday night, Sandie Peggie’s lawyer said that the health board had cleared the nurse of four gross misconduct allegations – following Peggie’s suspension in January 2024 after complaining about sharing a changing room with transgender medic Dr Beth Upton. Peggie then lodged a complaint of sexual harassment or harassment related to a protected belief under the 2010 Equality Act while earlier this year Dr Upton had made an allegation of bullying and harassment against the nurse. The case regarding single sex spaces was heard for ten

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Rising inflation shows how the Bank of England is failing

The rate of inflation climbed to 3.6 per cent in June – up from 3.4 per cent in May. That’s well above the 2 per cent target that the Bank of England consistently misses. It begs the question why the Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, spent the weekend talking up rate cuts, when as one former Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member put it to me recently: ‘The job is not yet done’. This morning’s inflation figures, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show much of the increase in prices was driven by motor fuel costs, but clothing and footwear, leisure activities and booze were up too. Food inflation has increased

David Shipley

The ‘morons’ who chopped down the Sycamore Gap tree don’t deserve prison

Our trees – oak and beech, soft and ancient, sycamores, whose seeds spin and tumble away every autumn – are one of the most beautiful things about England. I love them all – and have nothing but contempt for someone who needlessly destroys a tree which has taken decades, or centuries, to grow and might live for decades, or centuries, more. Despite this, I am deeply concerned by the way our justice system has treated Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, the two men from Cumbria who hacked down the famous Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023. At Newcastle Crown Court yesterday, the pair were sentenced to four years and three

Andrew Tettenborn

The flaw in the CofE’s £150 million victims’ fund

To much fanfare, the Church of England this week instituted a plan, funded to the tune of some £150 million and overseen by a well-respected City law firm, to compensate the victims of abuse carried out by church officials. So far, so good. But when we are talking big money like this, eligibility needs to be carefully circumscribed, with tough boundaries set. Unfortunately, one doubts whether the new Abuse Redress Measure, which set up the scheme, does this. However well-intended, it actually risks a worryingly unpredictable and at times arbitrary use of church funds. If you don’t like this, feel free to leave: but you shouldn’t be able to sue

Tom Slater Tom Slater

‘Climate denial’ shouldn’t be illegal

You can tell the environmentalists are on the back foot. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is issuing doomsday proclamations in parliament, branding Reform and the Tories ‘unpatriotic’ for refusing to go along with his deranged Net Zero policies. And now Labour donors are also calling for ‘climate denial’ to be criminalised. Because nothing says ‘we’re winning the argument’ like locking up your opponents. No wonder Dale Vince is rattled Green tycoon Dale Vince, a man whose woeful politics can be accurately inferred from his appearance, donated £5million to Labour ahead of the last General Election. Ever since, he’s been publicly dispensing increasingly crazed – and often totally self-serving – advice to the government he helped put into

Tuesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

No, Rachel Reeves: Britain doesn’t look ‘open for business’

Rachel Reeves wants Britain to become a shareholder democracy. In her annual Mansion House speech to the City’s bankers, accountants and financial advisors, she said ‘for too long, we have presented investment in too negative a light’. She’s right. These changes are unlikely to unleash the ‘big bang’ of prosperity and tax revenues the Chancellor badly wants and badly needs The Chancellor meant that regulation – which she called the ‘boot on the neck of business’ – has led to too many scary warnings about the risks of investing and not enough talking up of the benefits. She’s referring to the legally mandated ‘investment carries risk’ type messages you hear

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump – the conventional foreign policy President?

28 min listen

Trump has said he’s “very, very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened severe tariffs against them if there’s no deal on Ukraine within 50 days. He’s also sending more weapons to Ukraine in coordination with NATO. What’s behind his change of heart on foreign policy, and how’s his MAGA base responding? Freddy Gray is joined by deputy US editor Kate Andrews, and Sergey Radchenko, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. You can watch this episode here.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why does Trump like Starmer so much?

12 min listen

It can now be revealed that a Ministry of Defence data leak has cost the UK some £7 billion and put thousands of Afghans at risk of death. A dataset containing the details of nearly 19,000 people who applied to move to the UK following the Taliban takeover was released in error by a British defence official in February 2022. Ministers were informed of the debacle in August 2023; since then, an unprecedented super-injunction has been in place to stop the press from reporting details. What does this mean for successive governments? Also on the podcast, Donald Trump gave a surprise interview to the BBC overnight in which he changed

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves’s mortgage reforms reek of desperation

Just how desperate is Rachel Reeves to achieve her elusive economic growth? Desperate enough, it seems, to risk a rush of repossessions in a future housing crisis. One of the big announcements in her Mansion House speech this evening, it has been reported, will be a new, permanent mortgage guarantee scheme, plus changes to mortgage eligibility to make it easier for homebuyers to borrow high multiples of their income and take out high loan-to-value mortgages. The UK economy is horribly reliant on the housing market for growth What could possibly go wrong? Reeves looks like she will be following the example of Gordon Brown, who presided over an era of

James Heale James Heale

The MoD Afghan leak is a national embarrassment

Some days the British state really does embarrass itself. It can now be revealed that a Ministry of Defence data leak has cost the UK some £7billion and put thousands of Afghans at risk of death. A dataset containing the details of nearly 19,000 people who applied to move to the UK following the Taliban takeover was released in error by a British defence official in February 2022. The unauthorised data breach was committed by a soldier as he tried to help verify applications for sanctuary in Britain Ministers were informed of the debacle in August 2023; since then, an unprecedented super-injunction has been in place to stop the press

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Texas eating Hollywood?

20 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by editor-at-large of The Spectator World, Ben Domenech. They discuss why Hollywood productions are being drawn away from California to states like Texas, and what this could mean for the future of filmmaking in America. Ben writes about this in the new edition of Spectator World, and you can subscribe to the print magazine here: https://thespectator.com/subscribe

James Heale James Heale

James Cleverly’s case against the revolutionary right

There is a revolutionary air on the right at present. Whether it is Kemi Badenoch’s call to ‘rewire the state’ or Nigel Farage’s attacks on ‘broken Britain’, few have much good to say about our current political set-up. Step forward James Cleverly to offer balm to all that inflammation. At a speech this morning at the IPPR think tank, the former foreign secretary gave his thoughts on the rise of Reform UK and how government must change to function more effectively.  Cleverly began by contrasting two Reform-run councils: Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Both wanted to change the rules to allow only national flags to be flown from council buildings. The former

The Spectator

Coffee House Shots Live: Are the Tories toast?

Watch Spectator editor Michael Gove, political editor Tim Shipman and assistant editor Isabel Hardman as they discuss where the Tories go from here, in a livestream exclusively for Spectator subscribers. The strange death of Tory England has been predicted before. But never has the ‘natural party of government’ faced a greater challenge to its survival. The Conservatives are facing attacks on all fronts from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK. Kemi Badenoch’s six-month anniversary as leader was marked by the loss of nearly 700 councillors – and testing elections await her next year in Scotland and Wales. She has promised change with her long-awaited policy commissions, ahead of a make-or-break party conference in October. But can she turn

James Heale James Heale

Starmer’s veteran woes are just beginning

As hundreds of veterans marching past the Cenotaph brought Whitehall to a halt yesterday afternoon, inside parliament a debate was held on the government’s plan to repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy and Reconciliation Act. Passed by Boris Johnson, this aimed to prevent veterans from being prosecuted for all but the most serious crimes committed during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ from the 1960s to 1998. Labour’s bid to scrap the legislation has sparked fury among veterans – and has left Alistair Carns, the Veterans Minister, on resignation watch. Quentin Letts, who has sat in parliament for nearly 40 years, suggested it was ‘the biggest turnout I have seen for a Westminster