Politics

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

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Liz Truss had to go

The Liz Truss survival plan was, in the end, unworkable. She not only hired her enemies – Grant Shapps and Jeremy Hunt – but let them govern: tearing up her policies, while she held on in No. 10. She thought the Tory right had no candidate to replace her with and the Tory left would be happy because there had been a Cameroon restoration. So yes, it was a humiliation – but one that was supposed to keep her in post. The wheels feel off yesterday, and Truss had to accept that her game was over Could it last? Earlier this week I spoke to several MPs who could see Truss surviving

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘The ultimate death match’: Will it be Boris vs Rishi?

It will take 100 MP nominations to qualify for the next Tory leadership race and the clock is ticking – with Boris Johnson out in front with 51 supporters so far. Rishi Sunak has 44 and Penny Mordaunt 20. It will go to the membership for a swift decision unless the finalists come to a gentleman’s agreement. So how will it unfold? I set out four scenarios of how this might unfold in The Spectator earlier this month. There are two that MPs have most recently got in touch about: Rishi by Christmas or the Boris restoration. A week is a long time in politics – and next week could

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Sixty years on, Vatican II turns nasty

14 min listen

Ten years ago the Catholic Church happily celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Most people thought it was a good thing – and those who had their doubts were careful to express them diplomatically. Sixty years on, by contrast, Vatican II is the source of rancorous division in a collapsing Church. Liberals, describing themselves as ‘The People of God’, are invoking it to propose surreal changes to the doctrine that would have scandalised the Council fathers. They like to portray the forthcoming two Synods on Synodality – whose consultations attracted only a minuscule number of lay Catholics – as the fulfilment of Vatican II.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

After Truss, who?

Sir Graham Brady has just given a statement outside the St Stephen’s entrance of parliament. The chair of the 1922 Committee said the new prime minister will be in place before the fiscal statement on 31 October, and that the party rules currently mean members will be taking part in the truncated leadership election to replace Liz Truss. There are a lot of candidates who could stand to replace the Prime Minister. Including the membership means that some of those candidates who might be feared by a good chunk of their colleagues could still do extremely well if they make it through to the final round. Truss did not command

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Liz Truss resigns

11 min listen

Forty-four days into her premiership, Liz Truss said she was resigning as Prime Minister. There will now be a week-long race to elect a new leader. Who will be the contenders? Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth. Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Liz Truss

Why I resigned as Prime Minister

I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills. Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine threatens the security of our whole continent. And our country had been held back for too long by low economic growth.  I was elected by the Conservative party with a mandate to change this. We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance. And we set out a vision for a low tax, high growth economy – that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit. I recognise though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Liz Truss resigns

Liz Truss has just announced that she will be stepping down as Prime Minister. Forty-four days into her premiership, Truss said she was resigning as the leader of the party. Announcing her decision in a short speech outside Downing Street – accompanied by her husband – Truss said that she entered at a time of uncertainty where ‘families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills’. She went on to say that she had delivered on energy bill support and reversed the National Insurance hike. But she recognised that given the situation the country now found itself in – both with economic turmoil and a divided party – she

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Who will push Truss out?

The number of MPs publicly calling for Liz Truss to resign is rising steadily (you can read the live list here). There are also a number of key meetings taking place over the next few days that could seal the Prime Minister’s fate for her. The 1922 executive is due to meet later. I am also told that the influential 92 Group of right-leaning Conservative MPs has invited its members to a meeting on Monday night ‘to discuss the current situation’. Truss is going to find herself pushed around by all parts of her party in the coming days The 92 Group might normally be the best group to bolster

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Is this a Remainer coup?

I don’t normally vote Tory. But I did in December 2019. And for one reason only. Because I wanted Brexit ‘done’, properly. I wanted a Brexit-leaning government after those two long years of the Remainer parliament and its various efforts to frustrate our leaving of the EU. Millions of people, especially in Red Wall areas, took a punt on Boris’s Tories for the same reason. Because they believed it was time Britain had a government that better reflected, or at least tried to better reflect, the views of ordinary people, especially the much-maligned masses in those ‘left-behind’ Brexit-backing areas. Fast forward nearly three years and I find myself in a

Coffee House

Full list: the Tory MPs calling for Truss to go

Following the disaster of last month’s mini-Budget, Liz Truss’s premiership is now hanging by a thread. The sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng and his replacement by Jeremy Hunt appears to have not placated many of Truss’s critics on the Tory benches. Veteran backbencher Crispin Blunt became the first elected member of her party to call for her to quit on Sunday with others now breaking cover to voice their concerns too. Keep track of all the MPs calling on Truss to go here on Coffee House. Crispin Blunt – ‘The game is up.’ Andrew Bridgen – ‘Liz has sunk her own leadership and her predecessor’s potential comeback at the same time, all in

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Booting Boris was a catastrophic error

To call it a shambles is an insult to the many perfectly respectable shambles that take place each day up and down this fine land. Yesterday’s performance across Westminster and Whitehall by the Conservative and Unionist party will surely be remembered for many years as the textbook example of the nadir to which a dysfunctional, divided and woefully-led governing party can plummet. The preposterous levels of self-belief exhibited by the Prime Minister across the despatch box made for a disquieting opening act, to be followed by the loss of yet another occupant of a great office of state and then, with grim inevitability, utterly farcical scenes in the voting lobbies

Nigel Jones

A brief history of Tory rebellion

One hundred years ago, on 19 October 1922, Conservative MPs gathered at the Carlton Club. There was only one subject on the agenda: whether the party should continue its coalition with Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s wing of the Liberal party, or fight the coming General Election on its own. Last night, by a savage irony, Tory MPs once again assembled at the Carlton Club for a dinner to commemorate that historic meeting – which resulted in the collapse of the coalition, the resignation of Lloyd George, and the formation of the 1922 Committee, the trade union of Tory backbenchers that now holds Liz Truss’s rapidly diminishing political future in

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Commons chaos as the Tories fall apart

The government chaos continues. On Wednesday morning, Tory MPs were told that Labour’s motion to force a vote on a bill to ban fracking was a confidence motion in Truss’s government. Whips were determined not to give Labour control of the order paper. There would be no ifs or buts – all Tory MPs had to vote with the government to block it. Then as the debate ahead of the vote neared its end, No. 10 started to have doubts – with a number of MPs going public to say they would rebel. Climate minister Graham Stuart then told the Commons: ‘Quite clearly this is not a confidence vote.’ This led

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Kill the Bill!

The more you study what is going on with the Just Stop Oil protests and the Public Order Bill, the more weird and inconsistent our national attitude to protesters seems. Britain, according to those opposed to the Bill, is a police state. If you look at their response to the Just Stop Oil protests, however, we look like pushovers. It would be easy to come to the conclusion, watching protesters block roads and the police often just stand and watch, that Britain is in desperate need of more laws to deal with this kind of thing: to make it clear that yes, everyone has the right to protest but no,

Wednesday

The Spectator

Divided they fall: can the Tories save themselves?

Seldom has support for a government fallen so far, so fast. Polls show that 24 per cent of the public would vote for the Conservatives if there was an election now, vs 52 per cent for Labour: figures that make 1997 look like a good result for the Tories. This is not just a one-off rogue poll, but the sustained average of six. It reflects what Tory MPs hear from voters appalled at the disgraceful shambles of the past few weeks. It won’t be forgotten in a hurry. This magazine gave its verdict on the Liz Truss agenda in August: ‘To attempt reform without a proper plan is to guarantee

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The lady vanishes: the Truss agenda is dead

‘Governments don’t control markets,’ the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, likes to say. But there are times when markets control governments. The market, or the fear of how the market might react, is now the driving force in British politics. It explains the dramatic developments of the past week and will determine the new Prime Minister’s fate. Last month’s ‘mini-Budget’ was doomed because it required that the government borrow £70 billion more than had been planned. This money would have to be raised in the gilts market, and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng assumed that the markets would be happy to continue to lend so much at such low rates. But

Peter Jones

Liz Truss and the art of rhetoric

Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low taxes with economic growth. But she failed to persuade her audience that she knew how this could be achieved. If only Dr Kwarteng, a classicist, had drawn her attention to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (4th century bc), the first full analysis of the means of persuasion, the day and her career would have been saved. First, Aristotle defined two general types of persuasive proof. One he called ‘artistic’, because it depended upon human ingenuity, the other ‘non-artistic’, because it derived from pre-existing evidence, e.g. witness statements, written contracts, etc. Then

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Nobody wanted Liz Truss

One of the most important ingredients in the oil used to anoint King Charles during his coronation is becoming a bit of an issue – and it may give us a signal as to what sort of monarchy lies in wait for us. Aside from cinnamon and ambergris, the oil also includes musk from the Ethiopian civet cat, obtained through what protestors suggest is a cruel process. The oversized weasel is constrained in a tight cage made of twigs and its bum is forced out of a hole at the back of a cage, whereupon skilled Ethiopian musk gatherers squeeze the animal’s perineal glands, reaping a rich harvest of noisome

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has a Conservative government got any power at all?

In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’. By chance, I was sitting in the peers’ gallery immediately behind the author of that famous phrase, Norman Lamont, who applied it to John Major’s administration in his resignation statement as chancellor in 1993. It grows ever more apt. I sometimes wonder if modern politicians positively welcome this situation. It is a general feature of the structures of the EU, where no elected politician has real power, but none seems to mind. Much of the joy of ‘compassionate’ Conservatives at the trouncing of Truss appears to derive from the proof