Politics

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

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Three problems with Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle

Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle has confirmed a new set of government departments focused on science and business, and a new party chair. That’s all well and good: the Prime Minister is very keen to make Britain a science superpower and wants to put the right people in the right jobs as he prepares for the next election. Civil servants are moving into new jobs, as are ministers. The new departments will use the existing government estate, but it isn’t yet clear where they’ll all be. But there are a number of potential problems with what’s been announced today. Is this the right reorganisation of Whitehall?Changing government departments can sometimes just be

David Spencer

Has the Met learnt anything from the case of David Carrick?

It’s another bad day for the Metropolitan police. The serial rapist former PC David Carrick has been given 36 life sentences and told he will not be released for at least 30 years. The details of the case are hard to believe: Carrick, known as ‘Bastard Dave’ to colleagues, has admitted using his status as a police officer to commit 48 rapes. The 48-year-old carried out a spree of dozens of offences against 12 women in a 17-year long campaign of depravity. The horrors of what Carrick did to his victims has led to another public examination of the inner workings of the Met. Once again, the force has been

James Heale James Heale

Four things we learnt from Richard Sharp’s BBC grilling

This morning Richard Sharp, the BBC’s Chairman, appeared before the Culture select committee of MPs. It was a difficult session for Sharp as the panel focused on reports that he helped Boris Johnson secure a loan, weeks before the then-prime minister recommended him for the role. Johnson has denied that Sharp had given him such advice. John Nicholson of the SNP and Labour’s Kevin Brennan led the way on grilling Sharp about whether he had breached any conflict of interest rules. Below are four things we learned from his testimony. Sharp insists he did not given Johnson financial advice Boris Johnson has said he is ‘ding dang sure’ that Sharp

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Will Biden’s docudrama fade away?

31 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Charles Lipson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and regular contributor at Spectator World about Biden’s ongoing docudrama. Image designed by Charles Lipson.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak shakes up his cabinet – and Whitehall

Rishi Sunak this morning embarked on a minor reshuffle of his cabinet as he restructures several Whitehall departments. Today’s cabinet meeting has been pushed back from this morning to mid-afternoon so as to allow for the changes to take place. In a sign of Sunak’s reluctance to ruffle feathers among Tory MPs, no sackings took place. Instead the focus was on rearranging government departments and then matching them largely with serving ministers. This could make the government run more efficiently and help Sunak point to delivery by the next election The most pressing matter, however, was the vacancy of party chairman after Sunak removed Zahawi from his cabinet over his

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The sinister celebrification of Shamima Begum

So is Shamima Begum a celebrity now? Tonight, a documentary about her airs on BBC Two. Over the weekend, her picture was splashed on the front page of the Times Magazine. ‘I was in love with the idea of the Islamic State. I was in denial. Now I have a lot of regret’, says the strapline, next to a pic of a madeover Begum sporting a fetching vest, baseball cap and fire-engine red nail polish. How long till she has her own reality TV show? The Only Way Is Raqqa, perhaps. The media’s sympathy for Shamima Begum is starting to creep me out. Lovingly framed, soft-lens photos accompany the interview.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’

Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly the message coming from loyalists. Oleg Matveychev, a parliamentarian and spin doctor, who also has a widely-read blog, has made waves by claiming in an online video that ‘2023 will be very dangerous,’ because of the threat of so-called ‘turbo-patriots.’ Discounting the liberals (who ‘have all run away’), he warned that the turbo-patriots had become ‘the only danger to our state.’ A kleptocratic elite is seeing Putin as bad for business His scenario was that after some new reversals in the war, a combination of disgruntled nationalism, anger at corruption

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Britain is the sick man of Europe – again

Liz Truss’s recent written confession is remarkable for its childlike air. It reminded me of my buck-passing wheedling whenever I was caught doing something naughty aged about eleven; ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing – but neither did the Treasury, yeah what about the Treasury, eh, mum?’ I can remember when the British disease, being the ‘sick man of Europe’, etc, was a national obsession but mostly of the right and the reactionary. Think of the low-status laughs to be had from Basil Fawlty bemoaning ‘more strikes!’ or Alan Partridge tutting and muttering ‘This country …’ But in the 2020s doominess seems to be the default for everyone,

Daniel Thorpe

Where are the rescuers? Turkey’s earthquake death toll rises above 4,000

Turkey is reeling after a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed more than 2,900 people and left hundreds more injured. More than 1,400 people in northern Syria are also believed to have been killed. The quake, which struck near the city of Gaziantep in southeast Turkey in the early hours of Monday morning, was felt as far away as Lebanon and Jordan, on the far side of the Mediterranean. Another quake of 7.6 magnitude struck the nearby Kahramanmaraş region a few hours later at 13.27 local time (10.27 GMT), according to the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD). The images and video emerging from Turkey, showing flattened buildings and piles

Monday

James Heale James Heale

What Liz Truss gets right (and wrong)

After three months of silence, Liz Truss has spoken out – first in a 4,000-word article for the Telegraph and now in a 50-minute-long interview with the Spectator. Truss, the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British political history, feels enough time has now elapsed to give her account of her 49-day premiership, the collapse of which was caused by a combination of the financial and political markets. As the co-author of a book on her long rise and rapid fall, I was intrigued to hear Truss speak for the first time publicly about where it all went wrong. Both the interview and article make clear that Truss’s time in No. 10

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Liz Truss interview: ‘I didn’t get everything right’

18 min listen

Today Liz Truss has broken her silence, giving her first broadcast interview since leaving No.10 to SpectatorTV. Was she denied a ‘realistic chance’ at success?  Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.  You can watch the full interview now on SpectatorTV: https://www.youtube.com/@SpectatorTV

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are the sharks circling around Sunak over Rwanda?

Rishi Sunak has been blessed with interventions from two out of the three former prime ministers who are serving in the Commons today. Only one will be welcome: Boris Johnson made an unusually helpful contribution from the backbenches this afternoon at Home Office Questions when he asked about the Rwanda deportation policy. He said: Isn’t it obvious from today’s exchanges that many of those who oppose the UK-Rwanda migration and economic development partnership have no idea about Rwanda, have probably never been there, and are wholly wrong to condescend and to disparage Rwanda in the way that they do. And above all they have not the ghost of an idea

Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson

Liz Truss: The interview

What went wrong for Liz Truss? In her first interview since leaving 10 Downing Street she talks to Spectator TV (watch it here), going through her leadership election, her 49-day premiership and her plans for the future. She says her plans to scrap Rishi Sunak’s corporation tax rise failed because the OBR rejected her analysis that ‘raising taxes is counter-productive’ and is ‘not actually going to lead to reducing debt’. The OBR, she says, should face greater scrutiny about the assumptions in its models given how much sway she believes they now hold over UK economic policy. Truss admits to some mistakes and says she might not have launched her

Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson

Liz Truss: The interview

51 min listen

What went wrong for Liz Truss? In her first interview since leaving 10 Downing Street, she talks to Spectator TV about her leadership election, her 49-day premiership and her plans for the future. Truss admits to some mistakes, says her premiership was probably doomed after she fired her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, and says Whitehall orthodoxy stopped her from doing what she wanted.

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry will regret invading his privacy with his ‘Spare’ sex scene

What a pity that memoirs don’t qualify for the Bad Sex in Literature prize. If they did, the description of how Prince Harry lost his virginity in Spare would surely qualify. That sordid tale has already passed into the annals of the least sexy writing about sex imaginable, with an older woman treating the young prince like ‘a young stallion’, before parting by ‘smack(ing) (Harry’s) rump and sen(ding) (him) off to graze’. The description of who the anonymous woman is duly sparked a media frenzy. There were rumours it was Liz Hurley, promptly denied. The woman’s identity became nearly as discussed as the Duke’s latest outburst against his family. Sasha Walpole described the

Andrew Tettenborn

Rishi Sunak is right to challenge Europe’s human rights treaty

Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That they are from countries where they are in no appreciable danger, can mouth the word ‘asylum’ and then either disappear or use every intricacy of the law to stymie attempts to deport them feels intolerable to many.  Last week Rishi floated an idea to stop this. It would subject those who arrived irregularly on our

James Snell

Syria might never recover from the devastation of this earthquake

Natural disaster always worst affects those who have already lost so much. And so it is in Turkey and Syria, where a double earthquake has killed more than 1,900 people. Across both countries, there are widespread scenes of destruction: apartment blocks reduced to rubble; gas supplies cut off in the middle of a freezing winter; survivors left to try and pluck their relatives from the rubble. Much of Syria’s population is displaced and living in refugee camps whose temporary buildings are hardly structurally sound. A million Syrians, forced to flee their homes, are living in poor accommodation across Turkey. In Syria itself, the country is still in ruins after a decade

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ending the strikes won’t be enough to fix the NHS

The biggest round of NHS strikes is taking place this week, and there isn’t much hope of a resolution. This is despite, as Kate Andrews explores, a widespread acceptance that the strikes are detrimental to patient safety. There is also widespread public sympathy for striking healthcare workers, which surely suggests that a deal should come sooner rather than later to stop the government losing out even more politically.  So what’s going on? That’s a question some Tory MPs are also asking, wondering why there isn’t any prospect of a deal given the Royal College of Nursing in particular seems to be keen to stop striking. ‘There’s an appetite for a

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Liz Truss, Brexit and the petulant anger at reality

The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back.  The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

How much longer will NHS strikes be allowed to risk patient safety?

Patients in Devon are not supposed to call their local GPs to check on their appointments. Residents in Gloucestershire have been encouraged to avoid ringing 999 unless the situation is life-threatening. Once again, people are being asked to stay away from the health service – not because of a pandemic this time, but because today marks the largest workers’ strike in the NHS’s history. Royal College of Nursing union members are walking out in over a third of NHS England Trusts, with over 10,000 GMB and Unite ambulance workers joining them. As we’ve learned from this ongoing series of strikes, they don’t tend to create mass queues outside hospitals or