Politics

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

Wednesday

1 Feb 2023

Cindy Yu

Are we close to a breakthrough on the Northern Ireland Protocol?

11 min listen

Today the Times has reported that a partial agreement has been made over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Why are the government playing down the progress made over the Irish border? Also on podcast, Boris Johnson has been on maneuvres this week, weighing in on the row over sending jets to Ukraine. Has he succeeded in undermining Rishi Sunak? Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.

Lloyd Evans

Did Rishi really not know about Zahawi’s tax troubles?

Necromancy was the main theme at PMQs. The Labour party has realised that Nadhim Zahawi’s resignation has left a gaping hole in their ‘sleazy Tories’ strategy. They badly need him back on stage. Sir Keir Starmer addressed Rishi’s fanciful claim that the rumours about Zahawi’s tax affairs were unknown to him until recent weeks. Sir Keir quoted three daily papers that mentioned Zahawi’s murky financial affairs last July. And he treated Rishi’s denials with blokeish scorn. ‘Oh come on. Anyone picking up a newspaper would have known it.’ Is it credible that Rishi knew less about Zahawi than the media, the whole of parliament and most voters? Rishi mounted a

Owen Matthews

One year on: how will the Ukraine war end?

In early October 2021 President Joe Biden, the CIA director William Burns and other top members of the US’s national security team gathered in the Oval Office to hear a disturbing briefing from US military chief General Mark Milley. ‘Extraordinary detailed’ intelligence gathered by western spy agencies suggested that Vladimir Putin might be planning to invade Ukraine. According to brieﬁng notes that Milley shared with the Washington Post, the first and most fundamental problem facing Biden was how to ‘underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order’ against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability ‘without going to World War 3’. Milley offered four possible answers: ‘No. 1: Don’t have a kinetic

Cindy Yu

Joe Biden puts America First on electric vehicles

A trade war is brewing between the United States and its closest allies. When Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal markets commissioner, pulled out of a summit with US officials just before Christmas, he complained that the agenda ‘no longer gives sufficient space to issues of concern to many European industry ministers and businesses’. A few days before, Emmanuel Macron cornered senator Joe Manchin in Washington DC. ‘You’re hurting my country’, the French president told Manchin. The senator was given a similarly frosty reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel accosted him caustically. The Europeans are upset about Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction

Katy Balls

The art of losing an election

There’s a new default conversation for Tory MPs at any Westminster drinks party: is this 1992 or 1997? Is the party doomed or not? In 1992 John Major became the only prime minister to have been 20 points behind in the polls and then gone on to win two years later. But in 1997, with the Tories mired in accusations of sleaze, Major lost by such a landslide that his party was out of power for three terms. There are some Tory MPs who argue that a narrow victory would be worse than giving Labour a small majority At last week’s cabinet away day, William Hague was brought in as

The Spectator

What’s moved the Doomsday Clock the most?

The final countdown The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its ‘Doomsday Clock’ from 100 seconds to midnight to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been to our apparent annihilation. How close was it during other periods of history? Cuban missile crisis, 1962 The standoff between the US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the brink, yet it was apparently a time of optimism compared with today – a few months later the clock was moved back from 7 to 12 minutes. Chernobyl, 1986 The world’s worst nuclear accident didn’t register on the clock: the hands were not moved for two more years, and then

Isabel Hardman

Sunak and Starmer need to change the record at PMQs

Rishi Sunak was clearly not on a fasting day of his diet when he stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon. He seemed to have consumed all the Weetabix in SW1, with more energy behind his attacks on Keir Starmer than he’s had for weeks. This didn’t mean the session veered away from its standard theme of two men fighting over who is the weaker, like dads at a barbecue vying over their DIY failures while burning the chicken. Each week’s weak-off has the same lines. Sunak’s are that Starmer sat next to Jeremy Corbyn for ‘four long years, not challenging him’ and that he can’t stand up to

Steerpike

Israel row embroils Labour, again

Labour are all too keen to present themselves as a completely new party these days. So Keir Starmer must be pretty annoyed at one of his more hard-of-thinking MPs for reminding voters that there are plenty of Corbynistas still sat on the Opposition benches. At Prime Ministers’ Questions today, Kim Johnson – one of a handful of ‘Corbyn’s kids’ selected under his leadership – used her 30 seconds in the spotlight to launch an attack on the ‘fascist Israeli government’ and its ‘apartheid’ policies. Surprisingly, Sunak did not use his reply to condemn this intemperate use of language. But plenty of others watching now have, noting that Johnson’s language comes

Iain Macwhirter

Nicola Sturgeon’s trans prison saga continues

Could the extraordinary scandal of transgender sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons come at any worse a time for Nicola Sturgeon? Only days after her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was stalled by Westminster’s government on the grounds that it might have an ‘adverse impact’ on women’s safety, it emerged that women have already been endangered by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS). In their anticipation of this very legislation, Scottish prisons have been allowing male sex offenders to routinely self-identify as women for almost a decade. How was this allowed to happen? How did the First Minister not know until last week that rapists, such as Isla Bryson

James Heale

Nadine Dorries and the rise of the ‘presentician’

‘Politics is show business for ugly people,’ said Paul Begala, famously. Westminster today, however, is more akin to a finishing school for aspiring media personalities. We live now in a new age of ‘presenticians’ – in which more and more political figures present their own news shows. Turn on your TV and you could well be confronted by one of a dozen current or former MPs who are now anchors or regular pundits. On GB News, there’s the husband-and-wife duo of Esther McVey and Philip Davies, and Lee Anderson MP just replaced his fellow Tory Dehenna Davison as the network’s resident ‘Red Waller’. Jacob Rees-Mogg has also joined the self-styled ‘People’s Channel’.

Steerpike

Wes Streeting’s Middle England offensive

To Kensington, where the masters of Fleet Street now ply their trade. Just a mile away from Northcliffe House – home of the Mail newspaper empire – the hard-working hacks who staff those papers gathered last night at the Royal Geographical Society. They were there to toast the man who started it all – Alfred Harmsworth, better known as Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail. Lord Rothermere, the descendant and modern-day equivalent of that great press baron, laid on a lavish drinks reception to mark the publication of Andrew Roberts’ book The Chief – a weighty tome on Northcliffe’s life. But while the assembled big wigs, flunkeys and satraps

Ross Clark

Why should under-productive civil servants get a pay rise?

We all know about the teachers and train drivers, but apparently there are 100,000 civil servants in 124 government departments and quangos also on strike today – if anyone has noticed. It includes members of the PCS union employed at the DWP, National Highways, the Food Standards Agency and, er, the Risk Management Authority, Trade Remedies Authority, Council for the RFSAs and, of course, Bord na Gaidhlig. It is only thanks to their striking that many people will ever have heard of them. Any workers wanting above-inflation pay rises will have to earn them through improved working practices That is the point, of course, of ‘Walkout Wednesday’ – it allows

Steerpike

What is Labour’s position on transwomen in prisons?

The fallout from Scotland’s trans prison debacle continues, raising some awkward questions for Westminster politicians. Many are scrambling to insist that – despite keeping very quiet on the trans issue for years – they were, in fact, never convinced that gender identity should trump biological fact and that women’s rights are paramount. Even if they didn’t say so during the years when female campaigners saying the same were being hounded and abused. Lots of the politicians who have recently discovered their long-held but previously unexpressed commitment to women’s safety are from the Labour party. Steve Reed, the Labour shadow Justice Secretary, gave a good example on Good Morning Britain this morning,

Steerpike

Could Boris Johnson run for president? ‘I don’t rule it out’

The 2024 race for the White House is on. Donald Trump is in, Nikki Haley is getting ready, Joe Biden is preparing to fend off intra-party foes – and now, Steerpike has learned of another possible entrant: former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. One of Steerpike’s Spectator colleagues in America caught up with the ex-PM at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, DC. When asked if he wanted to move from 10 Downing Street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Johnson told the Cockburn gossip column: ‘I don’t rule it out.’ Johnson, who is visiting the US to push for additional aid to Ukraine, did not specify whether he would run as

Isabel Hardman

Why are the Tories dragging their feet over public sector pay?

Why haven’t ministers sent their submissions to the independent pay review bodies for their sectors? That’s the question being asked of Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, both of whose departments have missed their deadlines for submissions on next year’s pay settlement. Some hope that a more generous pay settlement for next year might make it harder for trade unions to continue striking Keegan was out and about on the airwaves dealing with the start of the teaching strikes this morning, and explained that the education department had ‘halted’ the submission on future pay. She told the Today programme: ‘We want to keep open those discussions about

Patrick O’Flynn

Guy Verhofstadt is a good advert for Brexit

During the run-up to the referendum, some ardent Remainers attempted to brand the EU as a Great European Peace Project. Chuka Umunna, the former Labour MP turned investment banker, pushed this line in a radio debate I took part in with him. I made the usual pro-Leave point about Nato being the key international body guaranteeing peace in Europe, but conceded that Germany and France having a joint political project to focus on may have made a useful additional contribution. This enabled the additional point to be aired that the idea they would start a war against each other should the UK leave the EU was preposterous. Being a generally

Rhona Hotchkiss

Has Nicola Sturgeon learnt her lesson from the case of Isla Bryson?

The appalling debacle of the double rapist, Isla Bryson, being locked up in a women’s prison in Scotland, albeit in segregation, gave me pause for thought. As the former governor of Cornton Vale, the prison Bryson was incarcerated in, what would I have done if I was still in the job? ‘Over my dead body,’ was the response I gave when another trans-identified male inmate sought to be moved to Cornton Vale, back in 2016, when I was in charge. I was outraged: this was an individual who, over his years of offending, had committed multiple acts of serious violence, including to prison and health care staff. From prison, he stalked a 13

Julius Strauss

In Orikhiv, war has a rhythm

On the road to the frontline Andrii, 36, managed to coax the tired old British ambulance up to 80mph. The tarmac ahead was scarred with the impact of artillery shells and some of the holes were big enough to pitch us off the road, but he navigated around them skillfully. Suddenly, far in front of us and high above, we saw the contrails of an airplane: an innocuous sight in a peaceful country. Here it almost certainly meant an incoming Russian strike. Andrii and his helper, Oleksandr, 29, donned their body armour. And then from our left a new contrail appeared: a Ukrainian missile. The first contrail made a sudden

Gavin Mortimer

The French have rejected Macron’s love for the EU

Another 1.2 million people took to the streets in France yesterday to protest against Emmanuel Macron’s plan to push back the age of retirement from 62 to 64. His prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, insisted at the weekend that his pension reforms are non-negotiable. We’ll see about that, was the response of the people, who for the second time in a fortnight demonstrated en masse. But they are protesting about much more than just the pension reform. This is the culmination of six years of ras-le-bol (despair), the word one hears most frequently from the demonstrators. I have seen it countless times scrawled on placards, banners and on the yellow vests

Michael Simmons

Will the strikes prove terminal for Britain’s railways?

Today is being dubbed ‘Walkout Wednesday’: thousands of schools are shut as teachers go on strike – and civil servants and lecturers are also on the picket line. Railway staff continue their strike today too and there is little sign of the strike deadlock being broken. We’re losing more working days to industrial action than at any point since the 1980s. A large chunk of industrial action is made up by rail strikes, and the government fears ‘a generation’ of passengers will be put off train travel for good. Might the strikes prove terminal for Britain’s railways? The RMT, which is responsible for the latest walkout, is at the forefront