Politics

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

Sunday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Will Chad become Africa’s next warzone?

If you went to Doha this summer, you may have seen some militiamen from Chad. Perhaps at breakfast. For the last few months, 300 downtrodden tribesman, disaffected politicians, and madmen with guns have been staying in the city’s Sheraton Grand hotel, negotiating peace with the Chadian government. Three weeks ago they signed a ceasefire and now, having supposedly agreed not to kill each other, they are back in Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, trying to organise elections. If they can’t, Africa will become home to the world’s largest warzone. Mahamat Déby leads Chad’s junta and asked for the talks after his father, a dictator of 30 years, was killed by one of

Andrew Lilico

Vaccines disguised the errors of our lockdown policy

Liz Truss’s statement that she would never authorise another lockdown and The Spectator’s interview with Rishi Sunak have triggered a new debate about whether the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were justified. The most widely discussed positions are that lockdown occurred too late or that there should never have been any lockdowns at all, alongside the view that what happened was about right. But there is another position here – in many ways perhaps the most obvious position – that rarely gets an airing. When lockdown was first introduced, Boris Johnson said the point was to ‘squash the sombrero’ of cases, so that the peak number of hospitalisations each week

Nicholas Trickett

The case for energy nationalisation

We are living through an energy crisis unlike anything since the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. The average household energy bill is set to reach over £3,500 a year. Businesses are already going bankrupt as they face ruinous costs. And inflation, driven in part by high energy prices, is expected to hit 10 per cent with the threat of more drastic price increases in the new year. In these circumstances, it is surprising that no leading politician has yet made the case for nationalisation of our energy sector – even though new polling shows half of Tory voters believe energy should be brought back into public ownership. Some have

Saturday

Steven Barrett

The problem with parliament’s partygate inquiry

Boris Johnson has recently employed the services of the lawyer Lord Pannick, who has given his legal opinion on a House of Commons investigation into Boris Johnson’s partygate comments. The advice has been published here by the government. It seems to have cost £129,000, which is not expensive, believe it or not, by market rates for someone as eminent as Lord Pannick. To recap – parliament is proposing to put Boris on trial for the offence of misleading the House. The wrong complained of is when Boris told the House that ‘no Covid rules were broken’ and that the ‘guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.’

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why it’s still worth asking questions on lockdown

Rishi Sunak’s interview in last week’s magazine has inspired a lot of comment. Two this week: Lee Cain, ex-No. 10 spin chief, in The Spectator and Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times, warns about the promotion of betrayal ‘lockdown fables’ promoted by ‘mythmakers’ and ‘lockdown sceptics trying to rewrite history’. He and I discussed this on Twitter yesterday. I’m a big admirer of Shrimsley and think he deserves a more considered response than whatever can be squeezed into 280 characters. Cain: ‘Opponents still say lockdown was a mistake. What do these critics think would have happened to transmission rates – rising exponentially – if we had failed to lockdown? What

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron is blaming Putin for his own net zero folly

France is at war again, or as good as, according to Emmanuel Manuel’s recent rhetoric. This time the enemy is Russia, which at least is a more tangible adversary than Covid, on which the French president declared ‘war’ in March 2020. Most of the Republic believed him and submitted to one of the most draconian lockdowns in Europe. The state of health emergency imposed by Macron ended only at the start of last month, by which time millions of French understood that it had been a phoney war on a virus that wasn’t half as deadly as their president had had them believe. Barely a fortnight after the health emergency

Keiron Pim

Keiron Pim, Miranda Morrison and Cosmo Landesman

24 min listen

This week on Spectator Out Loud: Keiron Pim discusses what young Ukrainians can learn from the works of Joseph Roth (01:00), Miranda Morrison reflects on her decision to quit her job as a teacher (11:26), and Cosmo Landesman asks whether successful writers can be friends with less successful ones (19:39). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Putin’s closure of Nord Stream 1 has left Britain exposed

Few will be minded to believe Russia’s explanation for cutting off Nord Stream 1 pipeline – that it is a maintenance issue – and I don’t suspect we are expected to believe it, either – any more than we were expected to believe that the would-be Salisbury assassins had an interest in cathedral spires. It is pretty blatant what game Vladimir Putin is playing: Europe has announced, grandly, its intentions to wean itself off Russian gas and oil and Putin has set out to pre-empt that, to cut off the gas while Europe is still pretty much reliant on it. Gas supplies to Germany from Russia were already down to

Christopher Booth

Remembering Gorbachev

In early January 1997, I met my boyhood hero. It was in the grounds of his wintry dacha outside Moscow. A man in late middle age, though still sprightly, he wore a padded anorak against the cold and a dark patterned scarf. Snow lay fat on the bony branches, with more softly falling. His boots creaked over the frost on the pathways as we wandered and chatted: me in my broken Russian, he in his easily recognisable, gentle southern accent. It had been five years since he had signed away the Soviet Union at a pen stroke, and a little longer since he had been de facto discarded from genuine

Justin Bronk

Ukraine’s Kherson offensive may have already been a success

The Ukrainian armed forces launched a long–awaited offensive on Kherson this week. However, the counter-offensive was signalled for so long by both Ukrainian and western sources that the Russian army had plenty of time to significantly reinforce its positions there, meaning that the Kherson front is now more heavily manned by Russian troops than most other stretches of the frontline. Ukrainian government sources have requested a total blackout of media reports from the frontlines so exact details are sparse. But what is clear is that the Russian movement of forces has already had two positive effects for Ukraine, even before the actual counter-offensive operation was launched. The first has been

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Is Liz Truss the British Trump?

Readers must understand how the jargon of political chicanery has corrupted journalism if they are to make sense of the coming Truss premiership. Unless you grasp the slippery, new meaning of ‘pivot,’ media coverage will leave you clueless. To give you a taste of what is to come try this sentence from the Politico website. Liz Truss may have to ‘pivot away once the battle for members’ hearts has been won’. Pivot? Is our next prime minister a machine part that will bend the body politic with the prevailing wind? Or try this from the Independent: ‘Therein lies the truth about the coming pivot… The only question is how skilfully she

William Cook

Why the Baltics fear Russia

In the historic heart of Riga, Latvia’s lively capital, there is a building that reveals why the Baltic States remain so wary of the Russian Bear. From the street, it doesn’t look like much – just another apartment block on a busy boulevard full of shops and cafes. Only the discreet sign outside gives the game away: ‘During the Soviet occupation the KGB imprisoned, tortured, killed and morally humiliated its victims in this building.’ Most passers-by barely give it a second glance. They know this story all too well. The KGB vacated this apartment block in 1991 when Latvia regained her independence, but over 30 years later the memories remain

Friday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Can Boris get off the hook from partygate?

16 min listen

Boris Johnson has released legal advice that he received from Lord Pannick about the Commons investigation into partygate, where the lawyer said the investigation in its current form would be ‘unlawful’ if it were taking place in the courts. Can Boris really get off the hook? Max Jeffery speaks to James Forsyth and James Heale. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The truth about Extinction Rebellion

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse – Extinction Rebellion are back! Well, if you thought an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, fuelled by a global scramble for gas, would have led the eco-irritants to sit things out for a bit, you don’t know XR. For them, the ‘climate emergency’ trumps all. Plus, reading a room has never really been their strong suit – as we saw when they tried to win the hearts and minds of commuters by climbing on top of Tube trains, or when an animal-rights XR offshoot went after that most universally disliked of figures in Britain, the Queen. This time their target is the Houses

Steerpike Steerpike

Did Sadiq Khan force Cressida Dick out?

Crime is on the rise in London but spare a thought for the real victim in all of this: Cressida Dick. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner quit her post in February after a string of scandals on her watch. But an independent report has today claimed that she ‘felt intimidated’ into resigning after an ultimatum from London mayor Sadiq Khan. The report, written by the former chief inspector of constabulary Sir Tom Winsor, says: In my view, in this case, the commissioner faced political pressure from the mayor to resign, that pressure being of a character and intensity which was effectively his calling on her to leave office, outside the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is the Boris partygate probe ‘flawed’?

The new prime minister has not been announced yet, but Lord Marland – an ally of Boris Johnson – has already been on Newsnight to talk about the ‘distinct possibility’ of him having another run at the top job – after taking some time to ‘put hay in the loft’, in other words to build up his bank balance. The Johnson factor will be an irritant to whoever succeeds him. It won’t take much to get his partisans talking about a return for the Tory king over the water, and Johnson himself will play along with this: just look at the various ways he refused to rule out a comeback

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris’s resignation honours list: runners and riders

There’s very much an end of days feel in SW1 right now. With parliament in recess and a Truss coronation imminent, many of Boris Johnson’s ancien régime are making the most of their final week in office, attending endless leaving drinks and working out which consultancy they want to jump to next. But in the watering holes of Westminster the current topic of discussion among apparatchiks and bag-carriers is which of their number will be rewarded in Johnson’s forthcoming resignation honours list? Such expectations though are tinged somewhat by the knowledge of the controversy that such a list will inevitably provoke when made public. ‘It’s going to make the Lavender list

Siam Goorwich

France can’t keep its Jews safe

France is home to roughly half-a-million Jews. The country’s Jewish community is the largest in Europe, and the third largest in the world behind Israel and the United States. You might assume then that Jewish life in France is flourishing. But you’d be wrong. Over the weekend, news broke of the murder of Eyal Haddad, a Tunisian Jew living on the outskirts of Paris. What happened is still shrouded in mystery: the family’s lawyer denied earlier reports that the victim’s body had been burned and that the perpetrator had confessed to killing Haddad over a 100 euro debt, and because he was Jewish. But what we do know is this: Haddad was killed with

Steerpike Steerpike

Westminster grapples with TikTok craze

Whoever wins the Tory leadership on Monday will face a mountain of problems from day one. War, inflation, spiralling costs and a mutinous party: the in-tray will be veritably groaning. One issue that won’t perhaps be at the top of the list will be the future of the Prime Ministerial TikTok account: 10downingstreet. Officials have spent the past 11 months running the account, uploading videos of Boris goofing around to the page’s 292,000 followers. His presumptive successor though takes a rather more dim view of TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance has been criticised for its ties to Beijing. During the course of one leadership debate, Liz Truss said with regards