Politics

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

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Giorgia Meloni shows Silvio Berlusconi who’s boss

Giorgia Meloni, who is about to become Italy’s first female prime minister, has won her first major battle. It was fought, not against her countless enemies, but against her ally Silvio Berlusconi. In a crucial victory, Meloni has forced Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister, to concede unequivocally that she – not he – is the boss of the right-wing coalition that won such a large majority at the general election last month. The 86-year-old rogue may well look these days like a waxwork model that has somehow come alive, but he remains a classic macho Italian man who finds it virtually impossible to take orders from women. Yet he has

Steerpike Steerpike

Liz Truss’s media strategy revealed

It’s the age-old dilemma for a media advisor when your politician is in a jam. How do you get out of doing an interview you really don’t want to do? Liz Truss’s former spad Kirsty Buchanan gave us an answer to that question to this morning when she revealed to the Whitehall Sources podcast just how her minister used to evade appearances on Question Time back when she was running the Ministry of Justice: Liz Truss when I worked for her, she obviously didn’t like the media so we used to spend quite a lot of time making up excuses and killing off minor members of her family so that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Truss should be wary of this PMQs pitfall

Whenever a PMQs is meant to be a crunch moment, it rarely turns out to be. Having sat through pretty much everyone since David Cameron versus Gordon Brown, my experience is that a prime minister under pressure turns up with a series of well-prepared, defensive lines that they fall back on in answer to every question. The leader of the opposition’s questions are too long, allowing the prime minister some wriggle room as they grit their teeth and get to the end of the session. The consensus is that it wasn’t as much of a disaster as it could have been and Westminster moves on to the next crunch point.

Kristina Murkett

The Shakespearean tragedy of Liz Truss

In his book The Five Basic Plots, Christopher Booker outlines five stages of tragedy: anticipation, dream, frustration, nightmare, destruction. So far Liz Truss has completed four of these. Tory party members, like Macbeth’s witches, hailed Liz Truss as ruler of a new low-tax, pro-growth era. She rose to the top, like Macbeth, in a triumph of ambition over ability, but took his advice with her mini-Budget (‘if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly’) a little too literally. Frustrated by the fates of the markets, Truss is now surely in her nightmare stage: haunted, hunted, hiding (although apparently not under a desk). Yet I

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Could the Tories’ downfall be Reform’s big chance?

The Reform party, under its leader Richard Tice, invented Trussonomics before Liz Truss – launching an economic recovery plan in June which claimed to explain ‘how to grow our way out of crisis’. The core policy idea will be familiar to anyone who has followed the disastrous aftermath of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget – a huge stimulus, largely delivered through unfunded tax cuts and higher anticipated borrowing. Tice has so far been too modest to claim his rightful status as John the Baptist to Truss’s Jesus – which is hardly surprising given that she is being crucified right now. Yet the collapse of her vision of what was

Tom Miller

We love you, Uncle Xi!

In 2015, I had lunch with an old chum of Xi Jinping. He described how China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao was born into the Communist party’s ‘red aristocracy’ but had to toughen up fast when his father was jailed in the Cultural Revolution. The young Xi briefly became a street hoodlum who swore like a trooper, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. He survived by turning ‘redder than red’, climbing the party ladder from a branch secretary in a lowly village all the way up to the top job in Beijing. ‘I am fond of Xi, but he is isolated from his old friends and

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The question Liz Truss needs to answer

Liz Truss will face the music this lunchtime when she speaks in the Chamber for the first time since she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, hired Jeremy Hunt as his successor –then watched as he junked almost the entirety of the not-so-mini-Budget. When Labour summoned Truss for an Urgent Question on the issue on Monday, the Prime Minister sent her one-time leadership rival Penny Mordaunt in her place. Then Truss turned up just as the session was finishing and sat in for Hunt’s Commons statement. Mordaunt was praised for stepping in – while Truss was criticised for her silence. Can Truss reassure her party that – despite her dire poll

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Inflation is getting worse

In all the recent economic chaos, it’s been easy to overlook one of the most important factors contributing to the cost-of-living crisis: inflation. But this morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics brings it back into focus, as CPI inflation rose back into double digits in September: now at 10.1 per cent on the year, compared to 9.9 per cent in August. Another uplift was expected, but inflation has still risen higher than the broad consensus of 10 per cent. A weak pound hasn’t helped: sterling’s plunge against the dollar over the past few months has increased the costs of importing goods, especially food, which according to the ONS

Andrew Tettenborn

Poland wants reparations from Germany

If you think British politics is cracked, spare a thought for Europe. A spat between Germany and Poland is rapidly developing into a full-scale row involving not only those countries but the EU as a whole. Just a couple of weeks ago, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party handed an explosive diplomatic note to his German equivalent, Annalena Baerbock, on a visit to Warsaw to discuss security. In it was a formal legal demand that Berlin pay a cool €1.3 trillion in reparations for damage done to the Polish state during world war two. Ms Baerbock instantly made it clear that in the view

Philip Pilkington

Politicians can’t fix our economic woes

The knives are out for the Prime Minister. The world watches as Britain falls into a simultaneous political and economic crisis. Yet commentators in Britain appear to think that this is resolvable. They think that bad politics gave us a bad Budget which has led to economic destabilisation. Clean out the bad politicians, reverse the bad Budget and all will be well. None of that is true. The reality is that the Budget, however bad, is not the underlying cause of the economic crisis. The Budget merely triggered a crisis which has much deeper roots. It is comparable to a shock that sends a person with chronic heart disease into

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The murder of Lola and the failure of Macronism

Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that she was Algerian and was in an ‘irregular situation’ in France. And then that other Algerian migrants had also been arrested. As far as can be determined, on the day of the killing, ‘Dahbia B’ apparently waited for Lola to return home from school, seized her and took her to her sister’s apartment. The killing

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Gove eviscerates Truss

It seems it’s a day for chatty rats in politics. First, longtime Hunt ally Steve Brine went on Politics Live and inadvertently called the Chancellor a ‘fantastic Prime Minister.’ And now, Michael Gove has told the JLA Speakers Bureau that the country is ‘going through hell’ and that ‘all of us are going to face a hell of a lot of pain in the next two months.’ Gee, tell us what you’re really thinking, eh, Michael? In remarks reported by the Guardian, Gove told the event’s host Sangita Myska that she was ‘absolutely right’ that it was ‘no longer a question of whether Liz Truss goes but when.’ He added

Steerpike Steerpike

Jolyon squirms on Bingham blame game

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the cursed crusader doing a U-turn at the speed of light. Jolyon Maugham, the not-so-Superman of social media, spent much of lockdown railing against ‘Covid cronyism’, launching lawsuits at the drop of a fundraiser. But in his ever-online earnestness, it seems that Maugham has slipped up on more than one occasion. Having been accused last year of smearing a Stroud company which provided face shields to the NHS, Maugham is now in the firing line for his claims about a rather more high-profile target: Kate Bingham, the head of the government’s vaccine taskforce. Earlier this month, Bingham published her account

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will there be resignations?

13 min listen

Another day, another u-turn. Liz Truss met with her Cabinet today and is reportedly considering u-turning on the pensions triple lock. Are ministers heading for more ‘lengthy discussions’ on public spending? Should we brace ourselves for resignations? Also on the podcast, as Hunt looks at which departments to cut, what could this mean for the NHS? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Hunt gets tough on public spending

Liz Truss was in an apologetic mood again this morning when she sat down with her cabinet ministers. She told them that the government had ‘gone too far and too fast with the mini-Budget’ and that this had been, in the words of her spokesman, ‘exacerbated by global factors with inflation rising around the world’.  Her opening remarks included a pledge to be ‘honest with the public that times would be tough but that by addressing long-standing issues now, we can put the country on a stronger path for the future’. One of the (myriad) problems Truss has had up to this point is a refusal to be honest about

John Ferry John Ferry

Sturgeon’s economic plan will hurt Scots

Poor old Nicola Sturgeon. The news agenda at the start of this week was meant to be dominated by her new economic prospectus on independence. Then along comes Jeremy Hunt with his scrapping of the mini-Budget, which ensured everyone’s attention was on Downing Street rather than Bute House. If you did miss it, yesterday saw the First Minister set out the latest – and what was expected to be the most substantive – paper on the economic plan for exiting the UK (or Scexit, as Nationalists don’t like to call it). Did it live up to expectations? Of course not. Putting together a sensible economic case for making Scotland the

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The threat of Chinese headhunters

It is hard to say what is more shocking, dozens of former British military pilots lured by vast salaries to work for China’s People’s Liberation Army or the fact there appears to be no law to stop it. At least 30 experienced pilots, who have flown Typhoon, Jaguar, Harrier and Tornado fighters, as well as piloting advanced helicopters used for anti-submarine warfare, have been lured to China on packages worth as much as $270,000 dollars, according to the Ministry of Defence. The information they are passing on will be especially important should there be a conflict over Taiwan, and the PLA comes face to face with western military aircraft. It

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP calls Hunt a ‘fantastic’ PM

Find someone who supports you as much as Steve Brine supports Jeremy Hunt. Shortly after the latter’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer on Friday, Brine was all over the airwaves suggesting to Radio 4 that ‘you should see Liz Truss as chairman and Jeremy as chief executive.’ And four days on, Brine is at it again, popping up on the BBC’s flagship Politics Live show to trumpet his patron’s credentials. Host Jo Coburn wryly noted that less than twenty MPs had backed Hunt for leader earlier this year yet they seemed to be all over the airwaves. Brine denied, with a smile, that there had been a coup before

Steerpike Steerpike

Now the Aussies mock Truss too

How are the mighty fallen. Once, Liz Truss was the toast of Canberra, the champion of AUKUS and a Free Trade deal. But now her Liberal allies have lost power in the Australian capital and she herself is a figure of ridicule in No. 10. With her agenda in tatters and ‘Trussonomics’ dead and buried, Britain has become something of an international pariah in the bastions of right-on progressive thinking across the western world. So it was no surprise therefore that one of the new Labor ministers in Australia used an interview earlier today to slate Truss – the leader of arguably his country’s closest ally. In a discussion about

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Beware a Tory in a hurry

Liz Truss will not lead the Conservative party into the next general election, despite her rather hesitant claim to the contrary in an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason. There are probably now fewer than 20 Conservative MPs prepared to go into that contest with Ms Truss, or her alter ego Ann Droid, in charge. So she will be dispensed with, as even she must realise in those moments when a little bit of self-awareness creeps into her psyche. This being so obviously the case means the necessity to dump her at ultra-high speed has oddly receded.  Jeremy Hunt is in total command of economic policy, sending reassuringly brutal messages