Politics

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

Friday

14 Oct 2022

Why Truss picked Hunt for Chancellor

A day is a long time in politics. Just this morning, a No. 10 source told the BBC the Prime Minister believed Kwasi Kwarteng was doing ‘an excellent job’ as chancellor and the pair were ‘in lockstep.’ Only just a few hours on, Liz Truss has sacked her close ally and friend in a bid to salvage her premiership. Now, Truss has appointed Jeremy Hunt to replace Kwarteng. It’s not even 2 p.m. The view in Downing Street is that Hunt is ultimately a low-tax Tory As soon as rumours started to circulate that Hunt was the preferred pick, there were raised eyebrows among Tory MPs. Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid

Steerpike

Flashback: Hunt demands 15p corporation tax

Kwasi Kwarteng, we hardly knew ye. After 38 days, the Chancellor was unceremoniously axed from his post today as Liz Truss desperately tries to rescue her crumbling premiership. Memorable highlights of his five-week stint include the mini-Budget, firing Tom Scholar and being mistaken for Bernard Mensah. Indeed, the official mourning period appears in retrospect to have been the honeymoon of his tenure. Kwarteng and Truss were elected to parliament on the same day and have been close friends for more than a decade. They were co-authors, co-founders and successive leaders of the Free Enterprise Group, allies through the long years of May and Johnson. And yet that didn’t stop her

James Forsyth

Kwarteng’s sacking is a warning to his successor

Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking is brutal – and he was sacked as his letter makes clear. He was a chancellor who wanted to say yes to the Prime Minister, he deliberately did not try and build a power base for himself. But he has now been removed without ceremony, sacked even before he had returned to Downing Street. He will feel bruised, and understandably so. Whoever succeeds Kwarteng is going to take a very different approach. They are going to demand control over economic policy and they are going to install their own people in the Treasury and try and build up their own position. They will be acutely aware that if

Isabel Hardman

Will sacking Kwarteng be enough to save Truss’s premiership?

Can sacking Kwasi Kwarteng really save Liz Truss’s premiership? In the past few minutes, the chancellor has had a meeting with the Prime Minister – and he has now left the government. Tory MPs have spent the past week doing a lot of writing. The first thing many of them have been writing is a letter to Sir Graham Brady calling for a vote of no confidence. Even though the rules currently don’t allow one for a year after the election of a new leader, those who’ve sent their missives expect that he will reach a point where he has to tell the Prime Minister there would be a vote

George Brandis

Removing PMs hardly ever ends well

As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would be well advised to take a deep breath and reflect upon the absurdity of removing a leader after six weeks. As they do so, they might find it instructive to look across the sea to Australia to see the folly of constant leadership turmoil and the ever more lethal poison it injects into the bloodstream of political parties. Over the past decade and a half, Canberra – whose politics are famously robust – earned the unenviable taunt of having become the ‘coup capital of the South Pacific,’ as both sides

James Forsyth

Liz Truss sacks Kwasi Kwarteng

Liz Truss has sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor. It is a truly remarkable development. Truss and Kwarteng were even more part of a joint political project than David Cameron and George Osborne. The mini-Budget was an expression of their joint beliefs: his dismissal is a sign of how bad things really are. Less than six weeks into her premiership and she has sacrificed her closest ideological ally to try and shore up her position. Truss will hold a press conference at 2 p.m. In it, we can expect a U-turn on freezing corporation tax to be announced – the markets assume it is happening and with the Bank of England’s

Cindy Yu

What will Kwasi do?

9 min listen

It’s one of those flight tracker days here in Westminster as Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is about to land from a trip to the IMF in Washington, cut short last night. Is the government about to U-turn on its three-week-old mini budget? If so, will the Chancellor resign? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.

Andrew McQuillan

The sectarian shame of Ireland’s women’s football team

How bad is Irish nationalism’s sectarian problem? In the somewhat Panglossian world occupied by nationalist and republican activists and politicians – boosted by recent census and election results – it doesn’t really feature in the discussion. At the recent ‘Ireland’s Future’ conference in Dublin, attended by thousands of people, the grubby stuff – the legacy of the Troubles and all – barely featured amidst the hopeful mood music and good vibes. The sight of the Republic of Ireland’s women’s football team celebrating their World Cup qualification in Glasgow earlier this week with the pro-IRA chant of ‘Oh, Ah, Up the ‘RA” – a line taken from a Wolfe Tones song –

Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t Graham Norton speak up for JK Rowling?

Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the misogynistic monstering of JK Rowling an act of violence? ‘Silence is Violence’ is the radical slogan du jour. It was popularised by Black Lives Matter. There were moments over the past couple of years when you couldn’t browse the internet for five minutes without encountering a post saying that anyone who keeps schtum on hatred

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Liz Truss’s immigration conundrum

The Conservatives – in office since 2010 – are now into their fourth successive manifesto pledge to bring down immigration, which remains well over 200,000 annually. Naturally, Liz Truss is said to be weighing up increasing it further. Some of those in the Treasury believe that visa liberalisation is the quickest way to growth. From the Treasury’s perspective, and that of the new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, immigrants represent an excellent deal: you don’t have to pay for their education or childhood, instead simply importing units of homogeneous labour fully formed. What’s not to like? Open the borders and watch the line go up! Home Secretary Suella Braverman disagrees. She would like to

Jacob Heilbrunn

What does the 6 January subpoena mean for Trump?

Poor Donald Trump. The 6 January committee has subpoenaed him. The New York attorney general is seeking to put the kibosh on his new Trump II organisation. The Supreme Court has rejected his bid to stymie the Mar-a-Lago investigation. What next? Will it turn out that Jared or even — gasp! — Ivanka has been ratting him out to the feds about his hoarding of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago? Far from ending with his ousting from the White House, the Trump show has become an unending pageant of new plot twists. The central actor remains Trump and Trump alone, intent on hogging the spotlight in one way or another. Far

James Kirkup

In praise of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the secret centrist

These are hard times for centrists, though we should be used to that by now. My tribe – clever, technocratic, sometimes liberal and sometimes smug – has been losing arguments and elections consistently for several years, often deservingly. We may know all about how policy works, but we haven’t been great at politics. A common centrist lament comes from looking at the current government and despairing at the way libertarian ideologues have taken control, running the country according to the ideas found in Institute for Economic Affairs pamphlets and Allister Heath columns. Is there no one in government who is prepared to take a pragmatic, what-works approach to policy? Well,

Ross Clark

The markets have rebounded – but how long for?

So, no Black Friday. The pound is steady, the FTSE100 up 1.5 per cent, the FTSE250 up more than 3 per cent. Just as fears grew that the end of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme could send pension funds to the brink and precipitate a fresh market crisis, the opposite happens: markets embark on a rebound. It won’t necessarily last, of course. The long, miserable decline of stock markets and gilt markets this year has been punctuated, as ever, by periods of optimism, only for a fresh slide to begin. But for the moment it seems as if the big story that is driving markets is the expectation that

Michael Simmons

Six graphs that could seal Liz Truss’s fate

When Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday, prime minister John Major phoned the Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie to ask how the day’s events would be covered. McKenzie is said to have responded: ‘Prime minister, I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit which I am just about to pour all over you.’ With the Bank of England ending its emergency support for pension funds this afternoon, what newspaper editors are saying about the present Prime Minister by market close could come down to the ebbs and flows of these six graphs: 1. It’s all about gilts. Yesterday

Steerpike

Fight or flight? Kwarteng dashes home

It seems that panic and turmoil is something the markets and Tory party currently have in common. Kwasi Kwarteng is flying home a day earlier than planned from the annual meeting of the International Money Fund in Washington – so he will be back in London this afternoon when the Bank of England is due to end its gilt-buying programme, risking further chaos on the markets. So what’s Kwarteng up to? There are four options: Could Kwarteng be hoping to swoop in and save the day? 1. Quell rebellion, argue against a U-turn The Tory party is buzzing with speculation of a plot brewing to oust Liz Truss before Christmas.

Thursday

13 Oct 2022

Steerpike

Rishi Sunak thanks his supporters

There’s not much for the Tories to cheer about at the moment but there was little sign of the blues last night in Leicester Square. Members of Rishi Sunak’s campaign packed out the Londoner Hotel to toast their king over the water with glasses of English sparkling wine. In what his supporters insist was an event long in the diary, MPs, spinners and activists gathered to hear the man himself give a belated thanks to all those who had backed him. Fresh off the back of his Treasury farewell on Wednesday night, Sunak was on his best behaviour, declining the chance to declare vindication at his triumphant rival’s recent woes.

James Forsyth

Kwarteng fails to squash corporation tax U-turn speculation

Kwasi Kwarteng has done an interview from Washington which will do nothing to calm speculation about an imminent U-turn on corporation tax. The Telegraph’s Szu Ping Chan reports that: In response to a question about how markets “have improved today because they think you’re about to do a U-turn on corporation tax”, Mr Kwarteng said: “Let’s see”. ‘Let’s see’ is, obviously, a million miles from a denial or a reaffirmation of the current policy. If the government is going to change course on this – going back on one of the centre pieces of Liz Truss’s leadership campaign – they would be well advised not to drag this out any longer.

Lara Prendergast

Kremlin crack-up: who’s out to get Putin?

39 min listen

This week: In his cover piece for the magazine Owen Matthews writes about the power struggle at the heart of Russia. He is joined by Jade McGlynn, specialist in Russian Studies at the Monterey Initiative, to discuss whether Putin might be running out of time (01:00). Also on the podcast: Has America’s pot policy gone to pot? In The Spectator this week Mike Adams says that US cannabis legislation has been a total failure, a view contested by Katya Kowalski, Head of Operations at drug policy think tank Voltface. They both join The Edition podcast to debate the way forward for cannabis legalisation (16:26). And finally: Should we pity privileged men? For

Steerpike

Boris turns down editor job

Who will take over the Evening Standard, the ailing London freesheet currently losing £14 million a year? One name floated by those in the know is a certain Boris Johnson. The chatter at the Northcliffe House is that the former PM decided against it, with one old hand suggesting that Johnson thought the paper was not long for this world. A spokesman for Johnson did not deny he’d been offered the role when asked but refused to comment. It seems Lebedev has his eyes on another former chancellor. Rishi Sunak’s name, too, has been mentioned by one Steerpike conspirator Johnson would have been a rare catch for proprietor Evgeny Lebedev,

James Forsyth

Will Truss be gone by Christmas?

14 min listen

After a day of speculation, the rumours that Liz Truss was about to U-turn on more areas of the mini-budget proved untrue. Conservative MPs had a tense evening in the 1922 Committee meeting last night – are there any good options left for the Prime Minister? Isabel Hardman speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. Produced by Natasha Feroze.