Politics Archives

Saturday

1 Oct 2022

Will Giorgia Meloni be an enemy of Macron?

French elites are annoyed and perturbed that Italian elections have produced a new prime minister of the right, Giorgia Meloni, whom many within the Paris groupthink bubble consider to be practically a fascist. Not welcome news for Emmanuel Macron, who is up to his neck in problems. His European Renaissance is flailing. Eurozone inflation is at 10 per cent. Macron’s failure to win control of the National Assembly after his own reelection this year has derailed his legislative program, including pension reform, its centrepiece. Germany has turned out to be a catastrophic best friend, Merkel disappearing in a puff of smoke leaving energy chaos behind her. And now the Italians

Friday

30 Sep 2022

Svitlana Morenets

Will Nato accept Ukraine?

Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky made an offer to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine would drop its ambition to join Nato and would instead stay neutral, he said. It would not align with the West, in exchange for an end to hostilities. It was a sincere offer, and unpopular with Ukrainians. Yet it was significant: Putin had cited Ukraine’s Nato ambitions as the main reason for the invasion, saying it showed the West was somehow threatening Russia. But today, that offer ended and Zelensky is seeking the ‘accelerated’ Nato accession granted to Finland and Sweden this year. Will Nato accept? Jens Stoltenberg, Nato Secretary-General, dodged the question when asked today. ‘Our focus

Nick Cohen

‘Liz Truss hasn’t understood a word I wrote’, says PM’s favourite author

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980. She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator‘s Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan. I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not

Steerpike

Tory 2019 intake turns on Truss

So much for the honeymoon. Liz Truss closes her first ‘proper’ fortnight of politics this weekend with her backbenchers in open revolt and talk already building of a mounting government U-turn. There have been plenty of damning verdicts on last Friday’s ‘mini Budget’ but none more so than the YouGov poll which put Labour a whopping 33 points ahead of the Truss’s Tories. And now Mr S brings news of fresh woe to the under-fire PM as she battles to save her premiership. A poll by Redfield and Wilton of Conservative voters at the 2019 election shows just how few were impressed with the headline measures of her first fiscal

James Forsyth

Why Liz Truss can’t back down

Is there a way for the government to get out of the mess that it is in? This is the question obsessing ministers and Tory MPs. If the government doesn’t set out how it intends to square the circle, it’ll be risking more market mayhem. But as I say in the Times today, it is very hard to see a way out of this that is both politically palatable and economically possible. Nervous Tory MPs are being told by one of Truss’s cabinet allies ‘the solution is to be very tough on public spending’ A rapidly growing number of Tory MPs think the government should abandon or delay the abolition

Lisa Haseldine

Putin fires a warning to the West

‘The West has let their mask slip and revealed their true nature!’ That was Vladimir Putin’s message to a hall of vacant-looking officials at the Kremlin this afternoon. The Russian president gathered the great and the good of Russia to reveal the formal annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaphorizhzhia and Kherson. But Putin’s audience in the hall would be forgiven for quickly losing sight of this. This was a speech aimed at Russia’s enemies in the West. Putin justified the expansion of the Russian Federation by insisting that the four now-annexed Ukrainian territories had voted in favour of joining Russia: ‘This is the will of 20 million people’, he said. The

Kate Andrews

Can Liz Truss regain market confidence?

When the Liz Truss camp floated the idea of side-lining the Office for Budget Responsibility for her government’s first fiscal statement, the argument went that the announcements would be targeted at the energy crisis – and they couldn’t wait. As anticipation around the fiscal event grew, and it became clear that it would include much more than an energy update, MPs started to suspect foul play – that this was an overtly political attempt to avoid scrutiny of Kwasi Kwarteng’s growth plans and spending splurge. This suspicion is only going to grow now that the OBR has confirmed that draft forecasts were presented to the Chancellor on his first day

Katy Balls

Liz Truss’s mea culpa moment

11 min listen

Despite rejecting the Office for Budget Responsibility’s offer of a forecast to accompany last week’s so-called fiscal event, this morning it appears that the government have u-turned. What can we expect from the OBR’s statement ahead of the November budget? Also on the podcast, after last night’s YouGov poll put Labour ahead by 33 points, how has the news been received by Conservative MPs? Will Truss row back on her economic plans? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. Produced by Natasha Feroze and Oscar Edmondson.

Mark Galeotti

Even Putin’s minions are turning against him

Sergei Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic within the Russian Federation, is hardly a dissident. As Colonel General Melikov, he was deputy head of the National Guard, the main militarised internal security force, and he has been a loyal agent of Moscow’s all his life. Nonetheless, he has become a no-doubt-temporary phenomenon on social media for his abusive diatribe against over-enthusiastic military recruiters. Draft officers had been driving round Derbent, Dagestan’s second city, loudspeakers blaring calls for every adult male to go straight to their local military commissariat. ‘Utter nonsense’ was about the most polite thing Melikov had to say about this ridiculous (and illegal) gambit. He even implied that

Tom Slater

Who’s to blame for our censorious students?

Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution. And yet an alarming proportion of students seem not to have got the memo. A new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London confirms what has been clear for some time: that today’s students, far from being rebellious free-thinkers, are if anything more supportive of censorship than the general population. The numbers are pretty

Kate Andrews

Liz Truss’s mea culpa moment

The fallout from last Friday’s mini-Budget has been bigger and more volatile than almost anyone expected, with sterling hitting an all-time low against the dollar; runaway gilt yields; a U-turn from the Bank of England on its plans to start quantitative tightening. And that was all by Wednesday lunchtime. Will things be looking up anytime soon? The pound has recovered to pre-mini-Budget levels, hovering around $1.11, a point the Prime Minister’s supporters are keen to emphasise. But the pound has always been a secondary part of this story: with soaring borrowing costs the primary indication of the market’s confidence (or lack thereof) in the government’s tax cut-and-spend strategy. The real

Steven Fielding

Could Boris Johnson ever make a comeback as PM?

The big hope for Boris Johnson, according to Dominic Cummings, was that Liz Truss’s likely implosion as Prime Minister might give him a fighting chance of making a triumphant return to Number 10. The first weeks of Truss’s premiership have not exactly been auspicious, leading some betting markets to already put Johnson among the favourites to succeed her. But history is against it: the last ex-party leader and former prime minister to return to both roles was the Liberal William Gladstone in 1880. There might still be some hope for Boris, though: the post-prime ministerial career of one of his Conservative predecessors, Edward Heath, is cause for encouragement. Today few Conservatives talk

Philip Pilkington

Europe’s descent into deindustrialisation

The rapid economic collapse that Britain is facing is simply an accelerated version of what the whole of Europe is about to go through; unsustainable borrowing to fund the gap between high energy prices and what households can actually afford. With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there is now no feasible way back. Europe can no longer physically import Russian gas – prices will remain high until Europe builds more energy capacity, which could take years. What is likely to come of this? High energy prices will render European manufacturing uncompetitive. European manufacturers will be forced to pass through the higher energy costs in the form of higher

Thursday

29 Sep 2022

Katy Balls

Labour surge to 33-point lead over Tories

Today Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to calm concerns in his party over the fallout from the not-so-mini Budget – telling MPs: ‘We are one team and need to remain focused’. That message is likely to face some resistance after the latest polling. Tonight the Times has published a new YouGov poll which gives Labour a 33-point lead. Yes, you read that right. It is thought to be the largest poll lead enjoyed by a political party since the late 1990s. It comes after a poll earlier this week gave Labour a 17-point lead. According to the survey, just 37 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters would stick with the party were an election

Kate Andrews

What crisis?

41 min listen

On this week’s podcast: For the cover of the magazine Kate Andrews assesses the politics of panic, and the fallout of last week’s so-called fiscal event. She is joined by Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank to discuss where the Conservatives go from here (00:57). Also this week: Does the future belong to Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland? This is the claim that Jenny McCartney makes in this week’s Spectator. We speak with journalist Melanie McDonagh and politician Mairia Cahill about what this could mean for Irish reunification (15:58). And finally: Are red kites magnificent or a menace? Paul Sargeanton says in his article for The Spectator that red kites

James Forsyth

Could Truss axe Kwarteng?

23 min listen

Liz Truss broke her silence this morning and embarked on a pre-Tory conference media round of regional stations across the UK. In a brutal set of interviews, the Prime Minister faced questions on tax cutting the rich at the expense of the poor, fracking and bankers’ bonuses. With conference just three days away, what will be her next moves to take back control of her party, and win back the British public? Could Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng be sacrificed to save her instead? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

Steerpike

Nick Boles says he’s voting Labour (again)

Gosh! Cripes! Gazooks! It seems that those tireless seekers of truth at the Guardian have done it again. They’ve stumbled on something of a scoop: so toxic is new Prime Minister Liz Truss that even her former colleagues don’t want to vote for her. This afternoon the newspaper published a scathing piece by Nick Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford between 2010 and 2019. Headlined: ‘I was a Tory MP, but Truss and Kwarteng have convinced me to vote Labour’ it opens with this gem: ‘Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng possess a level of intellectual self-confidence usually found among undergraduates. They always have’ before rattling through 30 years of British economic

Patrick O’Flynn

The Liz Truss survival guide

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you then, as Rudyard Kipling almost wrote, there is a strong possibility you haven’t appreciated the gravity of the situation. Or as Corporal Jones put it more pithily in Dad’s Army: ‘Don’t panic!’ It is undeniable that Liz Truss is in a bind. Her first big play following national mourning for the Queen – the ‘fiscal event’ of last Friday – has not gone well, contributing to a meltdown about UK prospects in financial markets and emergency intervention by the Bank of England. Two successive opinion polls have put Labour 17 points ahead –

Steerpike

Eight of the worst bits from Liz Truss’s merciless media round

The regional BBC round is normally the amuse-bouche of pre-conference media: a bit of light relief before the main course. But with a plunging pound and market mania, this morning’s media appearances for Liz Truss resembled something of a turkey shoot, with eight regional interviewers lining up in 60 minutes to savage the PM’s mini-Budget. Given the sterling shenanigans of recent days, it’s likely that most had more listeners tuning in from Wall Street and the City than ever before in their history. The ‘hateful eight’ began at 8 a.m this morning with Radio Leeds. The tone was set from early on with a clip of a man now considering using

Wednesday

28 Sep 2022

James Forsyth

How high a price will Truss pay?

This year’s Conservative party conference was supposed to be a moment of celebration for the new Tory leader. Instead there is a sense of mounting alarm. Liz Truss’s radicalism has been met with something approaching panic by both the markets and the public. The Bank of England has had to intervene in the gilts market to prevent ‘a material risk to UK financial stability’. The pound hit a 230-year low against the dollar. Meanwhile, Labour has moved into a 17-point lead in the polls. YouGov finds that just 12 per cent of the public view the government’s so-called ‘fiscal event’ as affordable. Only 19 per cent consider it fair. Tory