Politics Archives

Thursday

1 Sep 2022

Is university good value for money?

Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money. Among graduates, many of whom will have paid these fees, the answer (by a margin of well over two to one) was clear. They didn’t. For good measure, nearly half of the graduates polled thought most degrees actually left them worse off overall, against just over a third who thought they led to financial benefits.

Kate Andrews

Trussonomics: a beginner’s guide

When polls started to show Liz Truss miles ahead of Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership contest, her team adopted a cautious campaign strategy. Why gamble on another interview with Nick Robinson when last time she had struggled to name a single economist who backed her economic plans? Eventually she landed on Professor Patrick Minford, an academic at Cardiff Business School and a bullish Brexiteer. Minford went on the record calling for interest rates to rise to 7 per cent, which Truss then had to defend and deflect. But that moment in the Robinson interview, widely reported as a humiliation, turned out to be one of the most helpful points

Robin Ashenden

Liz Truss should aspire to emulate Thatcher in Russia

The Russian political and media establishment have got Liz Truss in their sights once again. As well as analyst Igor Korotchenko’s crude declaration that Truss ‘doesn’t belong in politics, but in the kitchen’, a clip currently doing the rounds on Russian TV shows her shocked reaction in July when presenter Kate McCann fainted and keeled over in a TV debate. Vladimir Solovyov, a key Kremlin propagandist, has argued that the same stunned helplessness would be Truss’s reaction ‘when Britain falls’ and accused her of ‘delusions of grandeur’. The Kremlin, it’s clear, doesn’t hold our likely soon-to-be Prime Minister in very high esteem, though whether this reflects a sharp decline in

Wednesday

31 Aug 2022

Rodric Braithwaite

Will Russians soon realise how remarkable Mikhail Gorbachev was?

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final president of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician and as a domestic reformer. I first met him when he came to London in December 1984, when Mrs Thatcher said that she liked him and could do business with him. He was open, friendly, and spoke without notes: the opposite of his predecessors. Some of Thatcher’s own officials suspected that he was merely an old-fashioned communist who had learned new tricks, and that his charm was seducing her from her clear view of the Soviet threat. Thatcher was right, and the sceptics were wrong. By that time, the Soviet

Steerpike

GB News shakes up its stars

The winds of change are blowing through Paddington, with news reaching Steerpike of something of a bloodbath over at GB News. The self-proclaimed ‘People’s Channel’ is currently undergoing a shake-up in its personnel and programming, with staff being told today of changes to take effect from the beginning of next week. All individual shows between midday to 4 p.m are to be effectively scrapped and replaced. Stars Gloria De Piero, the former MP, and economics journalist Liam Halligan will therefore no longer work on their current shows: instead they will both expand on their work on other features. De Piero also gets to co-host a new weekday show, titled simply:

Cindy Yu

Is Labour in trouble again with the rail strikes?

11 min listen

Today rail union leaders announced another round of strikes, this time to coincide with the Labour party conference. Is there a message here that they are trying to send to Kier Starmer? Should we expect similar disruption during the Conservative Party Conference? Also on the podcast, after the death of the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was instrumental in ending the Cold War, how well do we understand future geopolitical threats? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. Get tickets to Coffee House Shots Live here: www.spectator.co.uk/afterboris

Ross Clark

Will Sunak’s heating bill plan be quashed by Truss?

When the next prime minister is installed in Downing Street on Monday, we can expect a package of initiatives to help households with their heating bills. But will Rishi Sunak’s existing scheme – which promised £400 worth of handouts to every household – survive if, as expected, Liz Truss walks into No. 10? The scheme has already been heavily criticised because it is not means-tested and fails to target help towards the poorest. But this morning came bad news: the Office for National Statistics has decided to treat the £400 handout as extra income, not as a reduction in bills as was intended. This matters because it means the scheme

Douglas Murray

Green parties are facing a reality check

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the

Freddy Gray

Trump’s Al Capone moment is nowhere near

When the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida earlier this month, various pundits suggested the raid could be an ‘Al Capone moment’. The Feds might not have got him for attempted insurrection, collusion with Putin, or corruption, it was said, but he could go down for a technicality: ie, withholding sensitive official documents he legally should have returned. We’ve heard that ‘Capone moment’ motif a lot throughout the Trump years — and it tells you a lot more about the state of American journalism than anything else. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and a deeply shady character in his own right, used to say it to make headlines.

Gavin Mortimer

British bobbies have much to learn from French police officers

Priti Patel wants the police to get back to basics and solve crime instead of parading their progressive credentials at every available opportunity. It’s about time: recorded crime in England and Wales is at a 20-year-old high. Villains have never had it so good. Just 5.6 per cent of offences reported to police resulted in anyone being charged or summonsed in 2021-22, a drop of ten per cent from 2014-2015. The Home Secretary is said to support a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank that warns that the police’s persistence in espousing social justice causes is ‘hugely damaging’ to public confidence. There is a growing sense among the public that

Steerpike

‘Rude and threatening’: MPs bully expenses staff

Given the state of the country, you’d have thought MPs might have better things to do than abuse and belittle those running the parliamentary expenses scheme. But that’s exactly what some of our elected masters appear to have been doing in recent months, according to a Freedom of Information request sent by Mr S. Staff at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) recorded six anonymised incidents of ‘bullying and abusive behaviour by MPs’ in one 14-month period between July 2020 and September 2021. Among them include one male MP ‘threatening to make bullying and harassment complaints against [IPSA’s] validation team if they do not approve his wrongly categorised claims for

Sara Wheeler

How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again

Every country has an origin story but none has ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject is inseparable from myth. In this impressive and deeply immersive book, the author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power manipulate both events and legend to shape the present. It is a saga of multi-millennial identity politics. A bestselling historian with a storied background himself, Figes arranges his material chronologically over ten chapters, beginning with the medieval chronicles of Kievan Rus. Those sources launched myths that became fundamental to the Russian understanding of nationhood. He

Daniel DePetris

Iraq is fracturing again

Political turmoil is nothing new in Iraq. The American invasion and occupation turned the country from a brutal dictatorship led by the late Saddam Hussein into a quasi-democracy that spends more time fighting against itself than providing for its citizens. Iraqi politics is laced with sectarianism. When the US helped construct Iraq’s political system, dividing the spoils among Iraq’s three main groupings, the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds, it was thought to be the best way to ensure the system didn’t collapse. The more buy-in from Iraq’s major communities, the logic went, the more incentive they would have to make Iraqi democracy work. Since then, the world has become familiar with factional

Andrew Roberts

The monarchy will survive Diana’s death (1997)

Today marks 25 years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Andrew Roberts wrote The Spectator’s cover story that week, republished below and available at our digitised archive. The story that ended so horribly in that functional concrete Parisian tunnel early on Sunday had begun with a television show in 1969, when the victim was seven years old. In contradiction of Walter Bagehot’s advice, daylight was let in on the magic of the monarchy. Before 1969, all had been deliberately obscure. Who now remembers Commander Colville? For over two decades, Commander Richard Colville DSC was press secretary, first to George VI and then to the present Queen. In Ben

Tuesday

30 Aug 2022

Mark Galeotti

Gorbachev was no saint. But he was a kind of hero

Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by what was still then the Soviet Union in its late years of sclerosis, when one moribund geriatric at the top of the system succeeded another (the dark joke at the time went as follows: a KGB guard stopped someone at one of the state funerals and asked him if he had a pass – ‘oh,’ came the reply, ‘I’ve got a season ticket’). But my early years as a Russia-watcher were during his time as General Secretary, and if my seniors had become used to the idea that the USSR was a

Katy Balls

Will Boris be back?

14 min listen

Boris Johnson is on his farewell tour but is remaining coy about the possibility of a political comeback. What problems will this throw up for the next prime minister? Will Boris be friend or foe? Also on the podcast, after Liz Truss pulled out of her BBC interview with Nick Robinson, is she trying to avoid scrutiny of her plan to tackle the cost of living? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Jonathan Miller

What kompromat does Trump have on Macron?

Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior. Early in his presidency, Macron himself weirdly volunteered that his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was ‘not my boyfriend’ Maybe the spooks of the CIA are

Stephen Daisley

The extremism on the unionist side of Scotland’s independence debate

When a nationalist mob descended on the Tory leadership hustings in Perth recently, those of us who criticise the SNP’s degrading of Scottish political discourse seized on the ugly scenes as another example. However, extremism is not limited to one side of Scotland’s constitutional divide. Last week, as she was attending an event at the Edinburgh Festival, Nicola Sturgeon was protested by a group called ‘A Force For Good’. Their number would generously be characterised as a handful and there is no suggestion they engaged in the sort of behaviour reported in Perth. In videos posted by the pro-Union outfit, a man can be heard shouting at Sturgeon, asking her

Steerpike

Kwasi prepares for life in No. 11

When you’re preparing for power, there’s not a moment to spare. Fresh from knifing each other in the pages of the Mail on Sunday, team Truss have now turned their attention to government, insisting there’s no time to now do Nick Robinson’s long-awaited interview with the Foreign Secretary. And few know that better than Kwasi Kwarteng, a long-time Truss ally, who is widely tipped to become her next door neighbour and Chancellor in the new government. Given the focus on avoiding the looming energy crisis, Steerpike was intrigued to see that someone within parliament has helpfully tried to clean up Kwarteng’s Wikipedia entry, ahead of his rumoured move into No.

Isabel Hardman

The minister trying to fix the Northern Ireland Protocol

One of the big priorities for the new Prime Minister is dealing with the situation in Northern Ireland. There’s no time for procrastination as the existing arrangements which suspend checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and Great Britain expire on 15 September. Liz Truss has made very clear that she is serious about getting the problems with the Protocol fixed and that while her favoured outcome is a negotiated settlement, she is also prepared to be tough. One of her newest supporters is Conor Burns, Minister of State for Northern Ireland, who only declared for the Foreign Secretary at the weekend but who is in Dublin at the moment