Politics

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

Monday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Macron would prefer Rishi Sunak as PM

France and Britain have been bickering again, this time about the chaos at the ferry ports over the weekend. The ‘clown’, as Emmanuel Macron reportedly dubbed Boris Johnson, may be on his way out, but there seems no end in sight to the circus that Anglo-French relations have become. Might that change with a new ringmaster in No. 10? Maybe, if Rishi Sunak wins the contest to become prime minister. Sunak and Macron are similar in many ways beyond their background in finance; presentable and polished but, so say their detractors, ideologically shallow. In this week’s Spectator Douglas Murray describes Sunak as resembling ‘someone who has floated to the top

Sunday

Glen O’Hara

Why prime minister Truss might surprise us all

Many Labour supporters are quietly allowing themselves to celebrate: if Liz Truss does win the Tory leadership, a Labour government, they think, is much more likely. It may well be so. Among the general public, Truss is on many measures the least popular of the last three Conservative contenders who fought it out last week. YouGov found that even Tory members preferred Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt to the Foreign Secretary. The reason is obvious, and personal. Truss comes across as by turns slightly eccentric, a bit vacant and – well, there’s no easy way to say this – just a tad weird. Truss has failed to win over even

Peter Wood

The two Americas: California vs. Florida

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office. You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. ‘Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.’ Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the 46th governor of the state, Ron DeSantis. Or, ‘Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Hungary’s revenge: Orban is sacrificing EU unity for Russian gas

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke magnanimously while receiving his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó in Moscow this week. He promised that the Kremlin would ‘consider’ Hungary’s request for significantly increased gas deliveries, after Viktor Orbán’s right-hand man said his country won’t manage without more Russian resources as Europe faces a deep-freeze this winter. It’s hard to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the EU: a member state supplicating Vladimir Putin’s regime to keep its people warm after years in which the bloc laughed off criticisms about its energy dependency on Moscow. The meeting was a dream for Russia: one of the surest signs yet that European unity on Ukraine is

Sasha Lensky

The tide is turning in Russia’s war on Ukraine

Could Russia triumph? There’s a growing sense that, as the months wear on, Ukraine’s resistance is faltering. The West is losing interest in the conflict and the unthinkable is being said: Putin is winning the war on and off the battlefield. The image of countless hordes of Russian troops grinding down the Ukrainian defences with a 3-to-1 advantage in artillery is at first glance quite convincing. Meanwhile, off the battlefield, the ruble rate is sky high, and sanctions seem to have no discernible effect on the war. Putin’s fiercest opponent Boris Johnson is leaving office, and the energy-dependency of Europe seems to play right into Russia’s hands. Putin now occupies nearly

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

There’s nothing conservative about climate change

The combination of ’40°C temperatures’ and ‘England’ feels about as natural a pairing as ‘English football’ and ‘winning’; God simply did not intend the two to go together as they did this week. And although it feels odd to have to point it out, there’s nothing conservative about believing climate change isn’t a problem. Turning England’s green and pleasant land into scorched savanna should not really be on the manifesto of the least important backbencher, let alone anyone with an aspiration to influence policy. This message has yet to penetrate the cranial shielding of some MPs. Sir John Hayes told the Daily Telegraph we found ourselves in ‘a cowardly new

Robin Ashenden

Tory MPs will regret giving Badenoch the boot

If the chaos of recent weeks in British politics has clarified anything, it’s the almost complete schism between Conservative MPs and the party’s members. That Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have made it to the final round of the Tory leadership contest, ahead of their more popular rivals, paints the Conservatives as a party that no longer wishes nor deserves to win. Not since a close ally of David Cameron’s described Tory activists in 2013 as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’ has contempt for the party’s grass-roots membership – or rather, complete indifference to their wishes – been so marked.  Were there a credible opposition, this would not matter so much. Yet one has

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Why Erdogan is now happy to snub Putin

Vladimir Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of the Ukraine war was supposed to project power. Instead the Russian president appears to have been left red-faced at a summit in Iran this week after his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, left him waiting in front of the TV cameras. For almost a minute, the man who started Europe’s bloodiest conflict in decades didn’t know where to look as he waited, shifting awkwardly on his feet and pressing his tongue into his cheek, with only the click of camera shutters cutting through the excruciating silence. The irony of the encounter hasn’t been lost in Turkey, where

Seb Kennedy

Putin could come to regret his gas game with Europe

Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed trolling European leaders. As relations between Moscow and Berlin deteriorate over reduced natural gas supplies and Ukraine-related sanctions, Putin is now brazenly gaslighting his German counterpart, chancellor Olaf Scholz. But it’s a move he could come to regret. Putin suggested this week that Germany should give the shelved Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline the go ahead to restore gas flows to normal levels. The amount of Russian gas flowing into Germany along the operational Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea is capped at 67 million cubic metres per day (MMcm/d), or about 40 per cent of its technical capacity. Russia claims this is

Saturday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

What Liz Truss learned from the Brexit referendum

Liz Truss may have been a Remainer but she has learned the political lesson of the EU referendum in the way that her genuine Brexiter opponent has seemingly failed to do.  The point is that in today’s milieu, and especially with an electorate of 160,000 largely Brexit-supporting Tory members, power is with the insurgent. In pinning her colours to at least £30 billion of immediate tax cuts, against Sunak’s steady-as-we-go no-tax-cuts-till-prudent mantra, she has defined herself as the crusader against alleged stultifying Treasury orthodoxy. Every time a credible economist accuses her of risking financial ruin – by pushing up national debt and inflation – all she has to do is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Rishi Sunak heal the NHS?

Rishi Sunak’s big pitch this weekend is to grip the NHS waiting list crisis. It makes political sense, given the terrifying size of these lists now, with some trusts declaring their waits ‘unmanageable’. By the time of the next election, the crisis in the NHS is going to seem monstrous. Ethical concerns tend to end up fading whenever a government has failed to do the long-term planning it could have done The former chancellor is worried that the surge in people seeking private treatment is ‘privatisation by the back door’. James and I discuss the wider context of this on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, agreeing that if people

Ian Williams Ian Williams

HSBC has answered the call of the Chinese Communist Party

HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China. The British bank was responding to a report in the Financial Times that it has become the first foreign lender to install a CCP committee in its investment banking subsidiary in China. While neither confirming or denying the report, an HSBC statement played down the importance of the cells, saying, ‘they do not influence the direction of the

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Zelensky is purging the security services of Ukraine

Could a general of the SBU, the security service of Ukraine, really have helped Russia take the city of Kherson? Could a colonel have tipped off the Russians as to where the Ukrainians had lain mines north of Crimea? The Ukrainian government certainly appears to believe that fifth columnists within the SBU have been Moscow’s secret weapon in this war – this week Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of the agency (and his childhood friend) Ivan Bakanov, along with the country’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova. A total of 651 alleged treason and collaboration cases have now been opened against prosecutorial and law enforcement officials, and more than 60 officials from

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany is caught in Putin’s trap

A collective sigh of relief went through Berlin this week as Russia resumed its gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a scheduled ten-day maintenance break. But even with the immediate crisis averted, Germany remains palpably jittery: it is unclear whether it will have enough gas to get through the winter. Threats from Vladimir Putin to curb or even stop energy supplies to Europe altogether have been part of the Russian war strategy right from the beginning. Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine in February, when the German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a halt to the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sneered: ‘Well. Welcome to

Andrew Lilico

In defence of Liz Truss’s ‘fairytale economics’

One of the key dividing lines of the current Tory leadership contest concerns economic policy. The gap between the candidates is not actually very large, but of course political arguments often magnify small differences. And in this case there quite an important philosophical difference that could have significant consequences over the longer-term. Broadly speaking, Rishi Sunak is the candidate of economic continuity – how could he be otherwise, given that until a couple of weeks ago he was in charge of economic policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His plans involve large tax rises. Even before inflation raced ahead of expectations his plans scheduled the total tax rate rising to

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Priti and Truss back MPs over Beijing’s threats

Most Tories are focusing on the leadership race but for some there are other concerns. Take the five MPs who last year were sanctioned by the Chinese state. Tom Tugendhat, Neil O’Brien, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nusrat Ghani and Tim Loughton were among a group of nine UK citizens to face sanctions in March for raising awareness of China’s human rights abuses against Ughur Muslim. Having banned this group from entering China, there are fears that Beijing will now try to seek revenge on them through other means too. One possible mechanism is by the exploitation of Interpol, the global police agency now feared to be acting in Chinese state

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine and Russia sign grain deal – what next?

This afternoon Kyiv and Moscow signed a UN-backed agreement to free up at least 20 million tons of grain from blocked ports. Ukraine said it would not sign a deal with Russia directly, only with Turkey and the UN. As Wolfgang Münchau noted this morning, it marks the first successful mediation between the two sides since the start of the war. This deal will complicate Vladimir Putin’s efforts to strangle the Ukrainian economy. But the Russian leader needs to show countries that are neutral – or more inclined towards Russia (in Africa and Asia) – that he saved them from hunger and rising food prices. Otherwise, Algeria could increase gas