Politics

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

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Memo to MPs: Britain is not America

Goodbye then, Roe v Wade. The US Supreme Court’s decision this week to overturn its ruling on abortion will effectively ban the practice across swathes of America. Millions of Americans are angry; politicians have been quick to proclaim their shock and dismay. But this is Britain, home to some of Europe’s most liberal abortion laws, where self-aggrandisement and West Wing syndrome mean that our own virtue-signalling politicians can’t resist shoehorning themselves into the debate. Thus far only one elected politician appears to have publicly expressed any kind of support for the decision: Scott Benton, the unorthodox MP from Blackpool South. The tangerine Tory’s (quickly removed) retweet of a celebratory Republican party post

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Could Belarus join forces with Russia in Ukraine?

Next week Putin is due to meet Alyaksandr Lukashenka, self-proclaimed president of Belarus, for the sixth time since the invasion of Ukraine. This will also be the first time in three years that they have met in Belarus. Much hooha is usually made by the Russian and Belarusian press of their meetings. There is always a ‘happy families’-style photoshoot: Lukashenka towering over Putin, grasping his hand in his meaty fist, looking like Laurel and Hardy’s grotesque reincarnation. According to official readouts, their long meetings tend to cover a variety of mundane topics: agricultural output, the state of their economies, general commitments of mutual support. These meetings are, in themselves, nothing

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory rebels plot a 1922 takeover

The Conservative party has a rather funereal air about it this morning, following this week’s two bruising by-election losses in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton, which saw the party get walloped in both the ‘red wall’ north and true blue south. And since the losses it appears that Tory animosity towards the PM has been building up. Two former Tory party leaders, William Hague and Michael Howard, have now said that cabinet ministers should pressure Boris Johnson to leave No. 10, with Howard telling the World at One that: ‘The party and more importantly the country would be better off under new leadership. Members of the cabinet should very carefully consider their

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Are we heading towards a British Donald Trump?

The Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections are, of course, shatteringly bad for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson. They should finally destroy any illusions Conservatives hold about the PM’s electoral appeal. As I and several others have often pointed out, Boris is not a Heineken politician and hasn’t been one since the middle of the last decade. Analysis of by-election results is often bad. In the minutes and hours after the result, commentators scramble to explain what local results mean for national politics, in a crowded field where political actors are doing their best to skew the narrative in their own interests. That being so, I’m not going to try to tell

Steerpike Steerpike

Poll: voters split over rail strikes

Mick Lynch has become something of a break-out star since his round of media interviews on Tuesday. The boss of the Rail and Maritime Transport union has won many fans on the left for his uncompromising views on the industrial action which brought chaos across the country this week. But it seems that, for all his undoubted media savvy, it’s far from clear whether Lynch’s case has had any cut-through with the public. For a new poll of 1,500 adults for The Spectator by Redfield and Wilton on Wednesday found that, a day after the union walkout, 41 per cent opposed and 32 per cent support the rail workers’ strike

Andrew Lilico

Boris will keep losing until he tackles inflation

The Tories took a serious beating in Thursday’s by-elections. Whilst Boris Johnson and his government refuse to take responsibility for the big issue of the day – inflation – and fail to convey any meaningful central purpose to their government (‘levelling up’ being clearly nothing more than an empty soundbite) they will continue to face huge electoral defeats. It really is as simple as that. When I say the government needs to take responsibility for inflation the immediate question is: ‘So how would you get it down?’ But that is the wrong place to begin. The first thing the government needs to do is to take political and policy responsibility for

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Guerilla warfare and targeted assassinations: Inside Ukraine’s partisan resistance

Dmytro Savluchenko was one of Moscow’s useful idiots: a Ukrainian advocate of Russkiy Mir (or ‘Russian world’), Putin’s idea of a kind of reich of Russian-speaking peoples. Back in 2014, when the Russian army stormed the Donbas region, Savluchenko campaigned for Kherson (an area bordering Crimea) to join Russia. More recently, Savluchenko has served as a senior official in the Russian-installed administration of Ukraine’s occupied Kherson region. His career ended this morning, when he was killed by a car bomb. His killing marks the start of a new phase in the war: guerilla warfare and targeted assassination. ‘Our partisans have another victory…a Russian activist and traitor was blown up in a car in one of Kherson’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris’s unapologetic by-election response

Boris Johnson has not accepted responsibility for the two by-election defeats. You could have written this line at any point today and it would be true – and it remains the case after the Prime Minister gave a press conference from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali. He said the party needed to ‘listen to the messages that we are getting’ but made clear that the message he was hearing was that the government needed to focus not on Westminster matters but on delivering the things that mattered to the British people. It’s almost as though Johnson hasn’t realised that the reason his party keeps getting mired in

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The truth about the Roe v. Wade abortion ‘ban’

You wait decades for landmark reforms in America and then, like culture-war buses, two come along at once. Earlier this week, the Senate passed a gun control bill – the most significant firearm control legislation in US history. Now, the Supreme Court has voted 6-3 to overturn Roe v. Wade – as everyone expected since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion was leaked on 2 May. ‘The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,’ a syllabus of the opinion said. Barack Obama has tweeted that the news is ‘devastating’ There

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The most revealing line in Dowden’s resignation letter

The resignation of the party chairman Oliver Dowden is so damaging for Boris Johnson because the issue in Tiverton was not the campaign that CCHQ ran. You can’t put a 30 point swing down to the choice of candidate or the campaign tactics. Dowden is a party man through and through, a loyalist to the core. He worked at CCHQ, then in David Cameron’s Downing Street before becoming an MP. He has helped prepare the last three Tory leaders for PMQs. He isn’t seen as particularly personally ambitious which makes his resignation all the more telling: no one can accuse him of being on leadership manoeuvres. In 2019, Dowden’s backing of

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory party chair: runners and riders

So. Farewell then Oliver Dowden. The Hertsmere MP resigned as co-chairman of the Conservative party this morning, following last night’s by-election defeats in Tiverton and Wakefield. He was appointed to the post in September and was tasked with guiding the Tory machine through the mid-term blues and focus CCHQ on winning the next general election. Now though, he’s gone, and a successor must be appointed. The Tories have opted in recent years to adopt a co-chairmanship model. Typically one is an oleaginous, wealthy individual whose job is to raise funds from other oleaginous, wealthy individuals. This role was performed with aplomb by Lord Feldman during the Cameron years and is now

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Boris Johnson heading for a 1997 moment?

10 min listen

In a major blow, the Conservatives have lost two seats in the Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections. Immediately after, the Conservative party chairman, Oliver Dowden resigned citing ‘a deeply personal decision’ following a ‘run of very poor results for our party’. The Lib Dems overturned a huge Tory majority in Tiverton and Honiton, Devon, their third by-election victory over Boris Johnson’s party in a year. What does this suggest about the public mood towards their current government? ‘At the moment, Boris Johnson motivates the anti-Tory vote more than the Tory vote’ – James Forsyth Isabel Hardman is joined by Katy Balls and James Forsyth

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory MPs: don’t blame Boris for these by-elections

The partygate scandal has left a long hangover. Westminster is waking up to the news that Tory seats in both the ‘red’ and ‘blue wall’ have fallen respectively to the Lib Dems and Labour. In true form, Sir Ed Davey is claiming the Tiverton result is the ‘biggest by-election victory we’ve ever seen’ (it wasn’t) while it transpires that harping on about Harold Shipman in Wakefield isn’t a good strategy for holding a northern marginal either. Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party co-chair, has already bit the bullet this morning by resigning – but there’s one person who definitely isn’t to blame according to some of his colleagues: Boris Johnson. Already the

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Tories shouldn’t bin Boris yet

If only they had waited until today. Had Tory MPs cleared the threshold for a confidence vote in Boris Johnson this morning – amid the smouldering embers of two blazing by-election defeats – rather than earlier in the month, then he would surely be toast. As it is, all that the Prime Minister’s many critics in the Conservative parliamentary party can do is seethe and wait a while for another opportunity to topple him. As someone determined to continue in office, Johnson is able to do so unchallenged until 6 June, 2023, absent of an emergency change in 1922 Committee rules. Some Tory MPs will now push for such a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What will the anti-Boris rebels do now?

Looking at these Tory losses, it is hard not to conclude that the rebels would have got the 180 votes they needed to oust Boris Johnson if they had been organised enough to wait until after the by-elections before going for a vote of no confidence. But having had a vote two weeks ago, it is not credible to suggest changing the rules immediately to allow another one. However, judging from the conversations I have had with Tory MPs this morning, more of them would now like the option of having another vote sooner than a year from now. Some talk about the autumn, others about March. In a way, Oliver

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is Boris heading for a 1997 moment?

Why was the Tory defeat in 1997 so heavy? One of the reasons was that the anti-Tory vote tended to coalesce around the candidate most likely to defeat the Tory in each place. Tactical voting in 1997 cost the Tories 30 seats, turning a bad defeat into a catastrophe. Last night provides evidence that this is happening again, that in British politics there are now two blocs, the Tories and the anti-Tories. Take Tiverton. In the last two elections, Labour came second there. But in this by-election, they lost their deposit as their vote share dropped by 16 per cent.  This isn’t because voters in rural Devon are particularly unpersuaded by

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

By-election results in six graphs

Last night’s by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton have proved disastrous for the Tories. Labour took Wakefield by 4,925 votes – a swing of almost 13 per cent. The Liberal Democrats meanwhile put another dent in the ‘blue wall’ taking Tiverton by 6,144 and achieving a massive 30 per cent swing. The Tiverton and Honiton result highlights the trouble Boris’s government finds itself in. The seat has been Conservative – and with a large majority – since its creation in 1997. But even before that seats in the area had been Tory since Queen Victoria was on the throne. Turnout was well below general election levels. In Wakefield, just 39

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

These by-elections were not a revolt against Brexit

The optics this morning could not look any worse for the Conservative party. They have been defeated by Labour in a red wall constituency – demonstrating how vulnerable they are to losing seats newly won in 2019. And they have suffered a crushing defeat against the Lib Dems in a formerly (very) safe seat. The Tories appear to be in danger of leaking seats in several different directions at the next general election. There are clearly lessons to be learned and things the party can do to turn this around. The problem is the Tories don’t have any solutions at the moment. There are some who are saying that these