Politics

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

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The plan to keep Boris in No. 10

What now for Boris Johnson? He’s lost two by-elections and a cabinet minister before breakfast, and isn’t even in the country. His response from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda was that he would keep going, saying:  I’ve got to listen to what people are saying, in particular to the difficulties people are facing over the cost of living, which is I think for most people the number one issue. I understand that the No. 10 plan to move on from these results had been to push up talk of an early general election in the autumn of this year. The Prime Minister had certainly been giving those

Oliver Dowden

‘We cannot carry on with business as usual’: why I’m resigning as Tory chairman

Below is Oliver Dowden’s letter to Boris Johnson, explaining why he is resigning as chairman of the Conservative party, following this week’s two by-election losses.  It is with great sadness that I must resign as Chairman of the Conservative Party with immediate effect. Yesterday’s Parliamentary by-elections are the latest in a run of very poor results for our party. Our supporters are distressed and disappointed by recent events, and I share their feelings. We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility and I have concluded that, in these circumstances, it would not be right for me to remain in office. It has been an honour to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why Oliver Dowden’s resignation matters

Boris Johnson has been clear that he will not resign in the face of by-election losses. But his party chairman just has done, saying someone needs to take responsibility for losses in both and Tiverton & Honiton. Tory chairman Oliver Dowden announced he is quitting as ‘we cannot carry on with business as usual’. In his resignation letter, he says ‘our supporters are distressed and disappointed by recent events and I share their feelings’. Dowden does not offer an endorsement of the Prime Minister – instead saying he remains loyal to the Conservative party. No Tory MPs really believe a lack of organisation is the key factor in these two

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The by-elections are a disaster for Boris

Boris Johnson is suffering a further blow to his leadership this morning after the Conservatives lost two by-elections overnight. Labour took Wakefield from the Tories by 4,925 votes – a swing of 12.7 per cent. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats managed to overturn a Tory majority of 24,239 in Tiverton and Honiton – beating the Conservatives by 6,144 votes, with a swing of nearly 30 per cent. Tory MPs with seats where the Lib Dems are the second largest party will be particularly nervous The opposition leaders have been quick to herald their successes. Labour’s Keir Starmer has said the result is ‘a clear judgement’ on the Tory government while Liberal

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Can the government prevent a ‘bummer summer’?

10 min listen

Today, British Airways staff have voted have a strike of their own, adding to the government’s woes as rail workers continue to strike throughout this week. On the podcast, James Forsyth adopts a term from the Americans and asks: can the government prevent a ‘bummer summer’, where nothing quite works? Cindy Yu also talks to Katy Balls, who gives the low down on the risks the Prime Minister is taking on with his eight days foreign trip at a time of two by-elections back home. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Steerpike Steerpike

Whitehall exodus follows Rees-Mogg’s decree

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s war on Whitehall continues apace. The Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency has embraced his new role with relish, firing off notes to officials refusing to return to the office and launching his new ‘EU law dashboard’. But it’s his intention to trim the size of the state which has caused most upset among the Sir Humphreys of SW1, with Rees-Mogg pledging to cut the civil service headcount back to where it was before the pandemic. That would mean 91,000 job cuts: a figure that was briefed to the Daily Mail, which splashed on the story on Friday 13 May. This announcement, via the media, angered many

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour mayor’s eco-hypocrisy press row

To Bristol, the right-on Remain capital of liberal Britain. The local Labour mayor Marvin Rees has been having a bit of a bad time recently. Elected in 2016, his constituents think he’s done such a good job that they, er, voted to abolish the mayoralty in a referendum last month. Awkward. Since then, Rees has made national headlines for the first time in his life after flying 9,000 miles to Canada to deliver a 14-minute speech on cutting carbon emissions. The irony of such folly appears to have been lost on Rees, whose team don’t take too kindly when the mayor’s eco-hypocrisy is pointed out. A perfect example of this

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Putin’s billions

35 min listen

In this week’s episode: Are Russian sanctions backfiring?The Spectator’s economics editor, Kate Andrews and Elisabeth Braw from American Enterprise Institute discuss why sanctions against Russia may be playing into Putin’s hands. (0.57)Also this week:Does Carrie Johnson get a hard time from the British public? Spectator columnist, Matthew Parris talks with the Daily Mail columnist about the role of a Prime Minister’s wife and why they are given such a bad time. (13.56)And finally:What’s so special about our cars?Juliet Nicolson & Tanya Gold, a Spectator contributor chat about their shared love for cars. (24.06)Hosted by Lara Prendergast & William MooreProduced by Natasha Feroze Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a

Julian Jessop

Of course we can afford to cut taxes

The latest data on the UK’s public finances have provided more ammunition for those arguing that the government cannot afford to cut taxes. However, the economic reality is far more nuanced – especially when it comes to interest payments. The bad news is that the government borrowed another £14 billion in May, £3.7 billion more than forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). This reflected both lower-than-expected tax receipts, despite the increase in National Insurance contributions, and higher spending, including £7.6 billion in debt interest costs. This means that the government has already borrowed £35.9 billion in the first two months of the new fiscal year, or £6.4 billion

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs should watch Rees-Mogg’s EU law dashboard closely

Jacob Rees-Mogg this week unveiled something that has variously been mocked as either a ‘vanity project’ or the Johnson administration’s equivalent of the Major government’s Cones Hotline. The Cones Hotline was a policy designed to tackle the great social evil of traffic cones loitering without intent – and became emblematic of that government’s tiredness and lack of proper ideas.  The Brexit Opportunities Minister has come up with a ‘retained EU law dashboard’, which he told MPs yesterday was ‘of both political – and in my view – historic constitutional importance’. The dashboard allows the public to see which out of more than 2,400 pieces of EU legislation have been kept

Steven Barrett

Raab’s Bill of Rights unpicks Blair’s messy reforms

For years, the Human Rights Act has cast a shadow over British politics. Its supporters claim, in the absence of a single written document in Britain’s constitution, that it upholds key freedoms; its detractors say it has been misused and hands too much power to the courts over elected politicians. Soon, this debate may be over: Dominic Raab’s Bill of Rights kills off the Human Rights Act. ‘The Human Rights Act 1998 is repealed,’ paragraph 2 of Schedule 5, of the Act says. Under the old Human Rights system, the courts were allowed to ‘interpret’ any Act of Parliament ‘in line’ with Human Rights legislation. That was always a conceptual

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Biden’s racial ‘equity’ plan is bound to backfire

‘America is a nation that can be defined in a single word,’ said the proud Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, standing outside the White House earlier this year. ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa.’ We shouldn’t laugh. The poor man has a speech impediment. Still, that ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa’ word will strike many Americans as an amusingly apt description of their country in 2022. It sums up Joe Biden’s whole administration: nonsense pretending to be clear leadership. America is, as everyone knows, in an inflationary crisis. The cost of petrol has reached such highs that Biden has called on Congress to suspend gas (petrol) tax for three months. That will do nothing to address the energy supply shortage that

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What counts as a bad result for Boris in the by-elections?

The polls are open for the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections. The results are due in the early hours of Friday – with the Tories at risk of losing both of them. The votes have long been seen as a crunch point for Boris Johnson’s premiership – even though the fact that there was a confidence vote just weeks ago means that it is unlikely to lead to another. To hold another vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, MPs would have to change the rules and no-one expects them to try to do this so soon after the last one. Expectations are so low that if they manage

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeremy Hunt loses (again)

It was with great excitement that Steerpike learned that Jeremy Hunt had (finally) made public what many had privately long-suspected: he’s running. Yet the more Mr S read of the politician’s bid for high office, the less it sounded like the Tory Remainer that we all know and love. For Hunt’s prospective manifesto included support for gun rights, stricter border controls and an end to taxpayer-funded abortions. Has the Surrey MP undergone a sudden right-wing conversion? Sadly for those hoping for such a political metamorphosis, it appears not. For Jeremy C Hunt is one of the candidates who has been running in the Republican primary for a congressional seat in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Boris able to stand up to Sunak?

The latest inflation figures have sent Tory MPs into a tizz again, unsurprisingly. There are a number of things that they’re upset about: the first is the ongoing refrain that their party should be cutting taxes, not imposing the highest tax burdens in living memory. Another is that Universal Credit is largely ‘an unfinished project’, in the words of one Red Wall backbencher who sees the impact of the malfunctioning benefit on his constituents. What both of these complaints have in common is that MPs feel the Treasury is deliberately pursuing the wrong policy: arguing that now isn’t the time to cut taxes and choosing to spend money on grants for

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Where’s Boris’s plan to stop the economic chaos?

Interest payments on the national debt rose 70 per cent last month to £7.6 billion (compared with a year earlier) – largely because of the impact of inflation on income paid to holders of index-linked gilts, which are inflation-protected government bonds. More worryingly, this was 49 per cent more than the official forecast made in March by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It suggests the OBR’s forecast that the government will have to pay £87.2 billion in interest payments (a colossal sum) may be too low, especially since the ONS is not factoring in the most recent inflation figures in its calculations of the monthly bill. Little wonder Rishi Sunak says ‘rising

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Putin’s billions: have sanctions backfired?

When Vladimir Putin sent his tanks into Ukraine on 24 February, he did so under the assumption that the West was too ruptured and disjointed to pull together a unified response. It was the first of many miscalculations. That same day, Boris Johnson promised ‘massive’ economic sanctions that would ‘hobble’ Russia’s economy to the point of shutdown. ‘Putin chose this war,’ said Joe Biden that evening, as the United States announced its own sanctions on Russia’s top banks. ‘Now he and his country will bear the consequences.’ The global economic response to Russia’s aggression has been stronger than anyone predicted. Russia’s most notorious oligarchs have had their assets seized and

Anshel Pfeffer

The odd couple: Israel and Turkey’s tentative alliance

 Jerusalem On Friday night, when the Israeli government usually shuts down for Shabbat, the Prime Minister’s office issued an emergency briefing. An attack on Israeli tourists in Istanbul was ‘imminent’, it said. Israelis in Turkey were ordered to stay in their hotel rooms for fear of assassins, sent by Iran. There was no attack that night, as it happened, but the threat to the many Israelis in Turkey remains. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has become increasingly enraged by Mossad’s assassinations of IRGC officers in Iran, and decided that the best and easiest way to get revenge is to target the thousands of Israelis in Istanbul. Both Turkish and Israeli

Andrew Cockburn

Why economic sanctions never work

The purpose of economic sanctions was aptly summarised back in 1960 by a US State Department official in a secret memo on Cuban sanctions ‘to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’ Twenty years later, the CIA concluded that ‘economic sanctions… have not met any of their objectives’. Worse, the measures strengthened the regime, providing Castro with ‘a scapegoat for all kinds of domestic problems’. That pattern has endured. Sanctions result in hardship for the sanctioned population, as exemplified by the half-million toll on Iraqi children during the 1990s, while the sanctioned nation’s ruling elite escapes unscathed and diverts any possible local disaffection among the immiserated populace against the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Who monitors the moralists?

If anyone was suitable to be the Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, it was Lord Geidt. Self-effacing, professional, unself-righteous but thoroughly proper, he could be relied on to do his job without an eye to attracting headlines, gaining Remainer revenge and similar modern temptations to which some officials succumb. Yet last week he resigned. It seems a good moment to ask whether the job is doable. Many will say that it isn’t, and blame Boris Johnson. It is undoubtedly true that any system based on rules comes under strain when confronted with Boris’s work methods. Last week, a horse called Etonian ran at Ascot. A newspaper reported that he