Politics

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

Saturday

7 May 2022

‘Please don’t do a hit job’: An interview with Devi Sridhar

Of all the scientists who became household names during the pandemic, few divide opinion as much as Devi Sridhar. The Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh turned adviser to the Scottish government and Guardian columnist is, according to your point of view, either a voice of reason who could have prevented the bungling at Westminster and steered Britain through the pandemic with a death toll as low as that of New Zealand, or a hectoring advocate of an impossible ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. She complains of having received hate mail – a baleful occupation hazard for many in public life, but perhaps all the more shocking if

Charlie Baker

The rise of the Old Rectory left

There’s a revolution stirring in the gentle British countryside, as a political faction starts to make their voice heard. The Old Rectory left are shrugging off their chains. In Thursday’s local elections, places where the Lib Dems were trailing the Tories saw an eight point swing to Ed Davey’s party. Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost control of Oxfordshire after ceding four councillors to the Lib Dems and another to the Greens. But who are these new rural agitators? I’m sure you know the most brazen of the tribe: retired lawyers harassing their children by dropping James O’Brien clips into the family WhatsApp chat. Militant FBPE-ers based between Putney and Salcombe. Angry,

Friday

6 May 2022

Steerpike

Watch: Starmer’s Miliband tribute act

Poor Keir Starmer appears to have the reverse Midas touch. When he awoke this morning, Labour was making gains across the country – the capitalist citadels of London were falling, marginals like Southampton were going red and the seemingly inexorable advance of the Tories in the Red Wall had been halted. Yet as sure as night follows day, mere hours after Sir Keir’s triumphalist victory photo call, Durham Police announced it would be conducting an investigation into ‘Beergate’ – dispatching the news like Zeus submitting thunderbolts down from on high. The news that Sir Keir is under investigation somewhat puts pause to Labour’s current claims to being the morally virtuous

Katy Balls

Can the Lib Dem’s declare victory?

14 min listen

We’ve had more election results in and it looks like the Lib Dems will be celebrating tonight, encroaching on many Tory seats around the country. But is this Liberal passion from voters or disaffection with the two major parties? Katy Balls talks with James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about all the latest results.

Steerpike

Which Tory MPs could lose their seat?

Nervy Tories in Westminster will be looking at today’s results and wondering what it means for them. Council contests are often fought on very different issues to those in a general election but there’s no doubt that local councils switching parties is bad news for the incumbent MPs there. Top Tories under threat include Dominic Raab, whose Esher constituency has seen the Liberal Democrats making gains on the local Elmbridge council. Sir Ed Davey’s party has undergone something of a resurgence in the south west of England, gaining Somerset council which suggests a major threat to incumbents like Marcus Fysh in Yeovil and Rebecca Pow in Taunton Deane. Elsewhere, Labour made some of its most

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

What reason is there for young people like me to vote Tory?

With a sense of reluctance, I went into a voting booth this week and ticked the boxes corresponding to my local Labour candidates. My rationalisation was simple: I wasn’t voting for Labour, but against the Conservatives. There is a tangible stench of decay surrounding the Tory party at present. At best, it is incapable of maintaining moral standards. Barely a month passes without some MP’s embroilment in a grubby scandal involving sex, money, or both. The party has no vision for the country, no agenda beyond targeting the young to pay for the old. And if you judge them on results, well, there’s even fewer reasons to vote Tory. The Conservatives

Mary Dejevsky

The fall of Westminster Council

Of all the setbacks for the Conservatives in London, the loss of Westminster Council was probably the least expected and the most emblematic. To be sure, as in much of the capital, the Conservative vote had been declining, but the prospect that control would actually change this year seemed unlikely. But it did, and as a resident of south Westminster for more than 20 years, I was an infinitesimal part of the reason. In 2000, contemplating the move back to the UK from the United States, we bought a flat within the echo (on a quiet day) of Big Ben. That the local authority was Westminister was a consideration. The

James Forsyth

Is Boris Johnson losing the south?

The great Tory success in 2019 was winning a host of new seats while keeping hold of their traditional southern heartlands, including many seats that had voted Remain. But the local election results will increase concern among Tory MPs that these seats are becoming vulnerable. The Tories have in the last couple of hours lost control of Maidenhead, Huntingdonshire, and Wokingham. Talk to Tories in these types of places and they cite a variety of reasons for their difficulties. Some say that these voters don’t like levelling up – they suspect it is code for taxing them more so that more can be spent in the Tories’ new northern seats.

Sam Holmes

Melissa Kite, Mary Wakefield and James Heale

24 min listen

On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Melissa Kite on the ambitions of Ben Wallace. (00:48) After, Mary Wakefield on our misplaced faith in forensics. (09:35) And, to finish, and James Heale on Eton’s great ‘awokening’. (16:33) Produced and Presented by Sam Holmes Entries for this year’s Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Steerpike

Will Keir Starmer now have to resign?

Sir Keir Starmer has sown the wind – and now he reaps the whirlwind. The Labour leader has led the charge on Partygate these past six months, releasing endless statements, clips and quotes castigating Boris Johnson for the gatherings in No. 10 during Covid. But today Durham Police have announced they will investigate an alleged lockdown breach by Sir Keir, who was photographed drinking and eating a curry during the ‘Beergate’ incident of April 2021. Steerpike thought it would be timely to look back at just some of the recent occasions when the Labour leader moralised about ‘Partygate’… 19 January – Amid fresh reports of more new parties, Starmer demands Johnson’s resignation in the House

Katy Balls

What Durham police’s ‘beergate’ investigation means for Starmer

It’s Boris Johnson’s lucky day. Keir Starmer had hoped to spend Friday talking up Labour’s results in the local election – with a particular focus on the party’s successes over the London Tories in Wandsworth, Barnet and Westminster. Instead, the Labour leader and his team will spend the afternoon talking about ‘beergate’ after the Telegraph broke the news that Durham Police will investigate the alleged lockdown breach. This all relates to an event in April last year when Starmer was photographed drinking beer with colleagues in Durham at a ‘work event’ involving a takeaway curry. When evidence of the event first emerged earlier this year, it gained little traction. But ever since Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were fined

Rod Liddle

The SDP’s electoral triumph is good news for fed-up voters

Meanwhile, there IS an alternative to the two wretched main parties: a socially conservative alternative. Wayne Dixon won by a landslide in the vast Middleton Park ward in Leeds, the first SDP gain since the 1980s and the first time Labour has lost the seat. The SDP picked up 2680 votes to Labour’s 1900. One (non-SDP) former councillor described the result as ‘astonishing’. Other SDP candidates in the city are puling in the votes too. It goes to show that when there’s an alternative to the main two parties which can WIN, people will vote for it. Huge congrats to the excellent Wayne Dixon and the scores of party workers who

Ross Clark

Bristol proves it: England doesn’t want elected mayors

Among the many council election results coming in today, the decision of the voters in Bristol to ditch the post of elected mayor, by a margin of 59 to 41 per cent, could easily get missed. Why does it matter? Because the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda proposes to establish elected mayoralties all over England – on the assumption that it is something we will all welcome as a way to bolster local democracy. Yet Bristol is just the latest in a long series of results which prove the opposite: we keep telling the government that we don’t want elected mayors and yet it keeps trying to force them on us

James Kirkup

Wandsworth shows politics is now all about education

Wandsworth, London I’m writing this in Labour-controlled Wandsworth, my leafy bit of south London. More precisely, I’m writing it sitting outside the sort of coffee shop where the drinks come in jam jars and everyone has a beard. I’d also bet that every one of the 30-odd people here – staff and customers – has at least one university degree. In the 20 or so years I’ve lived in London, Wandsworth has gone from being a slightly drab place to the sort of area where bright young (and middle-aged) things with high incomes come to live and play. The two (bearded) twenty-something men on the table next to me are

Nick Tyrone

Could the Liberal Democrats become kingmakers once again?

The narrative around the 2022 local elections looks something like this at present: Labour is strengthening their vote share in London, even taking former Tory citadels like Wandsworth and Westminster. Yet they are doing less well outside of the capital, where there is growth from the Corbyn era but it’s looking much smaller than they had hoped. If similar dynamics continue, the next general election is going to be close, probably hung parliament territory. This makes the Lib Dem performance interesting. If the next general election is as close as today’s result, then a few seats here and there can make all of the difference to who gets to be Prime Minister.

Steerpike

Lib Dems defeat their nemesis

This morning it was London: now it’s the results across the south of England which are flooding in, with similarly bad news for the Tories. And one declaration in Somerset will particularly trouble Conservative high command after the party’s expert on defeating the Liberal Democrats was himself defeated, er, by the Liberal Democrats. For incumbent councillor Hayward Burt has been soundly beaten in the Blackmoor Vale ward for Somerset Council, losing alongside his colleague William Wallace to two Lib Dems Sarah Dyke and Nicola Clark. The two Tories gained 1,443 and 1,328 votes respectively, compared to Dyke on 1,814 and Clark on 1,590. Burt runs the ‘Lib Dem unit’ over at CCHQ and last year

Isabel Hardman

Who are the ‘winners’ in the local elections?

13 min listen

The results are coming in! While the Tories seem to have done quite badly in the capital, Labour has not made the gains in the rest of the country that many predicted they would. The Lib Dems and the Greens have had a good showing so far but we won’t know just how good until the full tally of results come in. Isabel Hardman talks with Katy Balls and James Forsyth.

Robert Peston

Partygate could still sink Boris Johnson

There are two big questions in UK politics, neither of which has been decisively resolved by local election results in England so far – and probably won’t be by the time all UK results are announced over the coming few days. They are: Will and should Conservative MPs remove Boris Johnson as their leader and the country’s prime minister? And has Keir Starmer set Labour on a path that could see the party win the next general election? In London, the swing from Tory to Labour of three symbolically important councils – Barnet, Wandsworth and above-all Westminster – is humiliating for a Prime Minister who still boasts of his erstwhile popularity as

James Forsyth

Why the local election results should trouble the Tories

The overnight results in the local elections are bad, but not disastrous for the Tories. They do not presage a 1997 style wipe-out. And they do not suggest that the public is yearning for a Labour government with Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. In normal times, the Tories could regard them as fairly standard mid-term fare. But the worry for the Tories is that there is so much bad news to come between now and the next election. The other Tory worry is that no party will go into a coalition with them The Bank of England’s forecast yesterday suggests that there’ll be very little economic growth between now and

Patrick O’Flynn

Sticking with Boris Johnson looks like a safe bet for the Tories

Labour spin doctors this morning whisked Keir Starmer to the scene of his party’s biggest gain in the north in order to provide the TV networks with pictures of him celebrating victory. They took him to Barnet. That’s Barnet, North London. For that’s how far the red tide ran last night. It couldn’t even sweep over nearby Hillingdon, the borough that contains the Prime Minister’s parliamentary seat. And though Starmer told his activists in strangulated, overly-urgent tones that Labour had also won in Cumberland, where a new unitary council was having its first election, the list of other gains he recited – Wandsworth, Westminster, Southampton – made the point that