Politics

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

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

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

Katy Balls

Is Starmer falling short?

As the local election results trickle in, Labour has plenty to shout about when it comes to London. The party has taken Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet from the Tories, in a blow to the Conservatives. Given these are high-profile victories – Wandsworth was Thatcher’s favourite council and Westminster has never been Labour – it’s understandable that the results are leading the news. But outside of London, with 73 out of 146 councils counted, Labour is actually looking at a net loss of seats (down six) with not much signs of winning back the ‘red wall’. So what’s the wider picture for Starmer?  There’s no disputing that the Tories have had a tough

Steerpike

Labour’s Westminster election night takeaway

Local elections aren’t exactly the most glamorous of affairs but there’s usually a sprinkling of celebrity stardust to enliven the occasion. This year it has been in short supply, with Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman and Carrie Johnson’s lockdown-defying friend Ben Mallett supplying infamy, in lieu of charisma. But now Mr S has discovered an unlikely connection between the seismic events in Westminster – where the Tories lost the council for the first time ever – and a popular millennial YouTube star. Labour’s efforts in Westminster were spearheaded by PR guru and longtime councillor Paul Dimoldenberg, who wrote the account of the borough’s ‘homes for votes’ scandal of the 1980s and

Steerpike

Scottish Tories get the knives out

All is not well within the Conservative party north of the border this morning. Counting the votes hasn’t even started yet but already the Scottish Tories have pre-emptively begun deciding who’s to blame for the looming electoral losses. Senior figures within the party expect ‘heavy losses’ and are preparing to slip into third place: unnamed sources are going around suggesting Boris is to blame, with unionist voters refusing to turn out in protest against the No. 10 lockdown parties. Not all within the Scottish party are content to play this game. Former MSP Adam Tomkins, a widely-respected academic who stood down from Holyrood last May, has pointed out that the Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross

Tom Goodenough

Westminster falls to Labour for first time ever as voters vent fury at Boris

Westminster council has fallen to the Labour party for the first time ever, as the Tories suffered a string of defeats in local elections across Britain overnight. The party also picked up Wandsworth council for the first time since 1978, with the defeated Tory council leader Ravi Govindia admitting many voters raised ‘the issue of Boris Johnson’ during the campaign.  Elsewhere in the capital, the Conservatives conceded defeat in Barnet, which has never had a Labour majority. Barnet’s Tory leader Daniel Thomas said losing the council ‘doesn’t bode well for us’ at the next election and described it as a ‘warning shot’ for Boris Johnson. Meanwhile London mayor Sadiq Khan said the Prime Minister had been a ‘vote-winner

Michael Simmons

The 2022 local election results in five charts

Local elections results are still coming in but one thing is already clear: it’s been a bad night for the Tories. The Conservatives have lost 184 seats and ten councils, not as bad as the 800 councillors they had been forecast to lose. But still hardly a result for Boris Johnson to celebrate. Labour haven’t quite lived up to their highest hopes either. Just over two thirds of councils have declared and Labour have gained 48 councillors and five councils so far. But despite these gains, their vote share appears to be up by around only one per cent on 2018, when these seats were last contested. The biggest gains were made by the

James Forsyth

No sea change in favour of Labour despite Tory defeats

The results in the local elections so far provide further evidence of the fractured nature of British politics. The Tories have done badly in London. They lost Barnet, which was widely expected. And they have also suffered defeats in Wandsworth and Westminster.  Labour have had some good results, taking Southampton from the Tories. But it is impossible to see these results as a sea change in favour of Labour. On the BBC’s numbers their vote share is only up one point on 2018, when these seats were last contested. John Curtice, the elections expert, says that these results would not guarantee that Labour would be the largest party in the next

James Forsyth

Local elections: Boris Johnson faces his first post-partygate test

The polls have now closed in this year’s local and devolved elections. The parties – and their leaders – face a nervous wait for the results. For Boris Johnson, this is the first electoral test since he was fined by the police for breaking his own Covid rules. Tory MPs will be watching nervously to see how much damage has been done. Tory MPs will be watching nervously to see how much damage has been done CCHQ have done a canny job of expectation management, suggesting that the loss of 800 seats – which would be a truly diabolical night for the party – should be seen as par. But

Steerpike

‘Have a word’: Sadiq gets the vote out

Sadiq Khan may have won his contest last year but he’s not having such a good election this time around. The wokest mayor in all the West has not enjoyed the best week in the run-up to polling day. First, he was accused by Grant Shapps of breaking pre-election purdah rules after Transport for London yesterday announced the opening date for the Elizabeth Line. And today, Khan has reminded floating voters, uncertain of who to vote for in this year’s London council elections, of his key priorities. The mayor used polling day to tell male voters to ‘#HaveAWord’ and not laugh at ‘sexist “banter”,’ demanding that Londoners interrogate their friends when offensive language is

Katy Balls

Is the UK headed towards recession?

10 min listen

The Monetary Policy Committee has just raised interest rates again. This is the fourth consecutive rise, the first time this has happened within a quarter of a century. Economically the future is looking pretty bleak and not just in the UK, this looks like it may be a global problem caused by several factors. China’s no Covid policies, US inflation, the Eurozone trying to wean itself off Russia’s oil and gas, etc. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews about the state of the global economy.