Politics

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

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

Why is a ‘trans ally’ GP trying to fight the gender wars?

Dr Adrian Harrop, a 31-year-old GP, has been suspended from practising medicine for a month. Harrop, a so-called trans-ally, had conducted a personal crusade online, supposedly to protect trans rights. But woe betide anyone who happened to disagree with him. Harrop called one woman who took a different view ‘a venomous transphobic bigot’. He said her central aim was to ‘demonise trans people’ while ‘excluding them from public life’. In another message, he wrote: ‘Cis people, on the whole, are just awful and there needs to be a massive state-sponsored programme of re-education’. Trans people like me will have to pick up the pieces He condemned women who defend their sex-based rights

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Britain’s relationship with France has taken a turn for the worse

How will Priti Patel’s tour of European capitals in a bid to solve the migrant crisis go? Well, any visit to Paris will be difficult. Relations between the UK and France have taken a turn for the worse overnight, with Emmanuel Macron making a series of comments both privately and publicly that have landed badly with the UK government. Discussing the Northern Ireland protocol, the French President said the EU must not ‘cave in’ to British demands on border checks. In comments viewed as incendiary by ministers, Macron described the issue of the border as a matter of ‘war and peace’. However, where Macron has allegedly been the most critical

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories face their biggest problem yet

Up until a few days ago, ministers could see how the government might regain its footing in the polls after several weeks of self-inflicted damage. The argument went like this: as Christmas approaches voters will see that life in Britain — and specifically England — carries on with very few Covid restrictions whereas elsewhere in Europe more draconian measures have been imposed. This scenario seemed plausible. Austria was in lockdown and heading for compulsory vaccination; there had been rioting in Holland after the announcement of an 8 p.m. curfew and several German states had cancelled Christmas markets. In private, secretaries of state were making the case that the decision to

The Spectator

The army can’t be deployed for every crisis

Last week, the government published its blueprint for how it intends to remodel the army. According to the plan, it won’t matter that the number of regular troops is being reduced to the smallest size since the Napoleonic wars because the remaining forces will be more ‘agile, integrated, lethal and expeditionary’. A strange theme is emerging in Boris Johnson’s government: the Prime Minister sees the army as the solution to any given problem — yet he is cutting it back to a record low size. Like Tony Blair before him, Johnson likes to deploy troops — but to help him win battles against his own government machine. He announced this

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Keir’s Centrist Dad reshuffle is the sign of a decadent party

Sir Keir Starmer has rarely enjoyed such good press as he’s received for overhauling his frontbench. His Centrist Dad reshuffle saw promotions for soft-left pin-ups like Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Lucy Powell, while Corbynista Cat Smith got told to clear her desk. It was a pitch-perfect signal to Labour moderates that they were getting their party back — not least the crucial newspaper columnist demographic — who got to see all their princes return across the water at once. Well, almost. If Sir Keir had really wanted to earn some sweet, sweet commentariat love he’d have arranged a by-election and the first available flight from JFK to Heathrow for

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris’s social care plans are hollow

Boris Johnson promised to ‘fix social care once and for all’ as he became Prime Minister on the steps of No. 10. On the basis of today’s social care white paper, he doesn’t think it’s particularly badly broken. Care minister Gillian Keegan launched the document in the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that while this set out a 10-year ‘vision’, ‘today’s white paper is an important step on our journey to giving more people the dignified care that we want for our loved ones’. Those words — ‘important step’ — suggest that ministers don’t think this is the sum total of their proposals to fix social care, which is just

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Boris in trouble over No.10’s Christmas party?

12 min listen

Keir Starmer went on the attack today at PMQs. The controversy over last years Christmas party resurfaced, with accusations that No.10 breached lockdown rules. He then went on to criticise the government’s new hospitals program. Boris was dealt another blow, this time from his own side. Tory MPs are in uproar about the threats of growing restrictions. Yesterday, two votes in the commons over the new Covid rules led to another rebellion. ’40 is considered the problematic number for a rebellion. That second vote was very close to that’ – Isabel Hardman. A lot of MPs are worried the UK will just bounce in and out of these restrictions endlessly.

Philip Thomas

Unless Omicron changes everything, Covid is on the way out

There are good reasons to be concerned about the Omicron variant. For starters, this strain has 50 mutations, twice as many as Delta. Early reports from South Africa, where the virus has been circulating for a while, suggest it’s outcompeting Delta and spreading rapidly. There is a concern, too, that it could blunt the vaccines, because more than half of the new mutations affect the spike protein that the jabs are designed against. But all of this is theoretical: we need real-world data. So we won’t know whether it really is more transmissible, or how the vaccines perform against it, until long after Christmas. The concern, for now, remains Delta, as

Steerpike Steerpike

Anti-cancel culture conference cancelled

Oh no! What’s behind the cancellation of GETTR’s ‘Counter Conference’? The right wing festival – due to take place later this month – had promised to tackle cancel culture with a roster of speakers featuring Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox and several US Trump supporters. The organisers had ambitiously booked the O2 Indigo Centre, which has a capacity of almost 3,000.  Only they have now cancelled the event with GETTR, the Trumpists answer to Twitter, putting it down to new travel restrictions which mean arrivals to the UK need to self isolate until they have received their day two Covid test result. The company claims the new quarantine rules made ‘scheduling travel to the conference impossible for many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Boris blows his top

At PMQs Sir Keir attacked Boris for breaking social distancing rules. But not recently. A year ago, alleged the Labour leader, the guidelines had been ignored at a Downing Street Christmas party. Boris was evasive. ‘No rules were broken.’ That’s all he would say. Sir Keir claimed this as an admission of guilt. Not much of an ambush. Last year is pre-history. And the theme of Christmas gave Boris a chance to deepen the rift between Sir Keir and his ambitious deputy, Angela Rayner, whose invitation to Sir Keir’s Christmas bash has vanished in the post. Boris revealed Rayner had been deeply stung by the snub. She said it was,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Keir Starmer blunts his own attack

Sir Keir Starmer had two lines of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions, both of them strong in their own way. The problem was that it wasn’t entirely clear what held them together and by splitting his six questions between them, he weakened the force of both. Starmer has been building a case for a while that Boris Johnson is playing the electorate for fools Starmer started by asking Boris Johnson about the Mirror front page, which claims the Prime Minister and his aides broke lockdown restrictions last year by holding a party in Downing Street. Johnson brushed off the allegations by arguing that people were more interested in what happens

Ross Clark Ross Clark

When will the Tories do something about house prices?

Anyone who doubts that the fiscal response to the pandemic has stoked inflation needs to look at the latest figures from the Nationwide on the housing market. Yet again they confirm that the deepest recession in modern history has been accompanied by a boom in house prices. Moreover, the inflation does not seem to have been reined-in by the ending of the stamp duty holiday. The price of the average home, according to the building society, rose by a further 0.9 per cent in November to reach £252,687. This is ten per cent up on last November and 15 per cent up on March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. How can

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Who cares about a power cut in the north east?

How long could you cope without electricity, dear reader? And how many days could you endure without running water? Imagine your home was without power or water for four or even five days. What would you expect to happen? How do you think your country and your government would respond to your plight? There’d be a bit of a fuss, right? I mean, this is an advanced industrialised economy where we have, quite reasonably, come to take the supply of basic utilities as a given. If thousands of people were left without power, heat and water — and in winter too – for the better part of a week, it would

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris’s booster bet

Boris Johnson is relying heavily on the booster programme to protect Britain from any additional threat posed by the Omicron variant. The Prime Minister made that very clear at this afternoon’s Covid press conference in Downing Street, opening by saying that ‘there is one thing we already know for sure: right now, our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted’. Temporary vaccination centres were going to pop up ‘like Christmas trees’, he said. He also seemed committed, if not to boosterism in the form of unbridled optimism about how the next few months would go, then at least to a reluctance to tell people to change

John Jenkins

Will we learn the truth about the Liverpool bomber’s conversion?

It’s been more than a fortnight since the bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and there remain plenty of unanswered questions. It is a sign of the challenge authorities face that even establishing something as basic as the nationality of the man killed in the blast, Emad Al Swealmeen, has proved difficult. There is also much uncertainty over the circumstances surrounding Al Swealmeen’s conversion to Christianity. Al Swealmeen is believed to have entered the UK from Dubai, and his claim for asylum was rejected soon afterwards. Permission to appeal was refused, but, in 2017, Al Swealmeen converted to Christianity. This year, he applied for asylum under the name Enzo Almeni, claiming his Christian faith would put

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How concerned should we be about Omicron?

Ministers accused of overreacting to the Omicron variant will feel vindicated by the comments of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel. In an interview with the FT, Bancel said he expects his company’s vaccine to suffer a ‘material drop’ in efficacy against Omicron – on the grounds that the new variant has 32 mutations to its spike protein. The protein, which the virus uses to attach itself to human cells, is targeted by the Moderna vaccine. The vaccine seemed to cope with previous variants – but they had fewer mutations. Bancel said the company’s scientists had told him: ‘This is not going to be good.’ Yes, it will be possible to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What’s the aim of Labour’s second reshuffle?

10 min listen

Yesterday Keir Starmer’s Labour Party announced a new reshuffle of its shadow cabinet. It just coincidentally happened on the same day Angela Rayner gave a big speech on Tory sleaze, leading some to speculate on friction within the party. ‘What you can’t avoid is that they ultimately decided to do the reshuffle on a day where Angela Rayner, the deputy leader was trying to make a big statement that would lead the news.’ – Katy Balls Isabel Hardman talks with Katy Balls and James Forsyth about Labour’s key moves, as well as the latest updates on the new Omicron variant and the plans to thwart it. Subscribe to The Spectator’s

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Could there be a Tory upset in North Shropshire?

As the government turns its attention to the new Covid variant, the ramifications of the Owen Paterson sleaze row are not quite done yet. After a difficult few weeks for the Prime Minister and his team in 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson’s approval ratings have fallen both with the general public and Tory members. The latest ConservativeHome poll puts Johnson in negative ratings for the second time since the last election among the Tory grassroots — on -17.2. In a way, it’s hardly surprising Johnson’s standing has fallen given the combination of problems facing the government — from tax rises to small boats and the Paterson row. The question is,

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss channels her inner Thatcher

Since Liz Truss was appointed Foreign Secretary in Boris Johnson’s reshuffle, she has upped the ante when it comes to the visual element of the job. As well as appointing a new special adviser focussed on social media (who can no doubt compete with Rishi Sunak’s own social media whizz kid Cass Horowitz), Truss rarely misses a photo opp whether it’s for Instagram or tomorrow’s front pages.  Today is no exception. After warning this morning ahead of a meeting of Nato counterparts in Latvia that a Russian incursion into Ukraine would be a strategic mistake, Truss appears to have adopted the view that a picture can say a thousand words. The Foreign Secretary

Annabel Denham

The economic impact of the latest Covid restrictions

We don’t yet know whether the Omicron variant will drastically accelerate the spread of coronavirus, or whether it will circumvent parts of the immune system. Nor can we be sure that the ‘light’ coronavirus restrictions announced at the weekend will be enough to combat the new strain. We can be certain, however, that these measures will come with an economic cost that politicians are, at least publicly, understating. Face masks are once again compulsory in shops and on public transport in England, and UK arrivals will need to take PCR tests within two days of landing, isolating until they get their result. But the major economic threat stems from the