Politics

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

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

From Neil to Nigel: the descent of GB News

I can’t claim to know any behind-the-scenes rivalries or boardroom brouhaha motivating Andrew Neil’s departure from GB News but I am glad to see him go. Neil is out at the still ill-defined channel which can’t decide whether it’s a populist classical-liberal network, standing up to authoritarian cancel culture, or a British version of Fox News. It excels at neither. Given wobbly ratings, staff departures and one instance of very off-brand knee-taking, it’s not entirely surprising that Neil has finally had his fill and walked away. He was not only chairman but the underwriter of the promise — issued in his opening monologue — that the channel would dissent from

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can booster shots help Britain avoid another lockdown?

For weeks now, ministers have been getting increasingly frustrated by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s failure (JCVI) to back a wide-ranging programme of booster shots. Today it has finally recommended a third dose for everyone in clinical groups one to nine, which is, essentially, everyone over 50. Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, has already accepted the recommendation and the programme will begin next week. Will this be enough to prevent the need for another lockdown? The booster programme should prevent the waning immunity problem, which was one of the reasons why Israel was hit by an unexpected fourth wave. The government is relying very heavily on boosters to avoid more restrictive

Steerpike Steerpike

Changing fortunes for the Osborne family

George Osborne might be famous for collecting jobs but is he having any success with them? Since leaving the Treasury in July 2016, the onetime master of British politics seems to have acquired a reverse Midas touch. Having quit as an MP at the 2017 election – when Theresa May’s setbacks meant he could have been first in line to succeed her – Osborne has tried his hand at various gigs with, err, varying degrees of success. As editor of the Evening Standard, Osborne’s reign witnessed falling circulating, dozens of job cuts and losses which ran into the tens of millions. His long-awaited book ‘The Age of Unreason’ is still

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the inflation panic over? Probably not

So, is the post-Covid inflation panic over? That is how it looked last month, when the government’s preferred inflation index, CPIH, fell to 2.1 per cent from 2.4 per cent a month earlier. We will have the latest news on Wednesday morning, but for the moment it appears that consumer prices inflation hasn’t taken off like we feared. It is a similar story in the US, where inflation fell back from 5.6 per cent in July to 5.3 per cent in August. The fact that house prices have risen so strongly throughout the deepest recession in modern times ought to be a warning sign Yet there are good reasons to suspect that the summer

Tom Bower

How Charlotte Wahl Johnson’s troubled life shaped her son Boris

Attractive, accomplished and admired as an artist, friend and mother, Charlotte Wahl’s promising life could have been wrecked, first by cruel sicknesses and then by an adulterous husband. Instead, she bravely defied adversity and found happiness in a second marriage, her four children’s success, her friendships and painting. Her death at 79 will be particularly painful for Boris Johnson, the eldest of her remarkable children. Despite all the pressures, he regularly visited his mother at her comfortable flat in Notting Hill Gate, recognising how much he owed her. In frail health from Parkinson’s and other complications, Charlotte agreed to meet me in September 2019 for the biography I was writing

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Liz Truss’s plan to woo ‘Lidl Tories’

Is Boris Johnson’s government really conservative? In the wake of Boris’s plan to break a manifesto pledge and raise tax, it’s a question many have been asking – and one that a speech today by International Trade secretary Liz Truss aims to address. Truss – who has been tipped for a possible promotion to the Foreign Office amid rumours of a reshuffle – will use the event at Policy Exchange to outline Britain’s new trade policy.  Truss will link the UK’s trade policy with the government’s flagship domestic agenda: levelling up. She is expected to say that the ‘path to economic revival does not lie in retreating and retrenching, but in free trade and

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

It’s not cricket: should we ban Afghanistan from playing?

The Taliban takeover in Kabul left the west flailing. But when it comes to cricket, the new ruling regime in Afghanistan is being shown little mercy.  Cricket Australia has announced that it will almost certainly cancel the historic Test match with Afghanistan, which was scheduled to start in November. The reason? The Taliban’s mooted ban on women’s cricket. Australia’s Test captain Tim Paine said it is ‘hard to see’ Afghanistan being a part of next month’s T20 World Cup, implying that the ICC should ban the country and that teams should pull out from facing them in the tournament. The response from Australia emerged after the Taliban cultural commission head Ahmadullah Wasiq said ‘Islam and the

Steerpike Steerpike

Ministers have the ‘time of their lives’ at karaoke

New York may have the Met Gala but London has Parlioke. As global fashionistas last night crammed into their garish garbs, here in Westminster our political masters were having an evening soirée of their own.  Steerpike’s man with a microphone reports that MPs were invited to a select singing bash. Ahead of her speech today at Policy Exchange, international trade secretary Liz Truss warmed up her vocal cords with a touch of karaoke. The equalities minister hosted MPs in Parliament alongside fellow Cabinet attendee Therese Coffey, fresh off a morning media round on Universal Credit cuts.  Coffey and others let their hair down with a range of vintage songs including

Monday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The truth about Extinction Rebellion’s ‘climate warfare’

What have environmentalists got against commuters? Not for the first time a group of bedraggled climate nuts have taken their argument for ‘radical’ action on global warming not to Downing Street or to Parliament Square, but to ordinary people just trying to go about their business. Junctions have been blocked along the M25 near Kings Langley, Heathrow, Swanley, Godstone and Lakeside. This is the work of Insulate Britain, a single-issue Extinction Rebellion offshoot demanding action on home insulation. So far 42 have been arrested. The protesters tweeted that they were ‘disrupting the M25’ to ‘demand the government insulate Britain’. And yet so far their primary achievement has been to infuriate

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Donald Tusk is playing a dangerous game in dismissing Polexit

‘The British showed that the dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucracy did not suit them and turned around and left.’ That’s the verdict of the parliamentary head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Ryszard Terlecki, who has once again brought discussions of ‘Polexit’ to the foreground of Polish politics. Donald Tusk, Poland’s new leader of the opposition, has responded by suggesting this is party politics at work. But he is making a dangerous mistake to dismiss the prospect of a Polish exit from the EU. ‘If things go the way they are likely to go, we will have to search for drastic solutions,’ said Terlecki on Friday, citing Brexit as an example of

Steerpike Steerpike

Kerry-Anne Mendoza leaves the Canary

In the heady days of 2017, all seemed rosy for left-wing news website like the Canary. Founded in 2015 to ‘diversify the media’ the hyper-partisan outfit rode the wave of Corbynism to its height just after Theresa May’s snap election. Its editor Kerry-Anne Mendoza appeared on Newsnight; revenues hit £250,000 while staff boasted of 3.5 million unique users. Fast forward just four years and a very different picture emerges. After Corbyn’s electoral humiliation and the election of Keir Starmer in response, the Canary has lost its privileged perch among sections of the Labour party. By June 2020, with revenues falling, the site tumbled out of the top 1,000 online websites with just over 600,000 page

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why did the government backtrack on vaccine passports?

11 min listen

Over the weekend, the Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced that the government would be scrapping their plans for a vaccine passport system…at least for now. But what led to this change of mind? Did they not have the numbers? Are they more focused on the upcoming social care vote? Do they think the country is looking stable in regards to Covid? To discuss all these questions are Katy Balls and James Forsyth.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Why the NHS needs more bureaucrats

If the NHS’s cheerleaders and detractors can agree on one thing, it’s this: we need fewer backroom staff. If the health service’s doctors, nurses and cleaners are heroes, the pen-pushers, middle-men and legions of drab men in drab suits are sucking the vital lifeblood out of the NHS, while droning on about synergies in management. All this while claiming a salary that could have paid for another two nurses. This debate has re-emerged after it was reported that almost half of all NHS staff are managers, administrators or unqualified assistants. Helen Whately, the care minister, spoke for many when she said she feels ‘strongly that the money we put into the NHS needs to

Sunday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Let’s not politicise Emma Raducanu’s triumph

It didn’t take long for the open-borders brigade to try and politicise the magnificent feat of British teenager Emma Raducanu in winning the US Open women’s singles. Rather than just revelling in the general outbreak of joy in the country, or praising the astonishing maturity of Emma’s performance, the usual blue-tick suspects piled onto Twitter within minutes of her victory to argue, or imply, that the fact Emma was born in another country (she moved here from Canada aged two) proved that immigration in all its guises is always a good thing. Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera stated the case plainly: ‘Half Romanian, half Chinese. Born in Canada, brought up in

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Government scraps mandatory vaccine passports

On BBC One’s Andrew Marr show Sajid Javid confirmed that plans for domestic vaccine passports in England were on the way out, even before they were formally brought in: ‘We should keep it in reserve,’ he said of the government’s plans to link vaccine status to entry into nightclubs, but ‘I’m pleased to say we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.’ Vaccine passports have been a roller-coaster policy for months now, with claims made by members of the Cabinet at the start of the year that they weren’t being considered: that nothing so ‘discriminatory’, in the words of vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi, would be implemented. Since then,

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: ‘I’m not anticipating any more lockdowns’ says Javid

Sajid Javid – I’m not anticipating any more lockdowns The Health Secretary was the main guest of the day on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show, hosted this morning by Nick Robinson. Robinson asked Javid about the likelihood that Christmas could be threatened once again by lockdown. Javid responded by saying that it was highly unlikely that the UK would see itself in a similar position to last year, even with an expected surge of the virus over this winter: SJ: I’m not anticipating any more lockdowns… I just don’t see how we get to another lockdown. Vaccine passports will not go ahead Last week, the Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi appeared

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Emma Raducanu’s victory is being spoiled by the usual suspects

How do you take the pleasure out of something so marvellous and joyful as Emma Raducanu’s US open victory last night? Easy — turn on Twitter, which spoils everything including sport. Raducanu’s victory is truly a great triumph; the most breathtaking sporting feat by a female British athlete in our lifetimes. Emma is 18 and beautiful, just did her A-levels and got A* marks, had been 400/1 to win the tournament, never dropped a set — all these facts make her achievement even more delightful. I’ll stop the adulation there, because an entire industry of sports commentators already exists to make these points over and over. We don’t all need

Debbie Hayton

Rosie Duffield’s treatment brings shame on the Labour party

News that Rosie Duffield will be missing the Labour Party conference over threats to her personal security brings to a head an appalling situation where a female Labour MP cannot stand up for the rights of women without triggering opprobrium. Keir Starmer cannot and must not sit on the fence any longer. Maybe he is trying to sit tight and hope that this goes away? This seems unlikely: Duffield’s opponents are motivated by an evangelistic zeal to silence those who dare to disagree with them. Thankfully, Duffield isn’t taking the hint On Friday, she spoke more sense into the debate: Duffield might be the lightning rod, but the problem is

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Rosie Duffield to miss Labour conference due to security concerns

Labour conferences have been fractious affairs in recent years. Tensions between various factions have often spilled over onto the conference floor, with the Corbyn era being particularly notable for the divides between Labour’s membership and parliamentary party. A particular low point was Luciana Berger being required to have a police bodyguard at the 2018 conference after threats were made against her. New leader Keir Starmer is keen to show such acrimony is a thing of the past. This year’s Brighton jamboree is set to begin in a fortnight’s time and is being billed as the Labour leader’s first big in-person test to an audience of the faithful. Elected in April

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Christina Lamb, Simon Clarke and Hannah Moore

21 min listen

On this week’s episode, Christina Lamb reads her letter from Kabul about the situation on the ground under the new Taliban control (00:56). Simon Clarke makes the case for Covid boosters (06:19). And Hannah Moore talks about the horrors of so-called ‘American’ sweet shops in the West End (15:18).