Politics

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

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

The Trump nightmare isn’t over

What would happen to the Republicans after Donald Trump? That has been one of the pundits’ favourite themes in the past few months. Maybe the GOP could run against Joe Biden’s massive spending and borrowing splurge, some pondered; or go after some low-hanging woke excesses on the left; or exploit the huge influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border that Biden is bringing about so swiftly; or warn of inflation, or the generosity of pandemic relief holding back the recovery; or find some new young faces to appeal to minorities who moved ever so slightly to the right in the last election. And some Republicans have indeed made gestures

Steerpike Steerpike

Americans baffled by monarch’s role in Queen’s Speech

It appears the Queen has become the latest figure to be dragged into America’s culture wars after attending the State Opening of Parliament on Tuesday.  Her speech, which set out the government’s policies for the new parliamentary session, mentioned a bill to introduce mandatory Voter ID in British elections – something that has caused the monarch to become lionised by some Republicans who now view her as a champion against electoral fraud.  The Republican State Leadership Committee has done its best to herald Her Majesty as a fearless fighter in the war on woke, declaring: ‘The woke cancel culture mob continues to call voter ID racist. Now that the Queen of England will require an ID to vote, will

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What could surface from a Covid inquiry?

13 min listen

Boris Johnson has announced that an inquiry into the government’s Covid response will be launched next year. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about what could surface and whether it will shed any light.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The problem with a Covid inquiry

Will the government learn the lessons of the public inquiry into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic? Boris Johnson this afternoon confirmed he was indeed setting one up, to begin in Spring 2022. True to form, Sir Keir Starmer complained that the inquiry should start sooner; a point he makes with almost every announcement from the government. Johnson was, also true to form, thinking partly of the political landscape over the coming weeks: announcing an inquiry now means he can appear to be on the front foot with learning lessons when Dominic Cummings gives his long-awaited select committee evidence later this month.  It’s probably wise that Downing Street has decided

Steerpike Steerpike

Dua Lipa’s NHS hypocrisy

Last night the great and the not-so-good of Westminster piled into London’s O2 Arena to attend the Brit Awards, the UK’s first major in-person ceremony of the Covid era. Special advisers, Cabinet ministers and ordinary backbenchers were among the 4,000 in attendance to trial how live events might work after the pandemic, with no social distancing or face masks for attendees including Liz Truss, Thérèse Coffey and James Cleverly. But the Tories in attendance were presumably not cheering when British singer Dua Lipa collected one of her two awards of the night and dedicated it to British nurse Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, declaring:  There’s a massive disparity between gratitude and respect for frontline workers

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

When will the economy recover to pre-pandemic levels?

New growth figures were released this morning show that the economy contracted 1.5 per cent in Q1 this year and remains 8.7 per cent smaller than it was in Q4 2019 (the last quarter not to be impacted by the pandemic). Alongside this update, the Office for National Statistics also released its latest set of monthly figures, which saw GDP rise by 2.1 per cent in March — the biggest boost since August last year — taking the economy to 5.9 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. That GDP fell by just 1.5 per cent overall once again illustrates the extent to which businesses have developed a resilience to lockdowns. The first

Steerpike Steerpike

Tories unveil anti-woke manifesto

The Queen’s Speech yesterday may have seen the government’s fairly dry vision for modern Britain but a group of Conservative backbench MPs and peers have now banded together to propose their own alternative. Cracking down on immigration, breaking up the BBC and taking aim at woke policing are all proposed in a new book by the Common Sense Group of around 50 Tory parliamentarians. Titled Conservative Thinking For a Post-Liberal Age, it takes aim at the Equality Act, Supreme Court, British broadcasters and Extinction Rebellion, proposing a much tougher line on the forces of ‘wokeism’ and its practitioners. The group’s chairman Sir John Hayes declares that ‘the battle for Britain has

Katy Balls Katy Balls

A Tory rebellion is brewing against planning reforms

Boris Johnson used the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday to set out the policy reform he plans to do now that the pandemic is easing. This was largely centred on attempting to flesh out the ‘level up’ agenda through a focus on skills, industry and planning reform. It’s the latter bill that poses the greatest risk. Already Tory MPs have come out in opposition to what ministers say will be the biggest shake-up of the planning system in over 70 years. The government hopes the relaxation of the rules will pave the way for a home-building boom that will help it hit its goal of 300,000 new homes per year, ease

Steerpike Steerpike

David Cameron’s cringeworthy texts revealed

Oh dear. Amid a smorgasbord of investigations into the collapse of Greensill capital and its lobbying operation, onetime adviser David Cameron has been forced to release all his messages to politicians and civil servants. Cameron and his personal employees bombarded senior ministers and officials with at least 50 emails, texts and WhatsApp messages about Greensill between 5 March and 26 June last year.  They manage the dual feat of being both damning and deeply cringeworthy, with Cameron regularly signing off messages to Tom Scholar, the 52-year-old Permanent Secretary of the Treasury as ‘Love, Dc.’ One text reads like an opening line on a dating app: ‘Is Sir John C still at the

Mary Dejevsky

The UK’s very American political realignment

The speed and scale with which voters, mainly but not exclusively in the north of England, have switched their allegiance from traditional Labour to Conservative has been described as unprecedented. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE called it ‘amazing’ and spoke of ‘a massive shift of tectonic plates’. Nor can the results of last week’s elections be dismissed as a one-off. The breaches in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ began well before the Conservative landslide in the 2019 General Election and what happened last Thursday is unlikely to be the end. Labour voters, it appears, were released from their life-long loyalty to the party by the Brexit referendum, and then transferred

Yiannis Baboulias

Keir Starmer and the ‘Pasokification’ of Labour

As the Greek debt crisis took hold in the wake of the financial crash, there was one big political casualty. The main centre-left party PASOK — which had dominated Greek politics since the early eighties — collapsed, going from a comfortable 43.9 per cent of the vote to 13.2 per cent in 2012. A decade on, the party has failed to recover – and the grim news for Keir Starmer’s Labour party is that it faces its own version of Pasokification, one where the fall is slow rather than spectacular, and in which the left could find itself trapped. It might be hard to imagine British politics without the Labour

Henry Hill

Beware Welsh Labour’s Trojan dragon

After polls that suggested a radical shake-up at Cardiff Bay, in the end it turned out to be a strong result for the status quo in Wales. The Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford enjoyed a vaccine bounce — thanks to procurement decisions in Whitehall — and can now govern on his own should he wish to. But the fact that Labour won’t need a formal arrangement with Plaid Cymru to govern (as it did between 2007 and 2011) should not blind people to the fact that the Welsh leader already leads an increasingly nationalist party. Welsh Labour actually ran pro-independence candidates in these elections Drakeford himself has said that the

Tuesday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Why a Covid public inquiry could prove useful for Boris

The Prime Minister said today there would be a ‘full proper public inquiry’ into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. This is highly significant, because a ‘full, proper public inquiry’ means one led by a judge and with witnesses represented by lawyers. I am also told – though Downing Street is refusing to comment on this – that the Cabinet will be asked by the Prime Minister to approve the terms of the inquiry on Wednesday morning, and there could be an announcement shortly afterwards. Such a public inquiry – like Leveson’s into hacking and Chilcot’s into the decision to go to war in Iraq – would take many years

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Has Angela Rayner got the upper hand?

17 min listen

Carolyn Harris, a key Starmer aide, has resigned her post as his parliamentary private secretary over allegations that she was behind some of the negative briefing against Angela Rayner. On the podcast, Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about whether Angela Rayner has come out of Labour’s scrap, on top.

Will Heaven

How Boris’s planning revolution can keep Nimbys on side

There is a basic political idea behind the Planning Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech. When you build a house, someone buys it – and when they do, they tend to start voting Conservative. The Bill’s aim is to get more houses built, 300,000 a year by the mid 2020s, helping to create millions more homeowners over the next decade and bringing long-term dividends to the Conservative party. The data supports this idea: House of Commons Library research shows that at the 2019 general election, 57 per cent of voters who owned their home outright voted Conservative, as did 43 per cent of people with mortgages. Renters, both private and social,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Respect for Rayner is growing after Starmer’s failed sacking

The resignation of Carolyn Harris as Sir Keir Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary (more here from Steerpike) shows that the peace between Angela Rayner and the Labour leader is very much on Rayner’s terms. Harris is reported to have left the job after being accused of spreading baseless rumours about the deputy leader’s private life. There have been furious briefings from both sides over the past few days but Rayner has not had to sack anyone from her side, showing she has ended up with more power than Starmer. A number of her frontbench colleagues are also seriously impressed by the way in which she negotiated her new lengthy job title over

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Will Rishi Sunak fund Boris’s skills promises to the red wall?

Queen’s Speech day is one of the set-pieces when the government gets to decide that morning’s headlines. Barring disaster, the stuff you brief to the media the day before the speech will be what leads that morning’s bulletins, and has the best chance of being the thing that punters remember about the speech – if they remember anything at all, since, of course, most people don’t pay any attention to political news. Anyway, the central fact here is that No. 10 chose to lead with skills today, a package of promises about how things will get better for the people who do not do A-levels then got to university for

Steerpike Steerpike

Manchester mayor gets a London paper column

Under first George Osborne and now under new editor Emily Sheffield, the Evening Standard has become something of a safe exile for onetime players in the Cameroon government. But now it seems the winds of cross-party change are blowing through Northcliffe House as Sheffield took to Twitter to announce the newest signing for the self-proclaimed ‘Voice of London’: newly re-elected mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham. Burnham’s first outing for his new editorial home was speaking today at the Standard’s London Rising event at which he told the people of London that they do not need to be ‘levelled down’ for the North, adding ‘Don’t believe what people say — I love

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Boring Barnier won’t be the next French president

Let me go out on a limb here and predict that Michel Barnier, who is trying to rekindle his modest and largely forgotten political career on the back of his notoriety as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is not going to be the next president of France. Barnier is currently famous (but only, I suspect, for 15 minutes) for demanding a three to five year suspension of immigration into France. Bad news for Swedes seeking a retirement chateaux in the Dordogne. But seriously, this is all he’s got? The nightly riots and attacks on police in France, provoking excited talk of civil war, seem to originate with people who are

Andrew McQuillan

Can the DUP survive?

A 36-person strong electorate will meet in Belfast this Friday to elect Arlene Foster’s replacement as leader of the Democratic Unionist party.  The choice facing the assembled ranks of the party’s MPs and members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) is, amusingly, between two men who share the same office in Lisburn: the Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Edwin Poots, the Stormont agriculture minister. Such is the DUP way, the two candidates are under orders not to speak to the media or undertake any form of public-facing promotional activity for the duration of the contest. However, a document sent by Poots to his colleagues setting out his vision for the