Politics

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

Tuesday

20 Apr 2021

Johnny Mercer’s departure became inevitable

No Prime Minister likes a minister allowing public speculation about whether they are going to resign or not. So when reports emerged this morning about Johnny Mercer planning to resign over Northern Ireland veterans not being covered by the Overseas Operations Bill, it was inevitable that Downing Street would sack him if he did not commit to staying. Mercer was duly dismissed tonight following a tempestuous meeting with the chief whip Mercer’s letter to the Prime Minister doesn’t pull its punches. He accuses the government of lacking ‘moral strength or courage’ in failing to resolve this issue. His letter says that this is leading to veterans ‘being sectioned, drinking themselves to

Katy Balls

Boris scraps daily White House-style briefings

Boris Johnson has axed plans for televised White House-style press conferences. The announcement came six months after Allegra Stratton was unveiled as the Prime Minister’s new spokesperson who would lead the daily Downing Street briefings. Instead, Stratton will become his spokeswoman for COP26, the climate summit, fronting communications both strategically and publicly in the lead up to the event in November. Meanwhile, the No.9 Downing Street briefing room that had been renovated for the press briefings at the cost of £2.6m will be used instead by the Prime Minister, ministers and officials for government communications. So what’s behind the change in plan? So what’s behind the change in plan? The televised press

Katy Balls

What is Michael Gove up to in Israel?

Boris Johnson may have had to cancel his trip to India but that hasn’t stopped his colleagues embarking on trips overseas. Michael Gove is in Israel today on a fact-finding mission ahead of his review into immunity vaccine passports. The Cabinet Office minister has been meeting with Israeli politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the foreign minister and health minister. The trip – which I reported earlier this month – is focussed on what the UK can learn from Israel’s Covid response. Discussions are also taking place on a possible green travel corridor between the two countries for when overseas holidays are allowed again. Vaccine passports aren’t the only

Brendan O’Neill

The two elites squeezing the life out of football

So, all of a sudden the chattering classes care about football fans? Yesterday, the kind of people who usually wring their hands about the vulgar, tattooed hordes who pack into grounds and chant unspeakable things at the opposing team, posed as the champions of fans. A European Super League would be a contemptuous assault on the salt-of-the-earth football-watchers who are the heart and soul of every great team, they said. Politicians, sports commentators, and Guardianistas — they were all at it; all waving a metaphorical scarf for the good ol’ English footie fan currently being betrayed by filthy rich oligarchs who see football as little more than a money-making machine.

Kate Andrews

Have unemployment fears subsided?

Over the past few months, each labour market update from the Office for National Statistics has suggested forecasts predicting mass unemployment were wide of the mark. In the three months leading up to February, unemployment was estimated to hover at 4.9 per cent, 0.9 per cent higher than the previous year but down 0.1 per cent from the previous month. Where credit is due is debated – and likely shared. The jobs retention scheme continues to shield five million workers, who cannot yet return to their jobs, from unemployed status. That GDP has not taken anywhere near the same tumble this winter as it did last spring speaks to innovative

Katy Balls

Can Boris really stop the super league?

17 min listen

Fans, players, managers and politicians have spoken out against the proposals by 12 of Europe’s top football teams to form a breakaway league. Boris Johnson wrote in today’s Sun that he would show the plans the red card, but can government really stop them? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

Matthew Lynn

Juncker’s Brexit delusion

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU’s miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at least a little sad. Not deploying the formidable force of his personality to swing the British referendum behind staying in the EU. Juncker now reckons the former PM’s judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case In an interview this week, Juncker revealed that David Cameron told him to keep out of

Steerpike

Richard Dawkins gets cancelled by the humanists

For years, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins enjoyed the acclaim and approval heaped upon him by universities and institutes across the western world. Festooned with awards and lavished with honours, he rode the intellectual tidal wave of new atheism at its peak. But now the tide is out and with it Dawkins’ brand of free-spirited thinking too; the author of The Selfish Gene has been accused of Islamophobia, transphobia and a variety of supposedly offensive comments. Dawkins of course is famously thick skinned but the latest ignominy heaped on the Oxford academic will have stung more than most. The American Humanist Association Board today announced it was stripping Dawkins of his 1996 ‘Humanist of the

Monday

19 Apr 2021

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Sinn Fein’s hollow ‘apology’ for Mountbatten’s murder

Prince Philip’s death presented Sinn Fein with a particular challenge, given that the IRA murdered his beloved uncle. ‘I am sorry that happened. Of course, that is heartbreaking,’ said the party’s leader Mary Lou McDonald this weekend. But if the words sounded sincere, don’t be fooled. Sinn Fein learnt a difficult lesson back in 2011, when the Queen and Prince Philip visited, the first time for a century that a British monarch set foot in Dublin. Back then, they completely misjudged Irish public opinion and refused to participate, ending up looking like kids outside a sweet shop with noses pressed to the window. The Queen got an approval rating in

Katy Balls

Why Boris was so reluctant to cancel his India trip

Just a few hours after Boris Johnson confirmed that his trip to India had been postponed, the country has been placed on the government’s red list. Following reports of a new India variant of Covid, travel to the UK is to be banned — with those returning from the country facing hotel quarantine as of 4 a.m. Friday. Announcing the news, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs that initial data on the new strain meant that the travel ban had been put in place on a ‘precautionary basis’. Johnson’s supporters believe he works better in person than on Zoom calls The decision was viewed as inevitable after the Prime Minister’s trip to India

Steerpike

China’s belt and road to nowhere

Sinoscepticism is on the rise in Parliament, with China’s controversial ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ increasingly being the subject of attention in the House of Lords. Down the corridor and across central lobby it appears no MPs are now willing to be linked with the scheme which ties Chinese infrastructure spending with increased influence. The All Party Parliamentary Group for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was founded in 2018 by Labour MP Faisal Rashid, who managed to find time amidst the ongoing Brexit drama in the last Parliament to visit both Guangdong and Guangxi in China. As the Beijing to Britain briefing service points out, Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming spoke

Robert Peston

Why are politicians picking on the football Super League?

The collective gasp of outrage – led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson – at the decision of a few wealthy clubs around Europe to announce the creation of a European Super League is either naive or hypocritical. Because the idea that professional football is some kind of social enterprise owned and run by fans and communities might have been true 100 years ago, but in recent decades it has been a rapacious, commercial enterprise motivated mostly by money. It is quite difficult to see why the cartelisation of football should be what jolts our political leaders to man the barricades And does anyone think FIFA, UEFA and the Premier League

Steerpike

Watch: Keir Starmer kicked out of pub

Keir Starmer was out in Bath today campaigning ahead of the local elections. Unfortunately a quick stop by The Raven pub did not go as planned when the landlord Rod Humphris confronted him over the impact the Covid lockdown has had on his pub. The landlord, who recently featured in the local press attacking vaccine passports as ‘unpleasant and discriminatory,’ shouted ‘that man is not allowed in my pub as Starmer’s security men restrained him in his own pub. In a scene that could have come straight from EastEnders, Humphris yelled at the politician to ‘get out of my pub’ as the Holborn and St Pancras MP bid a hasty retreat.

Ian Acheson

Why Sinn Fein can’t really apologise for the IRA’s atrocities

What are we to make of Sinn Fein’s latest experiment with the language of regret when it comes to the murder of Lord Mountbatten just after his nephew’s Royal funeral? It’s not hard to be cynical about the Shinners. This is after all the political party that appointed a convicted terrorist bomber as Director of ‘Unionist outreach’ not so long ago. A party that dragged its feet on pensions for victims of paramilitary terrorists in their attempt to include injured perpetrators. A party that police services on either side of the border says is run by shadowy figures in the army council of the IRA. Their uncamouflaged leader, Mary Lou

Damian Reilly

Football’s Super League critics are being hypocritical

Is it possible meaningfully to oppose the decision by Europe’s biggest football clubs to form an unaccountable, anti-democratic Super League if you voted to Remain? The obvious answer is that it’s not. Not that that will stop anyone. The proposed Super League is an almost exact sporting distillation of the issues that defined the European Union referendum: the continent’s financial power house football clubs are threatening to carve up immensely lucrative markets while simultaneously shutting down external competition irreversibly. A televised rant by Gary Neville – vocal remainer and stalwart of the Manchester United team that in 2000 infamously turned its back on the magic of the FA Cup in

Steerpike

Jared O’Mara’s exceptional career

Oneterm wonder Jared O’Mara had quite an exceptional two and a half years in Parliament. Having unseated former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in June 2017, the Labour MP was the first autistic MP elected to the Commons but quickly found himself being suspended for racist, homophobic and misogynist comments posted prior to his election. In July 2019 O’Mara’s former employee Jennifer Barnes complained that she had received inappropriate messages and approaches from O’Mara through various media. Having stood down at the 2019 election, the parliamentary standards commissioner has today found that O’Mara did indeed breach parliament’s sexual misconduct policy, with his right to a parliamentary pass now withdrawn. It

Katy Balls

What does Boris’s India cancellation mean for vaccines?

10 min listen

Boris Johnson’s trip to India was today cancelled as the country battles a new coronavirus variant. The PM was expecting to push Modi to release AstraZeneca vaccines to Britain, but that now looks unlikely. What does this mean for the UK’s roadmap? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.

Nick Tyrone

If Starmer goes, can Labour’s Corbyn critics keep hold of power?

Keir Starmer is only a year into his job as Labour leader, but could his time in charge soon come to an end? Starmer is under increasing pressure following his failure to revitalise Labour. A bad set of results on 6 May could mean the final nail in the coffin. If Starmer is ousted – and that remains a big if, given the lack of viable contenders for the job – Corbyn’s critics within the Labour party will quickly find themselves in a difficult position. With no heir apparent on the Labour right, Starmer’s departure could easily mean the left taking control of Labour all over again. Yvette Cooper has

Matthew Lynn

In defence of football’s Super League

Short of dropping Harry Kane from the England team, and replacing him with Andy Carroll on the grounds that what we really need is a big man up front, it is hard to imagine a footballing decision that could be less popular. Twelve of Europe’s biggest clubs, including Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool, have announced plans for a break-away ‘European Super League’. Alongside the domestic competitions, the 12 elite clubs would play each other regularly season after season. Football decided 30 years ago to become a big money game, and has been rewarded with massive global audiences The reaction, to put it mildly, has not been 100 per cent positive,

James Kirkup

Football’s Super League row can save capitalism from itself

I am not a football fan. Reactions to plans for a European super-league remind me why. According to the BBC ‘critics say the move is being driven purely by money.’ Whereas in the prelapsarian days of, say, last week, professional football was all about craft and community? Free marketeers should be relaxed about this. You could argue that the super league members’ decision is a matter for them and them alone. They are private businesses supplying a product – entertainment – to paying customers in a market. If they want to supply that product via slightly different arrangements, why should anyone else care? If the public anger in today’s headlines

Get a free copy of Douglas Murray’s new book

Tuesday

Monday