Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Trudeau’s Canada hit by Covid third wave

It was just two days ago that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was claiming in his country’s parliament that Britain was ‘facing a very serious third wave.’ But now cases in the country have overtaken those of its southern neighbour the USA, whose approach to the pandemic received widespread criticism prior to the vaccine roll out.  Data from Johns Hopkins University show Canada now have cases of 207.3 per million people compared to those in the United States where numbers are 206.7 per million. A day before Trudeau’s comments on the UK situation, Canada registered a record 10,859 new cases despite the country’s original response to the virus being widely praised. Experts there

Peter Hunt

The royal redemption of Prince Andrew

Seventeen months is clearly long enough, as far as Prince Andrew is concerned, to spend in the royal wilderness. While mourning the passing of his father, he’s made tentative steps to reclaim his position as one of the public faces of the House of Windsor. His private status, close to his mother, has never been under threat. His first act, on this path to redemption, was an audacious one. He gave a television interview. Emily Maitlis was nowhere in sight and it passed off without incident. Indeed, it generated positive headlines with his account of how the Queen had described the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh as

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s union trouble

It’s arguably been a good week for Labour, as the Tory party becomes more and more implicated in the Greensill lobbying scandal, which saw the former PM David Cameron ringing around ministers last year to secure emergency cash for the flailing financial firm. Labour leader Keir Starmer certainly seemed to enjoy the ongoing revelations about Greensill at PMQs this week, when he said Boris Johnson was overseeing the ‘return of Tory sleaze’. Wiser heads wondered though if the Labour Party should be championing a crackdown on outside organisations influencing politics, considering its own close links to the unions… Lo and behold, that appeared to play out last night when Labour’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Covid advisor’s Cheltenham amnesia

Steerpike finally got his hands this week on a copy of Failures of State by the Sunday Times Insight duo Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott about Britain’s experience of Covid. While not exactly a barrel of laughs, Mr S did enjoy one contribution from SAGE member Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London and a Communist party member of 40 years. Reflecting on the decision to allow Cheltenham racing festival to go ahead in March 2020, Michie told the authors: I thought Cheltenham should definitely not have been allowed to go ahead. I remember looking at the television images of what was happening there and feeling slightly nauseous about it, just feeling: ‘God, this

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How much of a threat is the South African variant?

For residents of six London boroughs, as well as those in Smethwick in the West Midlands, the partial relaxation of lockdown rules this week hasn’t quite gone according to plan. They’ve had a day out in the sun, alright, but not necessarily sitting enjoying food and drinks in a pub garden – more likely they have been standing in a long queue to get ‘surge tested’ for the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. So how much of a threat is the South African variant? In spite of anecdotal claims from South Africa that the new variant was affecting younger people, there is no evidence that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What happened to Cameron’s original retirement plan?

When David Cameron started contemplating life after Downing Street, he settled quite quickly on a model of what it should look like. He would stay on the backbenches, providing advice and wisdom to whoever came after him, earn a little bit of extra money while still working as an MP, and continue in public service with charities and others. In 2016, he outlined his approach to me as we sat in a cafe in Witney, and I wrote it up in my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians: He mourned the number of former ministers who had departed at the 2015 election, and suggested that you could do other

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s Finsbury flight of fancy

Boris Johnson’s ‘fixer’ Eddie Lister is once again in the headlines, making the splash of today’s Daily Mail for being ‘on the case’ of the attempted Saudi takeover of Newcastle United. It comes two days after a piece in The Times reported that former Lister was considering combining his current role as the prime minister’s special envoy to the Gulf with a six-figure advisory gig for lobbying firm Finsbury Glover Hering – an approach he only rejected after being approached by the newspaper. Finsbury of course is chaired by Roland Rudd, the smooth talking, uber networker best known for heading up the unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign and for being one of Tony Blair’s ‘Four

Matt Ridley

Britain is in danger of repeating its post-war mistakes

In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some clothing off the ration altogether,’ he boasts, posing as a munificent liberator. ‘From shoes to bathing costumes, and from oilskins to body belts and children’s raincoats. Then we’ve reduced the points on such things as women’s coats and woollen garments generally and… on men’s suits.’ Does this remind you of anything? One day in November, George Eustice, the environment

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The green games: the Prime Minister’s big plan to rebrand Britain

It is not unusual for governments to focus on a big event after a period of crisis. In 1951, the Festival of Britain was meant to rejuvenate the country after years of post-war austerity and rationing. The 2012 London Olympics, presided over by Mayor Boris Johnson, supposedly announced the UK’s recovery from recession with a £27 million opening ceremony. But games are intended to be boosterish. A 12-day summit on the environment is not an obvious crowd pleaser. Yet this government is determined to turn COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to be held in Glasgow in the first two weeks of November, into a great event to

Daniel McCarthy

Joe Biden’s party is over

Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won the last presidential election with a record 81 million votes. But the exiguous margins of their hold on the House and Senate, with fewer than 51 per cent of the seats in either chamber, tell another story, as does the desperation of their struggle to abolish the filibuster and federalise election law. Those policy aims are of a piece with dreams of ‘packing’ the Supreme Court with left-liberal justices — and packing the Senate too, by turning tiny Democratic bastions into new states. The left wing of the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain is closing its trade gap with the EU

So it was just a blip after all. Remember those huge headlines last month revealing that exports to the EU had plunged by 41 per cent in January, leading frustrated remainers to bleat: we told you so? ‘Brexit – the unfolding disaster’ tweeted Lord Adonis for one, along with a graph showing the sharp fall in January. Now we have the figures for February, which has been reported rather less loudly, but which show just as strong a rebound. Exports in goods to the EU in February, records Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, were 56 per cent up on those in January. They are still down 11.6 per cent on February 2020, but

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Liz Kendall is right – we don’t value social care enough

Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. In politics, it’s more often than not the latter that matters most. Liz Kendall, star of my somewhat unsuccessful 2015 campaign to ‘Make Liz Kendall Labour Leader and Queen of Everything’, has been pilloried online for suggesting care workers would be ‘better off stacking shelves at Morrisons’ given their pay and conditions. Her remarks were pounced upon as proof of snobbery towards supermarket staff, a largely unacknowledged army of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As ever with outrage rampages, the truth is a bit more prosaic. Here is Kendall’s question in full: ‘Despite repeated promises, the truth is

Wednesday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Will the Greensill scandal hurt Boris?

13 min listen

A civil servant advised Greensill Capital while still working in government, it emerged yesterday evening. Is the scandal hurting Boris Johnson, or just damaging an old rival? Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and the New Statesman‘s political editor Stephen Bush.

Constantin Eckner

Merkel’s radical lockdown plan could quickly backfire

In its flailing response to the Covid crisis, the German government appears to have finally given up on federalism. Angela Merkel’s latest idea is to introduce nationwide ‘emergency brake’ measures to combat rising case numbers, replacing a patchwork system across the 16 federal states. But will it help bring Germany’s third wave under control? Legal changes to grant the federal government unprecedented power to enforce coronavirus regulations in all states have been backed by ministers. The final obstacle for the German Infection Protection Act is parliament. If Merkel’s plan is approved, it will mark a big change in the way Germany is governed. It will also make it clear that Merkel is increasingly

Ross Clark Ross Clark

James Dyson isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

He backed Brexit for a wheeze – and then, when he realised that it was actually going to happen and the implications for his business sank in, he fled to Singapore. That, very simply, is the Remainer case against Sir James Dyson. But how does it stand up against reality now that Brexit has happened? In an interview with the BBC, Dyson revealed a little more about his decision, in 2019, to relocate his HQ in Singapore, and why he backed Brexit. Dyson has burned his fingers, but not in the ways which Remainers asserted No, Sir James has not left Britain. His company still employs around 4,000 people here,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Starmer has ‘dodgy Dave’ to thank for his best ever PMQs

‘Keir today, gone tomorrow.’ The whisper before Easter was that Labour’s troubled leader might not survive until the next election but the spectre of Tory sleaze – which felled John Major’s government – has come to the rescue. Sir Keir started PMQs by alluding to David Cameron’s freelance activities for Greensill Capital. ‘Are the current lobbying rules fit for purpose?’ he asked. Boris tried the ‘nothing to see here’ approach. He wants to smother the controversy by appointing a legal sleuth with a spectacularly dull name, Nigel Boardman, whose findings will be delivered in June. So for the next two months the PM can happily refer every question to ‘the

Andrew Foxall and James Rogers

The Kremlin’s strategy to undermine Britain

The past week has seen the war in Ukraine, which has been simmering for the last seven years, once more come to the boil. According to Kiev, Russia has massed as many as 85,000 troops near its border, while Moscow has actively talked-up the possibility of full-scale war and warned that it ‘would mean the beginning of Ukraine’s end’. Is such a war likely? You can forgive Kiev for worrying so — Vladimir Putin is already getting his excuses ready. The Kremlin claims to have an obligation to protect the residents of the Donbass if tensions continue to rise (just like it claimed to have an obligation to the residents

Kristina Murkett

Locked-down students are paying a heavy price

Students are the forgotten victims of lockdown. Having worked hard to achieve their grades, undergraduates have been consigned to their bedrooms to learn online. There’s been no socialising, freshers fun or the chance to make new friends. The only thing that has been the same for the Covid class of 2021 are sky high fees. Finally, the government has announced that all university students will be able to return from the 17 May. While some undergraduates may be relieved to get some much-needed clarity, most will be deeply, deeply frustrated. Many students are asking why universities did not open again when schools did. They are also wondering why they can currently go

Steerpike Steerpike

Trudeau claims Britain faces ‘very serious third wave’

Steerpike was surprised to learn this morning that the UK is facing a ‘very serious third wave’ – not from the newspapers or an ashen faced epidemiologist but rather the unlikely form of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Amid calls in Canada to loosen lockdown restrictions, the embattled leader referenced Britain in his parliament yesterday as an example as to why there should not be faster liberalisation. Sporting a hideous beard, the premier best known for ethics scandals and blackface pictures told members of the Canadian House of Commons: I think it’s really important that we work from facts and understanding of the science around things. We know for example that the UK is ahead