Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Steerpike

Three arrested at Letby hospital in manslaughter probe

To the Countess of Chester Hospital, where three hospital managers have been arrested as part of a corporate manslaughter probe relating to the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby. Cheshire police have confirmed that the hospital bosses have been arrested today on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter. They have been bailed pending further inquiries. It follows

Tom Goodenough

The truth about living with a politician

Sarah Vine’s How Not to Be a Political Wife is the talk of Westminster – and beyond. This week, four hundred Spectator subscribers and readers heard from Vine and Spectator editor Michael Gove at an exclusive event. Rachel Johnson – brother of Boris and son of Stanley – and Hugo Swire – whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an

Steerpike

Ex-Tory minister suspended over ‘cash for questions’ row

Dear oh dear. Mr S reported on Saturday that former Conservative science minister George Freeman was under scrutiny over Sunday Times reports about his £60,000-a-year adviser gig to GHGSat Limited. Now it transpires that the Tory MP for Mid Norfolk has been suspended from his role as government trade envoy after the allegations he was

Steerpike

BBC chief left IDF death chants on livestream

Well, well, well. The chants of Bob Vylan frontman at Glastonbury – ‘death, death to the IDF’ – sparked outrage at the weekend and it wasn’t long before questions were asked of the BBC, which streamed the performance to viewers at home. Now it transpires that the Beeb’s director general Tim Davie was made aware

James Heale

Can these Farage rivals’ start-ups hurt Reform?

You wait ages for a right-wing movement to come along – and then two do so at once. Former MEPs Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe both launched rival outlets yesterday. Habib now leads ‘Advance UK’, a political party whose first aim is to reach 30,000 members. Meanwhile, Lowe has started ‘Restore Britain’, a ‘bottom-up movement’

Michael Simmons

Will the welfare bill really push 150,000 into poverty?

Labour MPs are obviously going to panic when told their votes might plunge just one person into poverty – let alone 250,000. That was the original estimate for the fallout from Liz Kendall’s reforms to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit. Yesterday, the DWP released a revised figure after Starmer caved to a rebellion

Trump could bomb Iran again

President Trump has already warned Tehran that he’ll be back if Iran tries to revive and advance its nuclear programme, following the strikes by B-2 stealth bombers. Judging by the comments of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Trump may find himself with this dilemma sooner than he thinks. Iran could return

Northern Ireland is still paying a heavy price for Brexit

This week heralds the arrival in Northern Ireland of yet more overregulation, bureaucratic overreach, and political incompetence. No, Keir Starmer isn’t making an unannounced visit to Belfast. From this month, many thousands of food products imported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will have to display warnings on their packaging highlighting that these goods are not

Max Jeffery

Adam Curtis: ‘modern power makes me cry’

Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers

Liz Kendall’s humiliating welfare climb-down

‘This government believes in equality and social justice,’ began Liz Kendall. Which government she was describing is anyone’s guess. I suspect that if you were to ask the general public what they thought the government believed in, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ wouldn’t even make the top 100 printable responses.  The government were facing a backbench

The Spectator presents: Living with a Politician

Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live.  Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake’s Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP’s Wife) as they discuss the losses and

Steerpike

Watch: Pro-Palestine mob in Leicester chant ‘death to the IDF’

Pro-Palestine demonstrators on the streets of Britain have been led in a chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ – in a sick imitation of punk duo Bob Vylan’s performance at Glastonbury. Protestors who gathered in Leicester on Sunday shouted the slogan during a speech by controversial activist and ex-Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg. Begg, now

Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs are still sceptical of the Welfare Bill

Liz Kendall tried to use her Commons statement on the government’s U-turn on some of the disability benefit cuts to persuade her colleagues that the changes made the legislation worth supporting. Not all of them sounded very convinced: there were repeated complaints about a ‘two-tier system’ whereby two people with the same needs would get

Stephen Daisley

Being a Christian isn’t easy

Spare a thought for Chris Coghlan, who has learned to his horror that not only is the Pope a Catholic, his own priest is one too. The Liberal Democrat MP, who voted to legalise assisted suicide, attends St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Dorking. He complains to the Observer that Father Ian Vane ‘publicly announced at Mass that he was… denying me

James Heale

How big will the Labour welfare rebellion be?

This afternoon Liz Kendall will update the House of Commons on her revised plans for welfare, following the concessions wrung out of her by Labour MPs. The Work and Pensions Secretary announced plans on Thursday night for £3 billion in additional funds. This will allow current claimants of personal independence payments to keep their current

Steerpike

Poll: half of voters unaware of ‘Boriswave’

What likelihood of a Boris Johnson comeback? Well, according to the man himself, there is, apparently, ‘more chance of a baked bean winning Royal Ascot’ than an improbable second premiership. Yet amid Kemi Badenoch’s constant woes, there are those who still harbour hopes of Johnson 2.0. Of course, one massive stumbling block could be the

Politicians, not ChatGPT, caused the recruitment slump

The machines are already smarter and better organised than humans. They never ask for a pay rise, and they don’t ask any awkward questions about the company’s environmental record. An artificial employee is, in many ways, the model employee. But is artificial intelligence really responsible for a recent fall in entry-level jobs, as new figures

Mark Galeotti

Will Putin really rein in Russia’s defence spending?

At the very time when those warmongering Nato nations are pledging to raise their defence spending substantially, that doveish peacenik Vladimir Putin is promising to reduce his. It’s hard to know which of these two commitments is less plausible, but those anticipating the cranking down of the Russian war economy any time soon are going

Woolworths cancels The Spectator

The Spectator has thousands of readers in South Africa, many of whom get their weekly magazine from Woolworths, the country’s upmarket retailer. Not any longer. Woolworths has taken the bizarre decision to stop selling The Spectator. The apparent trigger? Gareth Roberts’s ‘End of the rainbow’ cover story. Does Woolworths really think its shoppers can’t cope with

Does Starmer still want to be PM?

13 min listen

There have been a number of navel-gazing interviews with the Prime Minister over the weekend. Across thousands and thousands of words, he seems to be saying – if you read between the lines – that he doesn’t particularly enjoy being PM. In better news, Labour seems to have quelled the welfare rebellion. Liz Kendall is

Take me back to Glastonbury

Judging by the coverage of this year’s Glastonbury festival, and the reaction in certain quarters, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was little less than a hard-left, Jew-hating Nuremberg rally. It is an impressive achievement to unite the government, led by the Prime Minister, and the opposition in blanket condemnation of two of

On the Israel-Syria border, death is always close

Syria’s new president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is desperate to stay on the sidelines of the Iran-Israel war. Most middle eastern states have strongly condemned Israel for its surprise attack on Iran, but the Syrian government has been conspicuously silent. Since coming to power in December 2024, Al-Sharaa’s forces have confronted Iran-backed militias in many regions of

Melanie McDonagh

Should Chris Coghlan be denied Holy Communion?

It is not, it’s fair to say, a universal view among Catholic priests that MPs who vote the wrong way on assisted dying and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth should be punished by excluding them from communion. But so it has turned out with Chris Coghlan, the Lib Dem MP for Dorking and

Michael Simmons

Britain is facing a doomy economic future

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has confirmed the economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the first three months of the year. The figures, released this morning, are the ONS’s second attempt at estimating growth in the first quarter and, unusually, the GDP growth number was unrevised from the initial estimate. The strong growth

Sam Leith

The bluster and waffle of George Freeman

Retromania is well and truly upon us. Neil Young just headlined Glastonbury. Noel Edmonds is back on the telly. And a Tory MP has been turned over by a Sunday newspaper in a cash-for-questions scandal. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1997.  The humiliated party this time around is George Freeman, a former science minister

Why I hate Wimbledon

Here we go: two weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of the sport for people who hate sport. The most boring game ever invented, played by the most boring athletes, watched by the most boring audience, interpreted by the most boring commentators. In case the penny hasn’t dropped, I am of course describing Wimbledon, the only sporting

Gavin Mortimer

Meet France’s new anti-green movement

A new anti-green social movement is gathering momentum in France seven years after the Yellow Vests rocked the establishment. The ‘Gueux’, which can be translated as ‘beggar, peasant or outcast’, held a series of demonstrations on Saturday at ports across France. The principal grouse are wind turbines, many of which are scheduled to be constructed

Steerpike

Labour contenders jockey for position

They say you should never waste a good crisis. And that certainly seems to be the mantra of certain senior figures within the Labour party, given their prominence in recent days. First, there was Wes Streeting out on the Sunday airwaves. Asked about the ‘Death, death to the IDF’ chant at Glastonbury, the Health Secretary

Bob Vylan was grotesque, but arrest would be wrong

It is with some measure of irritation, I must confess, that I am drawn away from this balmy weekend to discuss the idiotic antics of a so-called musical act by the name of ‘Bob Vylan’. At Glastonbury on Saturday, the frontman of the English ‘punk duo’ led the crowd in a chant. First it was just ‘Free, free Palestine’; but then it became ‘Death, death to the IDF’. They also

Rod Liddle

The Guardian: let babies vote

I think I have just located Peak Guardian. It can be found on page 57 of the newspaper’s latest Saturday magazine, ‘Saturday’. And it rests under the headline: ‘Should we give babies the right to vote?’ In the piece, a woman called Laura Spinney advances the case for ‘ageless voting’. She accepts that a common