Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Rishi Sunak is right to get rid of 20 mph zones

Are we seeing the real Rishi Sunak at last? Since telling the nation on 20 September that his government will be taking a more realistic approach to reducing carbon emissions, the Prime Minister has announced – or, more often, refused to deny – that he intends to introduce a whole bunch of policies that horrify bien

Don’t read too much into North Korea releasing a US soldier

Perhaps he was not so useful after all. Yesterday, North Korea’s decision to expel Private Travis King, just over two months after the US soldier bolted across the inter-Korean border, quashed speculation that he would be held captive for years. A month after admitting that King had been detained, Pyongyang decided to ‘expel’ the man

Freddy Gray

Who is winning America’s class war?

38 min listen

This week Freddy is joined in The Spectator offices by regular contributor and fellow of urban studies at Chapman University, Joel Kotkin. They discuss Biden and Trump’s respective attempts to burnish their credentials with the unions this week, how the cultural agenda is alienating voters, and whether technology could prevent the coming of neo-feudalism.

Ross Clark

The UK’s GDP is proving Remainers wrong

You can almost sense the agonising among hardcore remainers, the howls of anguish. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Instead of still struggling to reach its pre-pandemic high it seems that the UK economy in fact surpassed 2019 levels two years ago.  Previously, the ONS

The Spectator at Tory conference 2023: events programme

The Conservative party conference in Manchester is something of a political version of the Edinburgh festival: you go for the fringes, not the main events, and there’s no end of variety. The Spectator is hosting a packed and entertaining schedule of fringe events – and a famously un-crashable party. All our events are free but require

Gavin Mortimer

The war against the French police is just getting started

Last Saturday in Paris a police officer leapt from his car and levelled his handgun at a baying mob. The thugs backed off long enough for the policeman and his colleagues to make good their escape.   The chief of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, praised the officer’s ‘sang-froid’ in successfully extracting his team from

Young people are right to hate the Tories

According to the latest YouGov polling, just 1 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds plan to vote Conservative at the next election. That’s right – 1 per cent. There are now more caravans in the UK than young Tories. Among 24- to 49-year-olds, the figures aren’t much better; Rishi Sunak’s party trails Labour by 45

The outrageous felling of the Sycamore Gap tree

One August afternoon, my dad, my uncle, and I were walking along Hadrian’s Wall. It was pouring. Our shoes were full of water, our glasses had steamed up, and our pac-a-macs were sticking to our bodies.  Seemingly out of nowhere, we came upon a little dip in the cliff, within which was nestled a tall

Steerpike

Rishi roasts Truss, Hancock and the lobby

To the Parlimentary Press Gallery dinner, held in the splendour of the National Liberal Club. This event hasn’t been held for four years, with Press Gallery chair Sam Lister joking that ‘Boris Johnson locked the country down’ to avoid attending while Liz Truss resigned the day her invitation to this shindig arrived. Lister gave the

Steerpike

Will Fergus Ewing now defect?

The SNP civil war has returned to the offices of Holyrood and nationalist infighting is only getting more toxic. Veteran politician Fergus Ewing was last night disciplined after months of vocally criticising his party’s policies — and voting against the government during junior minister Lorna Slater’s confidence motion.  Although his punishment has been dished up,

James Heale

What’s behind Labour’s private school U-turn?

14 min listen

Another day, another U-turn. But this time it’s Labour, who have changed tack on their plans to end charitable status for private schools. Labour leader Keir Starmer previously declared that the charitable status for private schools could not be justified, so what’s behind the move?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former

Stephen Daisley

We should all care about the dire state of our prisons

Charlie Taylor is not so much the canary in the coal mine of prison conditions as the British Gas engineer nailing a ‘condemned’ sign to the entrance while ministers skip gaily into the fumes. Taylor, just reappointed to a second three-year term as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, has been raising the alarm about our

Jonathan Miller

The campaign to destroy the French GB News

The campaign to destroy GB News in Britain is precisely mirrored by a campaign to eliminate CNEWS, its French equivalent. The French political and media establishment would dearly like to shut down CNEWS which has overtaken #BFMTV (ipso facto BF Macron TV) as the most watched news station here. The campaign against CNEWS is intensifying

Katy Balls

How close is Britain to leaving the ECHR?

Will the UK government pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights? It’s a cause that Tory MPs on the right of the party have been championing for years, and their cries have grown louder as the Rwanda scheme has struggled to get off the ground. So far the Prime Minister has refused to

Tom Slater

Why is a Tory MP calling for GB News to be ‘taken off air’?

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re not even 48 hours into the latest Twitterstorm about upstart anti-woke news channel GB News – this time sparked by presenter Laurence Fox’s sexist, on-air comments about journalist Ava Evans – and it’s already become abundantly clear that all the outrage and fury isn’t really about those comments at

Brendan O’Neill

The chilling calls to shut down GB News

Tyranny is a sneaky thing. It often scurries in on the back of controversy. It is often when people are angry about something that authoritarians spy an opportunity to take a potshot at liberty. And, boom, before you know it politicians are on TV calling for entire media channels to be shut down. This is

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator – an update

The Spectator’s financial accounts are released today. We normally don’t make a fuss about them but these are unusual times, with plenty of interest in us as a company – since we are now, of course, up for sale. So for those interested, I’ll say a bit about our story so far. When I became

Ross Clark

Has the true cost of net zero finally been revealed?

When the Commons nodded through Britain’s legally-binding net zero target in 2019 all MPs had to go on was the Climate Change Committee’s estimate that the whole process would cost £1 trillion. MPs failed to probe this figure and the government didn’t even try to calculate one. Indeed, when the Treasury attempted to come up with

Steerpike

Rishi’s media round derailed by HS2

Ah the regional BBC round: the chance for any aspiring local reporter to make a name for themselves. Every year, in the run-up to Tory conference, the party leader must subject themselves to this ritual piñata, in which they face a barrage of quick-fire questions from journalists across the country. Last year it was Liz

The second GOP debate did nothing to trouble Trump

The worst job in America on Wednesday was trying to moderate the second Republican debate. With seven candidates on stage struggling for air time, the moderators, Dana Perino, Stuart Varney and Ilia Calderón, did a creditable job under impossible conditions. They asked the right questions but couldn’t stop the candidates from talking over each other

Germany is going to have to get used to the AfD

This week, the right-wing Alternative for Deutschland party suffered one of its first setbacks of the year, after it failed to win the mayoral election of Nordhausen, a small town in the region of Thuringia. Normally, Germany wouldn’t have much interest in the likes of Nordhausen, population 40,000. But this election has gained outsize significance for Germans

Steerpike

The knives sharpen for GB News

The GB News row rumbles on, with its enemies seeing the perfect chance to call for its closure. A genuinely indefensible blunder from two of the channel’s regulars, Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton, has seen both suspended. But questions are now being asked about the overall culture – and even whether it should be banned

Steerpike

SNP suspend rebel backbencher Fergus Ewing

Is open debate now too painful for the SNP? Fergus Ewing, one of the party’s longest serving (and most outspoken) politicians has tonight been suspended for a week after criticising his own government’s ministers and policies. The disciplinary action comes after a series of statements Ewing made in recent months attacking the direction of the

Max Jeffery

Would Labour grant more oil licences?

12 min listen

The UK’s largest untapped oil and gas field has been given the green light in a move that has been criticised by Labour, although Keir Starmer has said he will honour the Tories’ approval of the controversial Rosebank site should Labour enter government next year. Has the language changed around net zero?  Also on the

Steerpike

Watch: Lucy Frazer struggles through painful Sky News interview

The morning broadcast round is often dreaded by politicians sent out to bat for the government. Today it was the unlucky turn of Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, who ended up being savaged by Kay Burley on Sky News while defending Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s call to reform the UN refugee convention.  Early on, Frazer had

Stephen Daisley

Can the SNP hold on to Rutherglen?

Last night’s televised hustings entrenched the battle lines already drawn in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. Labour candidate and local teacher Michael Shanks sought to pin unpopular SNP policies, including council tax rises and lengthy NHS waiting times, on the Nationalists’ Katy Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor. Loudon retreaded her two-point case for giving

Steerpike

It’s Fox vs Wootton, as GB News debacle deepens

Oh dear. It seems that the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Channel’ has been at it again. GB News has been forced to formally suspend both Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton after comments on his show last night about the political commentator Ava Evans. In a segment ostensibly responding to Evans’ comments about male mental health, Fox called