All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It’s somehow appropriate that Matt Hancock finished third in the 2022 series of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Third is a word that fits him neatly. Third choice. Third wheel. Third rate. Third is the ‘and you did great, too!’ of victories. The day before, Hancock had donned the brass hot pants of ‘the Bronze
The Lying-in-State of Her Majesty the Queen was widely hailed in September as a triumph. The organisation was slick, the tributes were moving, the crowds respectful and the queue deftly managed. But it seems that the otherwise flawless ceremony had one misstep: the impact of all those thousands of visitors on the floor of Westminster
As Tory MPs ponder whether to stand down at the next election in the face of grim polling, the Prime Minister is facing an uphill task to show he has a grip on his party. Ahead of a difficult winter with the NHS and public sector strikes, Rishi Sunak is facing a two pronged rebellion
The disappearance of rural bus routes is one of the small tragedies of our time. It isn’t, alas, a very glamorous tragedy. It affects older people, poorer people, people who live in unfashionable parts of the country. You seldom see Twitter storms about rural bus routes. You don’t see footballers campaigning on the issue with moist eye, bent knee and clenched fist.
America could be entering the ‘Great Stagflation’, defined by economist Noriel Roubini as ‘an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions’. Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labour participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.
All of Westminster was glued to their screens on Sunday tonight to watch the final of I’m A Celebrity. For three weeks, SW1’s finest have watched Matt Hancock – the Casanova of the Commons – battle heroically against endless jungle-based challenges. The onetime Health Secretary has been covered in creepy-crawlies and subject to public opprobrium
The Covid situation in China is not looking good right now. The authorities have trapped themselves into a situation from which there’s no obvious escape strategy. Whatever they choose – or will be forced – to do next will be very costly. The country is extremely poorly prepared for a major surge of the virus
How can 20 per cent of people in our great cities be on benefits at a time of mass migration and record vacancies? It’s perhaps the most important question in politics right now, but it’s not being given any scrutiny because the real figures lie behind a fog of data. But the fog is easily
On Friday, Justin Trudeau made his much-anticipated appearance before the Canadian Public Order Emergency Commission, where he gave testimony about his unprecedented decision to use the Emergencies Act last February to suspend civil liberties and suppress the trucker protests against vaccine mandates. Using the Act allowed Trudeau to freeze the personal and business accounts of the protestors
Mark Harper – Inflation matching pay rises are ‘unaffordable’ The Transport Secretary Mark Harper joined Sophy Ridge this morning, at a time when public sector strikes are high on the agenda. Though rail unions claim to have found Harper far more satisfactory to work with than his predecessor Grant Shapps, Harper cautioned that nobody should
Farewell Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘trans, non-binary and gender-variant children, young people and their families’. Green resigned rather abruptly on Friday, and the statement from its chair was short and to the point. An interim CEO will be appointed in due course. Mermaids has found itself under
One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings
Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for China’s zero-Covid policy. Rare displays of public anger have risen to levels not seen since the Shanghai lockdown, and perhaps even since the death of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang three years ago. Chinese social
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, appeared 60 years ago this month. Vividly portraying a normal day in the life of a Gulag prisoner, it was followed by Solzhenitsyn’s two great anti-Stalinist novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), which helped establish the Soviet dissident-in-excelsis as a
I love a good hard debate, especially at a university. I can’t recall how many such clashes I have had, on God, free speech, marijuana, and Russia. But on the subject I really want to talk about, the destruction of the grammar schools, I find it harder and harder to get anyone to debate against
Just why is Britain still spending over £50 million a year in development aid to China? Despite it being the world’s second largest economy and investing in UK infrastructure projects, the latest statistical release by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office shows that in 2021 more than £50 million of bilateral aid money was spend
On New Year’s Day, 2014, during those sunny, innocent times of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, Labour MP Keith Vaz headed down to Luton Airport to greet new arrivals coming off the planes. There he met a rather bemused young Romanian man, Victor Spirescu, who had no idea he was going to become the face of migration on
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the government will spend (read: borrow) £43 billion this year to keep the average household’s energy bill at £2,500. Without the Energy Price Guarantee, bills would have hit an eye-watering £4,279 in January. It is certainly true that the blame for this bleak state of affairs should fall squarely
It must be great fun being Keir Starmer at the moment. Eighteen months ago he was asking aides ‘why does everybody hate us?’ in the wake of Labour’s disastrous defeat at the Hartlepool by-election. Now scoring points off the Tories is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. The Conservatives have ceded so much political
Heathrow, in London’s western outlands, never lets you forget it’s there. Jets ascend and descend constantly, turning the air into a migraine. People and cargo, all going and coming all the time. Except for the asylum seekers, the refugees, the migrants, who are stuck like lost baggage in commandeered hotels dotted around the airport. There is
How many more Tories will announce they’re stepping down at the next election? They need to tell the party in the next two weeks whether they want to do it or not, though there is no obligation for them to share their decision more widely. I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been
Will the last Conservative MP please turn out the lights? In recent days both Will Wragg, 34, and Chloe Smith, 40, have announced they will be quitting the Commons at the next election. And now Dehenna Davison – the Red Wall poster girl of the 2019 election – has become the eighth (and youngest) Tory
Imagine if Jeremy Hunt announced a new 60p income tax band that was payable only by people who earn less than £20,000 a year. Or if he reversed council tax so that Band A homes paid three times as much tax as Band G homes, rather than the other way round. There would be more
In many ways, the biggest political development of this week was the Supreme Court ruling that a referendum bill would be outside the competence of the Scottish parliament. This unanimous decision – and the fact that the UK government isn’t budging on a Section 30 order which would allow another referendum – means Nicola Sturgeon
It wasn’t so long ago that people complained that not enough former prime ministers chose to stay on as MPs. However, Rishi Sunak is fast discovering the downside to having one’s predecessors stick around. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are reportedly planning to back an attempt led by former Levelling Up Secretary Simon Clarke to
‘There is a lot of ruin in a nation.’ So said Adam Smith over two centuries ago. He reminds us that strong, stable countries such as my country, America, can survive the pounding we have suffered over the past few years. Our nation may be continually tested, but it has deep reserves of strength. In
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Today the nurses’ union have announced that they will strike this winter as they seek a pay rise of 5 per cent above inflation. How do the government navigate these strikes? Where do Labour stand? Also on the podcast, with the government trying to fill the 1 million vacancies in the job market, how do
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, has been convicted of failing to register a humanitarian relief fund and fined 4,000 Hong Kong dollars (about £400) after being punished for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators during the mass protests in Hong Kong. The fine may seem small, but this is Beijing’s way of
The French have adopted a ‘when in Rome’ approach to the World Cup in Qatar, refraining from virtue-signalling their disapproval of their host’s beliefs. As their captain, Hugo Lloris, put it last week: ‘When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and
Today’s net migration figures naturally present a problem for ministers in that they are going in the opposite direction to what the government officially says they should be. As Fraser says here, net migration to the UK last year was at a record high of 504,000, and this looks rather different to the high-wage, high-skill
Perhaps the most cathartic moment of The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards was when the relatively quiet former PM Theresa May had a pop at the not-so-quiet Piers Morgan. Picking up her award for Speech of the Year, May did acknowledge her weak reputation as a rhetorician. But she got Piers where it hurts:
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New migration numbers out today show that, for the first time ever, net migration have exceeded 500,000 a year. Is this a problem for the government, or is this the kind of immigration that they actually quite like to see? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.