All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Martial law can arrive with a bang: tanks on the streets, Swan Lake on the TV. It can also creep up on a country in the guise of a presidential edict with the title ‘The Decree On Measures taken in the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation in Connection with the Decree of the President
Just as it seemed a brief calm was emerging in the Tory party, the Prime Minister has lost her Home Secretary. Suella Braverman has left her role with Grant Shapps brought in to replace her. The circumstances of her departure are shrouded in mystery for now – but government sources suggest this is not a
A week of sheer hell for the Tory leader. Plots and rumours have swirled around Westminster. Rebels are said to be roaming the corridors and gathering support for an anti-Liz putsch. And yet she’s still here. Our death-row Prime Minister strode into the chamber apparently dressed for her own funeral. Black trouser suit, white cotton
It sounds like something from a spy novel: scientists linked to the Chinese military complex working at UK universities on sensitive technologies, which can be used for weapons development by the Chinese Communist party. Except, this is no novel. This is very much reality. New research uncovered by Civitas has revealed that there are at
Prime Minister’s Questions was not an easy ride for Liz Truss. Nor was it catastrophic. As James predicted earlier, crunch moments rarely end up being as crunchy as expected. The Prime Minister turned up with some well-prepared defensive lines (also something James predicted), including, curiously, ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’. It wasn’t clear what
The Tory whips have, in their great wisdom, decided to make today’s opposition day vote on fracking a ‘confidence issue’ in Liz Truss’s government. The Labour motion this afternoon isn’t the usual non-binding partisan one, but a mechanism which would allow the opposition to introduce a bill into the Commons banning the practice. It is
Liz Truss is almost exactly the leader the country is desperate for. Britain needs someone to take painful decisions and even alienate voters in order to get growth going. Given that the next election is probably lost anyway, there is a case to be made that Truss should serve as the sin-eater for Conservative policy, implementing
Embattled, humiliated and lampooned, Liz Truss has few public allies left. And she certainly has one less after today, following the suspension of Jason Stein, her acting director of communications in No. 10. Stein is a longtime supporter who managed much of Truss’s press operations during the summer leadership campaign. But shortly before PMQs the
Giorgia Meloni, who is about to become Italy’s first female prime minister, has won her first major battle. It was fought, not against her countless enemies, but against her ally Silvio Berlusconi. In a crucial victory, Meloni has forced Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister, to concede unequivocally that she – not he – is the
It’s the age-old dilemma for a media advisor when your politician is in a jam. How do you get out of doing an interview you really don’t want to do? Liz Truss’s former spad Kirsty Buchanan gave us an answer to that question to this morning when she revealed to the Whitehall Sources podcast just
Whenever a PMQs is meant to be a crunch moment, it rarely turns out to be. Having sat through pretty much everyone since David Cameron versus Gordon Brown, my experience is that a prime minister under pressure turns up with a series of well-prepared, defensive lines that they fall back on in answer to every
In his book The Five Basic Plots, Christopher Booker outlines five stages of tragedy: anticipation, dream, frustration, nightmare, destruction. So far Liz Truss has completed four of these. Tory party members, like Macbeth’s witches, hailed Liz Truss as ruler of a new low-tax, pro-growth era. She rose to the top, like Macbeth, in a triumph
The Reform party, under its leader Richard Tice, invented Trussonomics before Liz Truss – launching an economic recovery plan in June which claimed to explain ‘how to grow our way out of crisis’. The core policy idea will be familiar to anyone who has followed the disastrous aftermath of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget
Liz Truss will face the music this lunchtime when she speaks in the Chamber for the first time since she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, hired Jeremy Hunt as his successor –then watched as he junked almost the entirety of the not-so-mini-Budget. When Labour summoned Truss for an Urgent Question on the issue on Monday,
In all the recent economic chaos, it’s been easy to overlook one of the most important factors contributing to the cost-of-living crisis: inflation. But this morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics brings it back into focus, as CPI inflation rose back into double digits in September: now at 10.1 per cent on the
If you think British politics is cracked, spare a thought for Europe. A spat between Germany and Poland is rapidly developing into a full-scale row involving not only those countries but the EU as a whole. Just a couple of weeks ago, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party handed
The knives are out for the Prime Minister. The world watches as Britain falls into a simultaneous political and economic crisis. Yet commentators in Britain appear to think that this is resolvable. They think that bad politics gave us a bad Budget which has led to economic destabilisation. Clean out the bad politicians, reverse the
Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that
‘I am kind, I have a big heart, I’m an Aquarius. I love animals and I’m shy. I’m a tomboy. I’m an undercover nerd. I love cartoons and I’m a girl’s girl,’ says Paris Hilton at the start of Archetypes, Meghan Markle’s podcast about ‘dissecting labels’. This time the label is ‘bimbo,’ and with an
It seems it’s a day for chatty rats in politics. First, longtime Hunt ally Steve Brine went on Politics Live and inadvertently called the Chancellor a ‘fantastic Prime Minister.’ And now, Michael Gove has told the JLA Speakers Bureau that the country is ‘going through hell’ and that ‘all of us are going to face
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the cursed crusader doing a U-turn at the speed of light. Jolyon Maugham, the not-so-Superman of social media, spent much of lockdown railing against ‘Covid cronyism’, launching lawsuits at the drop of a fundraiser. But in his ever-online earnestness, it seems that Maugham has slipped
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Another day, another u-turn. Liz Truss met with her Cabinet today and is reportedly considering u-turning on the pensions triple lock. Are ministers heading for more ‘lengthy discussions’ on public spending? Should we brace ourselves for resignations? Also on the podcast, as Hunt looks at which departments to cut, what could this mean for the
Liz Truss was in an apologetic mood again this morning when she sat down with her cabinet ministers. She told them that the government had ‘gone too far and too fast with the mini-Budget’ and that this had been, in the words of her spokesman, ‘exacerbated by global factors with inflation rising around the world’.
Poor old Nicola Sturgeon. The news agenda at the start of this week was meant to be dominated by her new economic prospectus on independence. Then along comes Jeremy Hunt with his scrapping of the mini-Budget, which ensured everyone’s attention was on Downing Street rather than Bute House. If you did miss it, yesterday saw
It is hard to say what is more shocking, dozens of former British military pilots lured by vast salaries to work for China’s People’s Liberation Army or the fact there appears to be no law to stop it. At least 30 experienced pilots, who have flown Typhoon, Jaguar, Harrier and Tornado fighters, as well as
Find someone who supports you as much as Steve Brine supports Jeremy Hunt. Shortly after the latter’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer on Friday, Brine was all over the airwaves suggesting to Radio 4 that ‘you should see Liz Truss as chairman and Jeremy as chief executive.’ And four days on, Brine is at
How are the mighty fallen. Once, Liz Truss was the toast of Canberra, the champion of AUKUS and a Free Trade deal. But now her Liberal allies have lost power in the Australian capital and she herself is a figure of ridicule in No. 10. With her agenda in tatters and ‘Trussonomics’ dead and buried,
Liz Truss will not lead the Conservative party into the next general election, despite her rather hesitant claim to the contrary in an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason. There are probably now fewer than 20 Conservative MPs prepared to go into that contest with Ms Truss, or her alter ego Ann Droid, in charge.
There are no two groups more different than climate protesters and striking workers. The former are mostly plummy layabouts, posh road-blockers whose chief aim seems to be to inconvenience working people. The latter are working people. Their concern is not with the fantasy eco-apocalypse that so bothers the pretty heads of Extinction Rebellion agitators but rather
Spare a thought for Liz Truss’s communications advisers. They’re following the unwritten rules of crisis management to a tee, but it’s only making things worse. They find themselves in this quandary partly because the government’s situation is uniquely bad – and partly because the Prime Minister is so bad at communicating. Watching Truss’s interview with the
What do you do when a country is in crisis? You send in the army. And that’s exactly what two of the finest representatives of HM Armed Forces in parliament have taken it upon themselves to do, in light of the Tory party going a bit JG Ballard. Captain Ben Wallace of the Scots Guards
The WhatsApp message doing the rounds in Westminster yesterday was succinct: ‘Rishi PM. Hunt CX. Penny FS. And it’s a done deal’. Except that the only thing that’s ‘done’ is the Conservatives as a credible party of government. If there is indeed a stitch-up, one that sees the installation of the beaten leadership candidates as prime minister,
With Jeremy Hunt installed as the representative Sensible and Penny Mordaunt answering questions in the House, Liz Truss has been reduced to politely cheering on the people actually in charge. Those in Westminster seem to think that her chances of leading the Conservatives into the next election are comparable to the chances of discovering Lord Lucan and