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Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Freddy Gray

Biden’s racial ‘equity’ plan is bound to backfire

‘America is a nation that can be defined in a single word,’ said the proud Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, standing outside the White House earlier this year. ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa.’ We shouldn’t laugh. The poor man has a speech impediment. Still, that ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa’ word will strike many Americans as an amusingly apt description of their country in 2022.

Katy Balls

What counts as a bad result for Boris in the by-elections?

The polls are open for the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections. The results are due in the early hours of Friday – with the Tories at risk of losing both of them. The votes have long been seen as a crunch point for Boris Johnson’s premiership – even though the fact that there was a

Steerpike

Jeremy Hunt loses (again)

It was with great excitement that Steerpike learned that Jeremy Hunt had (finally) made public what many had privately long-suspected: he’s running. Yet the more Mr S read of the politician’s bid for high office, the less it sounded like the Tory Remainer that we all know and love. For Hunt’s prospective manifesto included support

Isabel Hardman

Is Boris able to stand up to Sunak?

The latest inflation figures have sent Tory MPs into a tizz again, unsurprisingly. There are a number of things that they’re upset about: the first is the ongoing refrain that their party should be cutting taxes, not imposing the highest tax burdens in living memory. Another is that Universal Credit is largely ‘an unfinished project’,

Appeasing Putin isn’t the answer

Oddly enough, a visitor to Kyiv these days is unwittingly reminded of Israel, of all places. With sunbathers on the beach by the Dnipro, busy (though not completely full) restaurants and cafés, and hipsters and skateboarders, it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that this is a country at war. Yet

Brendan O’Neill

In defence of striking

Here’s something I’ve learned over the past few days. The right loves the working classes when they’re voting for Brexit, but it hates them when they go out on strike. When they strike, they’re wreckers, a pox on the nation. They’ve clearly been led astray by their smooth-talking union bosses. So what if there was

Boris, Zelensky and Britain’s new special relationship

Boris Johnson has been accused of shamelessly using the war in Ukraine for his own political ends. The timing of his contacts with president Volodymyr Zelensky suggests there is plenty of evidence to support this claim. At the end of last week, within hours of his ethics adviser’s resignation, Johnson ducked out of a planned meeting with Northern

Steerpike

Wallace takes a pop at Penny

Like the first swallow of spring, the sound of chinked glasses in the sun signals the beginning of summer. It’s the annual party season and Mr S has been doing the rounds this week. Normally, buying and selling is left to the City but if Steerpike had to invest sums in anyone it would be

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s state of denial

Crisis? What crisis? Emmanuel Macron emerged from his bunker tonight to speak to France for the first time since his party’s humiliation in Sunday’s legislative elections. In an eight minute television address – the briefest I can recall from the usually loquacious president – he had absolutely nothing substantive to say. There was not an

Katy Balls

Are the latest inflation figures worrying for the government?

9 min listen

The latest figures suggest that inflation has risen at the highest rate in 40 years. Now at 9.1 per cent, it’s not all bad because the rate at which inflation is increasing has in fact slowed down. However, on the podcast, our economics editor, Kate Andrews suggests we are nowhere near the peak yet. How worried

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Starmer fluffed his chance to land a deadly blow on Boris

It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? The deadly hammer blow that ends Boris’s career will be delivered by voters in the crucial Yorkshire and Devon by-elections. But hang on. The deadly hammer blow was supposed to fall two weeks ago when he narrowly survived the no-confidence vote. Then again, the hammer blow was due to knock him

Keir Starmer’s trade union conundrum

Where does the Labour party stand on the rail strikes? It is a question government ministers have spent much of their time demanding an answer to, rather than, as critics might suggest, trying to find a compromise that would avoid further strikes. It is, in any case, a rhetorical question: the Conservative party some time

Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s inflation contradiction

As Boris Johnson tries to limit pay rises to bring down inflation, ministers have no explanation for why planned rises in the state pension and benefits would be less inflationary than increasing teachers’ and nurses’ pay. The government is attempting to limit public sector pay to 3 per cent, while allowing pensions and benefits to rise to around

Isabel Hardman

Starmer made Boris squirm at PMQs

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both came to Prime Minister’s Questions today wanting to talk about the rail strikes. The Tory leader was keen to pin the blame on Labour, pointing out that 25 MPs from that party joined RMT picket lines yesterday. Starmer meanwhile thinks, as I explained here, that he can be bullish on

Steerpike

Councils take the biscuit with food bonanza

In his search for gossip, Mr S has few qualms about perusing other august publications for inspiration. So it was in that spirit that his eye alighted on a story in a recent edition of Private Eye which noted that ‘food bank clients in Liverpool’ were left ‘not impressed’ after 90 city councillors recently tucked

In praise of Mick Lynch

The RMT union boss Mick Lynch is currently dominating TV screens and social media, making mincemeat out of politicians and broadcast interviewers alike. Hapless Tory MPs that attempted to recite pre-rehearsed cliches and dodgy statistics have been gunned down by the mature, considered and, yes, gruffly charming manner of Lynch. In a previous life, I

Kate Andrews

The Tories are picking inflation winners and losers

Inflation rose to 9.1 per cent on the year in May, taking the UK’s consumer price index to a 40-year-high. Optimists are noting the slowdown in pace, rising by 0.1 per cent between April and May. But I suspect we are in the eye of the storm. This price spiral is nowhere close to over,

Steerpike

Rishi continues the crypto-craze

Poor Rishi Sunak. The Chancellor was once the golden boy of British politics: the free-spending, Insta-loving, charm-oozing toast of the Wetherspoons’ bartenders. But now Sunak has lost his shine after a disastrous three week period in which his Spring Statement was lambasted, his ratings went into free fall and he ended up being fined by

Gavin Mortimer

Boris is falling into the Macron trap

You can’t blame Boris Johnson for jetting off to Kyiv last week for another meet-and-greet session with Volodymyr Zelensky. He got a warmer reception from the Ukrainian President than he would have in Doncaster, the town he snubbed in order to grandstand on the international stage. Johnson was scheduled to have made an appearance at

The EU’s solidarity for Ukraine is a sham

The EU will formally add Ukraine to its list of candidate countries this Friday. But if you look carefully beneath the pomp, you will see this is much less of a big deal than Brussels would have you believe. For one thing, the gesture is symbolic. The list of official EU candidates is a bit

Isabel Hardman

How long can Boris hold the line on railway strikes?

Is the government’s approach to strikes and public sector pay too blunt? Today Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to underline ‘the importance of fiscal discipline’. The Chancellor told the meeting that ‘the government had responsibility to not take any action that would feed into inflationary pressures or reduce

Steerpike

More than 3,000 Tube drivers earn £70,000 each

Londoners have today been cursing the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union for the misery that its 24-hour walkout has inflicted across the capital. The strike is about a dispute with Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) over pay, jobs and working conditions, with the RMT asking for a pay rise of seven

Steerpike

China hawks demand TikTok answers

In Westminster these days, WhatsApp and Twitter are decidedly old school. Now the current craze is TikTok where MPs compete to gain followings through video clips. Zarah Sultana, the Coventry Corbynista, has the most TikTok supporters but the irresistible online app also has fans in at least two different Cabinet ministers’ households. Not all in

Svitlana Morenets

Could Lithuania be Putin’s next target?

When Russian troops started ‘military exercises’ on Ukraine’s borders, those of us living in Kyiv had grounds to worry. Putin operates by bluff, disinformation and false flags. He blows smoke, but sometimes his troops march through that smoke. That’s why we ought to pay attention to reports on Russian state media that there are to

John Keiger

Emmanuel Macron’s future looks bleak

The single headline across the front page of the centre-left daily Libération said it all: ‘La Gifle’. But much more than a slap in the face, Emmanuel Macron has taken a heavyweight sock in the jaw. With only 245 seats for his ‘Ensemble!’ grouping, the French president is a country mile from having a parliamentary

Katy Balls

Is Labour in trouble over the rail strikes?

11 min listen

The first day of strike action has begun with large parts of the country’s railways, as well as London’s underground lines, shut down. But where workers are trying to put pressure on the government and Network Rail over higher pay, it seems like the Labour party is in more trouble. Disagreement over the party’s position

Isabel Hardman

Should Starmer be worried about the rail strikes?

Sir Keir Starmer has ended up in a very Starmer-esque pickle over the rail strikes this week. Yesterday he instructed Labour frontbenchers not to join picket lines, and said at the weekend that the strikes should not go ahead, having stayed rather quiet on the matter until then. This has annoyed many of his MPs,