All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Thanks to Brexit, we are now a free nation. But let’s not just talk about the opportunities that follow: let’s take them. If a young boy who came here aged 11 without a word of English, can serve at the highest levels of Her Majesty’s Government and run to be the next Prime Minister, anything
Nadhim Zahawi, Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt have declared their candidacy this evening. Ben Wallace, who had topped the poll among Tory activists, has announced that he won’t be standing in the Tory leadership race. Rishi Sunak is now leading the field in both MPs’ endorsement – he has 24 – and bookmaker’s odds (below). Sajid Javid has
Shinzo Abe, perhaps the most significant Japanese politician of the last 50 years, has been assassinated. The killing was carried out by Tetsuya Yamagamu, a youngish and apparently disgruntled former employee of the Japan’s Maritime Self Defence Force. It was a brutal and sordid end to what was an important if not uncontroversial life. Shinzo
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James Forsyth speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls about what Boris Johnson has achieved and if he will leave a significant imprint as a result of his time in office.
There’s only one candidate for prime minister with the guts to dismantle the self-loathing culture of identity politics that is destroying Britain. She’s uniquely qualified to take on the challenge because she’s a black woman raised in Nigeria who studied for her A-levels while working in McDonald’s. And she may succeed because, in addition to
Will this leadership contest provide a debate? The Tories got into this mess because have spent years asking who can bring them power, rather than what they stand for or who has the best ideas for the country. The leadership contest should come in two stages: first discussing what has gone wrong and then next
Oh dear. It seems that Britain’s favourite kimono-wearing, fox-murdering, bat-wielding loudmouth lawyer has done it again. The Conservative party is shaping up for a leadership contest between the most diverse range of candidates ever, including five MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds (Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid). There are also
The ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine isn’t a war – there’s a law and a possible maximum sentence (though no one seems to have faced it yet) of 15 years in prison to stop you claiming it is in Russia. Yet Russia does seem to be inching towards a wartime economy, for all Vladimir Putin’s
Whatever else will be said about him in the days and years to come, Boris Johnson will leave No. 10 having achieved the full extent of his policy ambitions: become Prime Minister. After a little under three years in office, Johnson has been reduced to the status of squatter in Downing Street, pottering about with
Dressed in full uniform and clutching a clipboard, Mark Rowley walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, down the steps and towards a row of microphones. It was January 2014. An inquest into the fatal police shooting in Tottenham of Mark Duggan had just concluded with a verdict of ‘lawful killing’ and
Rishi Sunak has launched a slick, well organised leadership campaign very early. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that he has been preparing his leadership pitch quietly for weeks and months. Will this hurt or harm him? There may be some Boris Johnson loyalists who will accuse him of disloyalty – although Johnson did
The Conservatives are selecting a new leader, who will become Prime Minister. What sort of a person should that be? It needs to be someone with the spark or edge of a leader, able to carry others with them – not just a clubbable ‘Yes Man’ type. It needs to be someone able to press
Boris Johnson’s resignation has fired the starting gun on yet another Conservative leadership election. The race to succeed Boris is the fifth to have been fought under the rules introduced by William Hague in 1998. But there’s a problem with the way the contest is run: it forces MPs to second-guess the Tory membership –
Rishi Sunak has this afternoon confirmed that he is running to be the next leader of the Conservative party. In a launch video published on social media, the former chancellor begins by telling the story of his grandmother coming to the UK from East Africa and starting a life here as he declares that ‘family
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The Tory leadership race has begun. Some candidates, like Steve Baker and Suella Braverman, have already declared that they will be running. Others, like Nadhim Zahawi, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, are expected to announce their candidacy in the coming days. What are their platforms? How many MPs will hopefuls need to have supporting them
Westminster is strangely quiet today. Most MPs are back in their constituencies. But the place will feel very different next week when there’ll probably be two rounds of voting in a Tory leadership contest. The speed of the contest – the 1922 executive is likely to propose having the parliamentary rounds wrapped up by 21 July – will
Over the coming weeks we will be regaled with dozens of personal recollections, from around the world, of the man who has dominated British politics this last half decade. Some of them will paint him as a foolish clown, others as a flawed genius, others will see him as Leaver saint or Brexiteering Satan, but
What does Boris Johnson’s resignation mean for the economy? The pound started its rebound yesterday from a two-year low against the US dollar after Johnson resigned. A few economists were quick to point out though that it had dropped so much, there was only one place it could really go: up. It’s very likely this leadership
John Stuart Mill once dismissed the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. When a reader queried the insult, Mill qualified it, but not by much. ‘I never meant to say that Conservatives are generally stupid,’ he wrote. ‘I meant that stupid people are generally Conservatives’. More than a century and a half later as the party implodes once
Keir Starmer is in the clear over beergate. This lunchtime, Durham Police announced that both the Labour leader and his deputy Angela Rayner have been cleared of breaking lockdown rules at an event involving curry and beer. When it comes to the event in April 2021, the police said there was ‘no case to answer’
Boris’s decision to quit yesterday fired the starting gun on the greatest game of them all: the Tory leadership race. Suella Braverman was first out the blocks on Thursday night before, er, Johnson had even gone. But it’s the launch of the second official candidate, Tom Tugendhat, which has attracted more interest. In traditional Tory
The SNP likes to portray itself as the moral guardians of Scotland. But does such sanctimony extend to Westminster, where the Tories have just ousted a leader accused of ignoring allegations of sexual harassment. Amid the chaos in the Commons, Steerpike was intrigued by the silence earlier this week coming from the SNP press office.
Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after he was shot twice while campaigning on the streets of the city of Nara, ahead of Sunday’s upper house elections. The incident took place at 11:30 this morning. A witness told NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster) that: ‘He (Abe) was giving a speech and a man came from
Tom Tugendhat has become the first of the Tory MPs depicted on our cover this week to confirm that he is running for Prime Minister. His strength: his military record and his consistency in opposing Boris Johnson which saw him left out in the cold for the last two years. His weakness: that he has
Britain’s Donald Trump. A constitutional vandal. A grave and potentially even systemic threat to the rule of law and representative democracy. Boris Johnson has been called all of those things in the last few years. Most of that criticism was cobblers, and we reached peak cobblers earlier this week when he hunkered down in No.
I know it’s the season of ‘dunking on Boris’, which is fine. He deserves a bit of dunking for the errors of judgement he made over Partygate and Pinchergate. But if only for the purposes of brief respite from all this Boris-bashing, I think we need to reflect on the one good thing he did. The
Three, five, or perhaps even ten whole minutes. In a more civilised, parallel universe, perhaps Europe’s big wigs would have allowed a slightly more dignified period of silence following Boris Johnson’s resignation speech before cracking open the foie gras and champagne. In this one, however, the gloating started immediately. ‘The departure of Boris Johnson opens
It’s been a tumultuous day in Westminster. Boris Johnson has (finally) resigned as Prime Minister after losing more than 50 members of his own government. So what better way to mourn or celebrate the fall of the Tory premier than over a glass of Pol Roger in the garden of The Spectator’s offices in Westminster?
With Boris Johnson going, talk now turns to the next Conservative leadership race. Tory leadership contests are always more like the Grand National than the Derby: crowded, unpredictable and with the favourite often not making it. But even by these standards, the coming contest looks remarkably open. There will be no shortage of candidates. Suella
Boris Johnson’s departure isn’t just front-page news in the UK. Germany’s press – which has never been much of a fan of Johnson since the days of Brexit – has taken a sombre, if derisive, tone towards his resignation. Today has seen the coining of a new term in the media, with popular tabloid Bild.de
Boris Johnson’s support for Ukraine looked like a gimmick for many in Britain. Whenever the PM was in trouble, he called president Zelensky. When things got too much in Westminster, Boris popped up in Kyiv. But for Ukrainians, Boris’s backing of Ukraine is no joke: he is a national hero. He is the most popular
One of the regrettable things about Boris’s resignation is that it will be hailed as a victory by the puritans. Boris is a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead – a Rabelaisian, freedom-loving character rather than a purse-lipped finger-wagger. More Oliver Hardy than Oliver Cromwell. But in the end that proved his undoing. He’s so firmly