All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It appears the Queen has become the latest figure to be dragged into America’s culture wars after attending the State Opening of Parliament on Tuesday. Her speech, which set out the government’s policies for the new parliamentary session, mentioned a bill to introduce mandatory Voter ID in British elections – something that has caused the monarch to become lionised by some
Members of the arts establishment have spent the past week outraged, following news that for the upcoming academic year funding for university courses in drama, dance, media studies and so on might have to be temporarily halved in order to better fund courses in medicine, nursing, pharmacology, the environment and the various sciences. Bearing in
13 min listen
Boris Johnson has announced that an inquiry into the government’s Covid response will be launched next year. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about what could surface and whether it will shed any light.
Will the government learn the lessons of the public inquiry into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic? Boris Johnson this afternoon confirmed he was indeed setting one up, to begin in Spring 2022. True to form, Sir Keir Starmer complained that the inquiry should start sooner; a point he makes with almost every announcement from
Last night the great and the not-so-good of Westminster piled into London’s O2 Arena to attend the Brit Awards, the UK’s first major in-person ceremony of the Covid era. Special advisers, Cabinet ministers and ordinary backbenchers were among the 4,000 in attendance to trial how live events might work after the pandemic, with no social distancing or face
New growth figures were released this morning show that the economy contracted 1.5 per cent in Q1 this year and remains 8.7 per cent smaller than it was in Q4 2019 (the last quarter not to be impacted by the pandemic). Alongside this update, the Office for National Statistics also released its latest set of monthly
The Queen’s Speech yesterday may have seen the government’s fairly dry vision for modern Britain but a group of Conservative backbench MPs and peers have now banded together to propose their own alternative. Cracking down on immigration, breaking up the BBC and taking aim at woke policing are all proposed in a new book by
Boris Johnson used the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday to set out the policy reform he plans to do now that the pandemic is easing. This was largely centred on attempting to flesh out the ‘level up’ agenda through a focus on skills, industry and planning reform. It’s the latter bill that poses the greatest risk.
I didn’t hear the boom on Monday night. I didn’t hear the siren either, due to some loud renovations. Sitting at my desk in the bomb shelter in my flat that doubles as a home office, I found out we were under rocket attack by reading about it on Twitter. With the blast door and
Oh dear. Amid a smorgasbord of investigations into the collapse of Greensill capital and its lobbying operation, onetime adviser David Cameron has been forced to release all his messages to politicians and civil servants. Cameron and his personal employees bombarded senior ministers and officials with at least 50 emails, texts and WhatsApp messages about Greensill
The speed and scale with which voters, mainly but not exclusively in the north of England, have switched their allegiance from traditional Labour to Conservative has been described as unprecedented. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE called it ‘amazing’ and spoke of ‘a massive shift of tectonic plates’. Nor can the results of last week’s
As the Greek debt crisis took hold in the wake of the financial crash, there was one big political casualty. The main centre-left party PASOK — which had dominated Greek politics since the early eighties — collapsed, going from a comfortable 43.9 per cent of the vote to 13.2 per cent in 2012. A decade
After polls that suggested a radical shake-up at Cardiff Bay, in the end it turned out to be a strong result for the status quo in Wales. The Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford enjoyed a vaccine bounce — thanks to procurement decisions in Whitehall — and can now govern on his own should he wish
‘What is grave about this situation, Messieurs, is that it is not serious’, was how General de Gaulle addressed his cabinet following the attempted putsch des généraux in April 1961. That could equally apply to recent Franco-British ructions over fishing rights in the Channel Islands. It is mere gesture politics, for all the French retaliatory threats
Is history in danger of becoming a thing of the past on campus? In recent weeks, Aston in Birmingham announced a consultation on plans to close its entire history department. Meanwhile, London South Bank has announced that its history course will not be recruiting students from this Autumn. The condemnation was swift. Former regius professor of history at Cambridge Richard
The Prime Minister said today there would be a ‘full proper public inquiry’ into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. This is highly significant, because a ‘full, proper public inquiry’ means one led by a judge and with witnesses represented by lawyers. I am also told – though Downing Street is refusing to comment on
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Carolyn Harris, a key Starmer aide, has resigned her post as his parliamentary private secretary over allegations that she was behind some of the negative briefing against Angela Rayner. On the podcast, Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about whether Angela Rayner has come out of Labour’s scrap, on top.
There is a basic political idea behind the Planning Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech. When you build a house, someone buys it – and when they do, they tend to start voting Conservative. The Bill’s aim is to get more houses built, 300,000 a year by the mid 2020s, helping to create millions more
The resignation of Carolyn Harris as Sir Keir Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary (more here from Steerpike) shows that the peace between Angela Rayner and the Labour leader is very much on Rayner’s terms. Harris is reported to have left the job after being accused of spreading baseless rumours about the deputy leader’s private life. There have
Queen’s Speech day is one of the set-pieces when the government gets to decide that morning’s headlines. Barring disaster, the stuff you brief to the media the day before the speech will be what leads that morning’s bulletins, and has the best chance of being the thing that punters remember about the speech – if
Under first George Osborne and now under new editor Emily Sheffield, the Evening Standard has become something of a safe exile for onetime players in the Cameroon government. But now it seems the winds of cross-party change are blowing through Northcliffe House as Sheffield took to Twitter to announce the newest signing for the self-proclaimed
Let me go out on a limb here and predict that Michel Barnier, who is trying to rekindle his modest and largely forgotten political career on the back of his notoriety as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is not going to be the next president of France. Barnier is currently famous (but only, I suspect,
A 36-person strong electorate will meet in Belfast this Friday to elect Arlene Foster’s replacement as leader of the Democratic Unionist party. The choice facing the assembled ranks of the party’s MPs and members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) is, amusingly, between two men who share the same office in Lisburn: the Lagan Valley MP Sir
The Labour soap opera rumbles on. Just as Keir Starmer appeared to be moving past the turmoil of his botched reshuffle with a very public Commons walkabout with Angela Rayner, relations in the party have kicked off once again. Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary Carolyn Harris MP has resigned over allegations that she spread baseless rumours about Angela
So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased. Previous modelling published in
There have been some truly dystopian spectacles during the past year-or-so of lockdowns. Cops using drones to spy on dog-walkers. Park benches sealed off with yellow tape. Curtain-twitchers dialling 999 after seeing the bloke next door go for a cheeky second jog. But this headline surely tops all of that: ‘Hugs will finally be legal
The Queen’s Speech laying out the government’s legislative agenda included a commitment to banning conversion therapy. Douglas Murray argued against the need for new legislation in The Spectator‘s 27 March edition of the magazine. Earlier this month, with the citizenry still confined to their houses, borrowing at record highs and GDP in a record slump, there was
Is the government ever going to reform social care? After a lengthy row between No. 10 and the Treasury, the Queen’s speech does include a promise that ‘proposals on social care reform will be brought forward.’ The stand-off wasn’t just over how much those proposals will cost, but the design itself. Perhaps this is why
Since the conclusion of Brexit, former EU negotiator Michel Barnier has been keeping himself busy, releasing his own ‘secret journal’ of the talks and wading into the Jersey fishing row to claim ‘the British are behaving like buccaneers.’ For years the former French foreign minister was the toast of Britain’s Remainers, meeting Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Chuka
Might the 2020s be the seismic decade in which the post-war consensus, that liberal democracies do not and should not break apart, is broken? Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon certainly thinks so. Her lifelong quest to break up Britain must feel closer than ever after winning last week’s Holyrood elections. But there are hurdles yet
Westminster is synonymous with the word ‘Dimbleby’, the surname of Britain’s premier broadcasting family. It was here that patriarch Richard cemented his reputation commenting on George VI’s lying-in-state in 1952 and where his two sons Jonathan and David both made their careers on countless BBC and ITV political programmes and all night election specials. But since
Sadiq Khan is here to stay. London’s mayor has suggested he wants to stay on until 2040. But is this really good news for Labour? Or might the Tories be quietly pleased that Khan beat Shaun Bailey? In the coming years, one of Khan’s tasks will be to go cap in hand to the government asking for
François Mitterrand remains something of an enigma in French politics. Mitterrand was the original champagne socialist and he remains a poster-boy of the French left. But France’s former president – an adulterer, member of the French Resistance with a Vichy secret, secularist and sometime Catholic – doesn’t easily fit into any one box. This week marks forty years since Mitterrand
Alex Salmond recently joked that if he wanted to destroy Nicola Sturgeon, ‘that could have been done’. The former first minister clarified this weekend that he had only meant to point out that he hadn’t called for her resignation when asked to by the Holyrood committee investigating the Scottish government’s handling of allegations against him.
