Steerpike is The Spectator's gossip columnist, serving up the latest tittle tattle from Westminster and beyond. Email tips to steerpike@spectator.co.uk or message @MrSteerpike
Earlier this week, Mr S brought you the BBC’s internal guide to talking about climate change and how to win audiences over to the ‘correct’ side of the issue. Now he can report that the Corporation’s commissars of language appear to have also redefined what it means to be gay. That redefinition comes in the BBC
It may be recess but diplomacy does not stop. Last week Boris Johnson welcomed one of the main Belarusian opposition leaders Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to Downing Street to show his support for the cause. According to a No. 10 readout of the meeting, the Prime Minister claimed that the British people shared with Belarusians ‘fundamental values such as
It’s not just David Cameron who has been making a mint from his time in No. 10. The BBC’s revelations yesterday that the Old Etonian earned around £7 million from Greensill came just days after Theresa May’s eponymous company published its first set of accounts since being incorporated in November 2019. Cameron’s successor has chosen to focus her
It’s A-level results day today as students across the country eagerly await their results. But for Gavin Williamson the day began with a morning media round worthy of an F as the education secretary repeatedly refused to tell LBC host Nick Ferrari what he got in his own exams. The South Staffordshire MP seemed to
Shame, opprobrium and multiple select committee grillings – was the disgrace of Greensill worth it for David Cameron? The answer would now appear to be yes, judging from documents obtained by the BBC ahead of a Panorama special programme tonight on the story of the company’s collapse. According to the Beeb, Cameron made about £7 million
Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda. A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world. The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories
Oh dear. This afternoon an anti-vaccine demonstration marched on what they thought was BBC Television Centre in apparent protest at the media’s supposed complicity in supporting vaccines, Covid certification and lockdowns. Unfortunately for the protesters, the Corporation actually left the building in White City some eight years ago. Since 2013 the site has instead boasted
It seems like just yesterday that Vince Cable was the most popular Lib Dem in the land. Back in the heady days of the late noughties, Cable was regarded as the supposed seer who foresaw the banking crisis; a ‘safe pair of hands’ whose memorable jibe at Gordon Brown’s transformation from ‘Stalin to Mr Bean’ provided much mirth to
It’s not been a great year for the LGBT rights charity Stonewall. In May founding member Matthew Parris accused the organisation of trying to delegitimise anyone who did not agree with its views after a free speech row at Essex University. Stonewall was alleged to have misrepresented the law in its advice to the institution
Last week Mr S reported that – following months of deliberation – the BBC had (finally) decided to uphold a complaint about a controversial blog post written by its LGBT correspondent Ben Hunte. The case in question concerned a court verdict in December in which senior judges ruled against children being given access to drugs that would allow
Throughout the summer Nigel Farage has kept up his focus on the migrant crisis in Dover. The onetime UKIP leader turned GB News star has spent much of the last six weeks denouncing the efforts of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) which he has dubbed a ‘taxi service for illegal trafficking gangs’ for picking up
This week, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which sets the UK’s vaccine policies, recommended that 16 and 17-year-olds be offered the Pfizer vaccine – leading to speculation that the jab could soon be offered to even younger age groups. Speaking at a press conference on the issue yesterday, the deputy chief medical
Who is on top of the gold medal table at the Tokyo Olympics? China? The United States? According to former European parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt, it is, in fact, the European Union that is triumphing at the games. While you have to go down to seventh place in the Olympics leader board to find an EU country (Germany), Verhofstadt
At the beginning of the year Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was forced to hastily cancel a diplomatic trip to Europe, reportedly after top EU officials refused to meet with him following the storming of the US Capitol building. In the aftermath of the event, Luxembourg’s foreign minister suggested that Trump was a
You might have thought the hire wire act of balancing Britain’s overseas interests would be keeping the Foreign Secretary fully occupied this summer. But now Dominic Raab has added skydiving to karate and boxing in his bag of tricks, having signed up to do a sponsored freefall for charity in October. A letter has now gone out to Raab’s parliamentary
Sir Ed Davey has called on the government to ‘keep the British taxpayer out of’ the Sizewell C nuclear plant, arguing that a part nationalisation of the project would ‘be a total betrayal of taxpayers and cost every household in Britain a small fortune’. Ministers are reportedly considering plans to strip the Chinese state-owned energy
The news this month that the government will offer nurses a 3 per cent pay rise didn’t exactly go to as ministers had hoped. Public sector workers still facing a pay freeze took umbrage at their exclusion while the UK’s largest nursing union is planning ‘a summer of action’ over what they view as a pitiful
It was revealed on Monday that ministers want to remove Beijing’s state-owned energy company China General Nuclear (CGN) from future UK power projects. In light of this, Steerpike thought he would look into those MPs and peers who have declared enjoying hospitality from CGN in the past. Neil Coyle, Trudy Harrison, Sue Hayman and Lord
The BBC has had its fair share of reporting controversies in recent years. But transgender issues have been a particularly difficult issue for the Corporation, with one video being lampooned (and then quickly retired) in January for telling children there are ‘over 100 genders.’ One article that caused particularly controversy appeared on the Beeb’s online
It’s the issue facing all MPs this recess: what do you do for your summer hols? It’s not just Covid causing confusion this year, with approved travel lists going from green to amber at a moment’s notice – there’s also the environmental question to consider. Some MPs are reluctant to cast aspersions on their eco-credentials by jet-setting
