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
Business minister Nadhim Zahawi was sent out to bat for his colleague Robert Jenrick on the Today programme this morning and let’s just say it didn’t quite go to plan. The housing secretary faces a cash-for-favours row over allegations he gave preferential treatment to a Tory donor and his multi-million pound planning bid after the pair chatted at a Conservative
Today, the UK Independence Party announced that Freddy Vachha will become the newest leader of the party. Vachha has been Ukip’s London Regional Chairman since 2016 and takes the reins from Richard Braine, who resigned just weeks before the general election last year after clashing with the party’s NEC. For those who’ve struggled to keep
No one seems to think Boris Johnson has handled this crisis particularly well. But who might have done a better job than him? According to the Great British public, the answer is obvious: Mrs Thatcher. A poll carried out by Redfield & Wilton Strategies suggests that 34 per cent of people think that Maggie would have
Earlier this month, The Spectator‘s chairman Andrew Neil announced that we would be handing back the government furlough money. He wrote, ‘Instead of depending on furlough money from taxpayers, I have tasked the editorial and management teams to grow sales of The Spectator to 100,000 as quickly as possible.’ Reader response was phenomenal, with thousands signing up
Donald Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton has made a series of bombshell revelations in a new tell-all biography. Claims that the White House does not want aired in public, with Trump’s administration launching a legal bid to block the book’s publication. However the volume, which is supposed to be released next week, has been leaked in its entirety to the
Oh dear. It seems Matt Hancock has forgotten his own rules. Shortly before PMQs this afternoon, the Health Secretary was spotted slapping a chum on the back in a blatant breach of the two-metre distancing regulations. Less than a minute later, Hancock again disregarded his ministry’s own guidance when he leaned in to have a
Back in the day when celebrities didn’t pontificate on the news but kept their political opinions to themselves, Russell Brand used to be a stand-up comedian. These days, he’s known more for his radical politics (and his former squeeze Katy Perry) than he is for his comedy. Naturally, Brand had plenty to say about last
Boris Johnson’s ministerial Jaguar was involved in a pile-up outside parliament earlier this afternoon. It seems a protester on Parliament Square tried to halt the PM’s cavalcade as he was leaving via Carriage Gates after PMQs. According to the Mail‘s John Stevens, No. 10 is saying that there are currently no reports of any injuries.
Poor Alistair Carmichael. The Lib Dem MP was only standing up for beef farmers in his constituency, raising a problem with the UK labelling regulations. But it appears that Boris Johnson didn’t recognise the Orkney MP, lambasting him for his supposed support for an independent Scotland. Yes, that would be the same Alistair Carmichael who served as
Since becoming the new Speaker of the Commons, the softly-spoken Lancastrian Lindsay Hoyle has sought to distance himself from the tenure of John Bercow. While the latter spent his days constructing long monologues and pontificating from the Speaker’s chair, Hoyle has instead focused on limiting his own contributions in the Chamber and attempting to be
Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford has caused a bit of a storm in the Westminster bubble this morning – the 22-year-old’s plea to the PM to extend free school meals into the summer holiday has not gone unnoticed. As Katy Balls writes this morning, there is a growing feeling among Tory backbenchers that the cost of the
Non-essential shops across Britain opened their doors for the first time since lockdown today, as the government attempts to breath some life into the UK economy, while avoiding a fatal spike of Covid-19. Retailers meanwhile, face the difficult task of persuading people that it is safe to shop in their stores as the pandemic recedes.
Today, it was announced that Emily Sheffield, founder of ‘This Much I Know News’ and former deputy editor of Vogue, has taken over as editor of the Evening Standard. She replaces former Chancellor George Osborne, who will now become editor-in-chief of the publication. Osborne spent three years at the helm of the paper. Sheffield takes
It’s been 45 years since the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ first aired on the BBC, in which Basil Fawlty coined the memorable line: ‘Don’t mention the war’. Perhaps now though it would be more apt to say, ‘don’t mention Fawlty Towers’. Last night the Guardian reported that the video streaming site UKTV (which is
Which statue will be the next to go? It won’t be Lord Baden-Powell’s if locals in Poole have their way. Campaigners want the effigy of the founder of the Scout movement to go because of his alleged racist views. But those who live in Dorset, where Baden-Powell’s statue gazes across to Brownsea Island, aren’t too
Yesterday, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that he was forming a new commission to investigate the landmarks, street names and statues of the capital, to see if they should be knocked down or renamed because of their racist past or links to the slave trade. The announcement came after a statue of the slave trader
London mayor Sadiq Khan promised today that he will begin the process of pulling down ‘inappropriate’ statues around London – after Bristolians dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the river at the weekend. To investigate London’s landmarks, Khan has created a ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ which will review statues
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has insisted that its decisions and policies have been led by the scientific advice on the virus. It’s a commitment that has allowed the government to convince the public that drastic interventions to stop the disease have been necessary. But, equally, there have been criticisms in some quarters
Priti Patel was in the Commons today, to be asked about the policing of the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the country. And, it was an understatement to say that the Home Secretary was taking no prisoners when it came to accusations from Labour that she or the government did not understand racism in this country.
Yesterday, protestors at a Black Lives Matter demo in London vandalised the statue of Winston Churchill which stands in Parliament Square. The protestors spray painted Churchill’s stone plinth so it read ‘Churchill was a racist’ and sellotaped a Black Lives Matter sign to the former prime minister – the man who led Britain against the