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
Oh dear. Every time Labour looks just about electable, up pops one of Keir Starmer’s MPs to help make that harder. Today it is the turn of Kate Osamor, one of the hard-of-thinking Corbynites who populate the opposition backbenches. She shot to fame back in 2018 when she threatened a Times reporter with a baseball
It’s the race that has had all of Westminster gripped. No, not the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire; nor the mayoral contest between Susan Hall and Sadiq Khan. Instead, all eyes this week have been on Rochdale, where the local Labour Party today met to decide their candidate for the forthcoming by-election. The contest
It looks like the ructions over Labour’s Palestine position aren’t ending anytime soon. Since the horrifying Hamas massacre on October 7th last year, Labour leader Keir Starmer has refused to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, instead making the case for a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ – which would involve Hamas handing over the remaining Israeli hostages
Last night The Spectator’s chairman, Andrew Neil, spoke for the first time about the sale of this magazine and the Telegraph newspaper to Redbird IMI, an entity run by the former head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and backed financially by the United Arab Emirates. In November last year, the government issued a Public Interest Intervention Notice, halting the sale
No wonder so many SNP politicians deleted their WhatsApp messages: they really are rather damning. In today’s Covid hearings, former Nicola Sturgeon aide Liz Lloyd is being grilled by the bulldog-like Jamie Dawson KC. If the Dear Leader’s liberal cussing wasn’t bad enough, the Inquiry has now unearthed some startling admissions… Throughout the pandemic, the-then
If there’s one thing that both Covid Inquiries have reliably provided, it’s expletives. Use of foul-mouthed language was popular among Boris Johnson’s top team, but members of the Scottish government were prone to the odd swear word or ten. And today’s Covid hearing has revealed that some obscenities came from, um, none other than the
So, who is the Conservative Britain Alliance? Westminster is virtually swamped these days with an alphabet-spaghetti-esque collection of different acronyms, ranging from the CGG and CSG to the the NRG and ERG. But the CBA is both the newest and most secretive entity of them all, with little known about the Alliance, other than its
Well, that was quick. Less than 24 hours after Simon Clarke called for Rishi Sunak to resign and tweeted ‘I have no further comment to make’ he has, er, issued a further comment. The former Levelling Up Secretary broke cover tonight after taking a battering from colleagues over his call for the Prime Minister to
It was ten days ago that Mr S brought news of the latest controversy to embroil our ancient seats of learning, after a lecturer at a leading London university allegedly suggested Douglas Murray should be ‘suppressed’. Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, was subsequently forced to order a review into the Home Office’s use of external
A feisty session of PMQs today. As speculation swirls around the future of the Tory leadership, Sir Keir Starmer sought to go for the jugular by channelling Tony Blair in the dying days of the Major government. ‘I’ve changed my party, he’s bullied by his’, he told the House to cheers. But Starmer’s efforts to
What is a woman? It’s a question Sir Keir Starmer has sometimes struggled with in the past. So it was perhaps no surprise then that the Labour leader chose not to pontificate on the subject when he addressed the women’s lobby drinks. Instead, Starmer opted to focus on warm words for his hosts and look
It’s a fun night on Tory WhatsApp tonight. Sir Simon Clarke – a cabinet minister under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – has tonight issued a call in the Daily Telegraph for Rishi Sunak to resign. But over on the Tory WhatsApp group of MPs, there is little sign that the parliamentarians are bolting just
Oh dear. It seems the blessed Nicola has slipped up again. Away from the high sea shenanigans of the fuity Houthi rebels, up in Edinburgh the extent of Sturgeon’s secret state is well and truly being exposed. Today the Scottish Covid Inquiry published text messages from the former First Minister to her onetime advisor, the
Is the BBC biased? Some Tories, including transport minister Huw Merriman, think so. But while there is plenty of evidence to suggest Merriman is correct, he might want to use a different example to the one he used when quizzed on the subject of BBC bias this morning. Sky News’ Kay Burley asked Merriman for
Poor old BBC. It’s been another torrid year for the Corporation after being embarrassed by Gary Lineker, lambasted over Richard Sharp and humiliated over various Hamas howlers. And now, even the mild-mannered Culture Secretary is having a pop at them. Lucy Frazer – never the most natural of culture warriors – was out on the
So. Farewell then Ron DeSantis. The Florida Governor tonight bowed to the inevitable and announced he was dropping out of the race to be the Republican nominee for the White House. In a four-and-a-half-minute long address on Twitter/X, DeSantis declared that ‘it’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give
It seems the renegade royal has run away again. All of Fleet Street was eagerly anticipating the mother of all media showdowns this month, with Prince Harry due in court for his libel trial with the publishers of the Mail on Sunday, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL). The MoS is the biggest selling Sunday in the
The saga of the Scottish Government’s WhatsApps continues to rumble on. The SNP regime has never been slow in condemning the Tories for a lack of transparency in the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry. So it was to Steerpike’s amusement then that Humza Yousaf and his Scottish government have been facing considerable criticism in recent months
He’s at it again. Like those unscrupulous bosses he professes to despise, Sir Keir Starmer enjoys taking the credit when things go right – but is rather less keen to take the blame when things go wrong. A prime example of this was offered today in an interview today with ITV, when he was asked
Just when you thought Putin’s regime couldn’t sink any lower, it somehow manages to. Like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that, actually, the Kremlin’s bloody war in Ukraine had had a ‘positive impact on life inside [Russia]’. Speaking at a foreign ministry press conference, Lavrov said this was