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
The Lib Dem conference is well underway and the party has a spring in its step. After four by-election gains in this parliament, there’s much excited talk in the conference bars about the party doubling their MPs next year. So what’s behind the orange surge? Clearly, er, not their less-than-charismatic leader. Sir Ed Davey was
It’s the first day of conference season and the Liberal Democrats are keen to make the most of it. This year their slogan is ‘For a fair deal’. But is renegotiating the Brexit deal really what they’re all about? Ahead of this weekend’s conference Sir Ed Davey was keen to put such talk to bed,
Just when we thought we had seen the last of John Bercow on our screens, the news has broken that the former speaker of the House of Commons is joining the line up of the US version of the hit game show The Traitors. Currently being filmed in Scotland, the show will see Bercow join the
Big news from the media world. Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as Chairman of Fox and News Corp as of November, with his son Lachlan succeeding him as sole chair of both. Murdoch will assume the title of Chairman Emeritus of each company, after seven decades in the print and broadcast industries. The Sun king, aged 92, wrote in
If you want a bruiser, send for Badenoch. Following Rishi Sunak’s net zero announcement yesterday, the Business and Trade Secretary was deployed to do the morning media round. Asked about Zac Goldsmith’s criticisms of the move, she told Nick Ferrari on LBC that the peer ‘is somebody who cares very much about the environment, he
Rishi Sunak defended his net zero u-turn during an acrimonious interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson on the Today programme. The Prime Minister, who yesterday pushed back the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2035, insisted that: ‘I believe in net zero and I want to deliver it’. But Sunak came in for
So there we have it. Rishi Sunak’s big announcement this afternoon was, er, a not entirely unreasonable five-year delay in the ban on petrol cars and gas boilers. Snap polling suggests it has gone down well with the public, who back the measure by 50 to 34 per cent. But judging from some of the
Talk about politics making strange bedfellows. It seems some unlikely alliances are being formed on this wet Wednesday afternoon, following the news that Rishi Sunak plans to water down his Net Zero commitments this evening. On the Tory side, two of Liz Truss’s former supporters – Chris Skidmore and Simon Clarke –were straight out of
The president of Guyana will take centre stage at the United Nations today – but before doing so he had to take on ITV’s Richard Madeley. President Irfaan Ali, who has said descendants of European slave traders should offer to pay reparations to right historical wrongs, came to blows with the Good Morning Britain host
Rishi Sunak hasn’t even formally announced his plans to water down the government’s net zero pledges, but already the backlash has begun. Tory peer Zac Goldsmith, who stormed out of Sunak’s government this summer, described the u-turn as a ‘moment of shame’ for Britain. He called for an ‘election now’ and said the PM’s time
The Russell Brand revelations have prompted much soul-searching in recent days from hand-wringing hacks fretting about the norms of the noughties. Leading the charge today is Marina Hyde, the toast of centrist dads everywhere. She has written in the Guardian about her angst concerning the infamous ‘Sachsgate’ episode of Brand’s career. Back in October 2008,
Who knew a high-speed rail network involved so many U-turns? It’s not just the government who are flip-flopping on HS2 expansion: anything they can do, Labour can do better! The Opposition have now tried three different positions in 48 hours on suggestions that HS2’s planned route could be cut back. On Sunday, frontbencher Pat McFadden
Radio 4 show In Our Time celebrates its landmark 1,000th episode this week. Host Melvyn Bragg is one of the Beeb’s biggest stars, but it seems his salary hardly puts him on level pegging with some of the corporation’s other big names. In an interview marking In Our Time‘s millennial episode, Bragg gently points out that
There’s nothing the Nats wouldn’t do to give their independence obsession a little more airtime. They’ll take the publicity from wherever they can get it – and that includes the pro-Putin Russia Today programme. It has emerged that First Minister Humza Yousaf appeared on the controversial channel twice in the past, first in 2013 and
With the polls pointing to a Tory thrashing, how many of the 2019 Red Wallers will win their seats next time? One who isn’t hanging around to find out is Dehenna Davison, the 30-year-old MP for Bishop Auckland. She announced back in November that she was standing down from parliament and today she has also
She’s back! One year on from the mini-Budget, Liz Truss arrived at the Institute for Government, flashing grins and firing off one-liners. The speech was of the pure Trussite vintage – little humility but much recrimination, with fingers labelled at the Usual Suspects of ‘corporatist social democracy’. Then it was on to the Q&A –
It all kicked off on GB News this morning, following a joint Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into Russell Brand, in which the news outlets accuse Brand of rape and sexual assault (Brand vehemently denies the allegations). After the pair interviewed Labour shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth, GB News host Andrew Pierce brought up
Poor Liz Truss. Today is the day Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister had hoped to launch an impassioned defence of her legacy. In a speech this morning marking the approaching anniversary of her disastrous mini budget, Truss planned to talk up her economic plan and attack her critics among ‘the London dinner party circuit’. But it
If only more politicians were like Rory Stewart. That is pretty much the gist of his book Politics on the Edge. While Stewart is the man called into politics to serve the people, the same isn’t true of his colleagues. Stewart’s memoir has a short list of ‘goodies’; namely, himself. But there is a long
The Labour party is on a charm offensive – not with Brits, but with our European cousins over the water. Keir Starmer has unveiled plans to drop the Rwanda deportation programme and cosy back up to Brussels in the hope of striking a new asylum deal. But it seems Labour’s plans to present themselves as the party who will kiss
