Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
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Nicola Sturgeon became emotional during her evidence at the Covid inquiry today – a highly anticipated part of the inquiry given the issue of deleted Whatsapp messages. How did the former first minister come across today? And what else can the evidence tell us about how the Scottish government operated? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and Michael Simmons.
Keir Starmer opened PMQs by describing ‘the plight of the Member for Mid Norfolk’, whose mortgage had gone up by £1,200 a month and had to ‘quit his dream job to pay for it’. That Substack post from Tory MP George Freeman isn’t quite as potent as a note left on a Treasury desk, but it allowed the Labour leader to attack Sunak by saying ‘a Tory MP counting the cost of Tory chaos after 14 years, and we finally discovered what they meant when they said ‘we’re all in this together”.’ Rishi Sunak’s response was to accuse Labour of not having a plan, and to quibble the figures about
Even Nicola Sturgeon’s enemies agree that the former first minister is a formidable politician. But at the Covid Inquiry, Sturgeon appears to be struggling to keep it together. Asked whether she was the ‘right’ person to lead Scotland following her earlier criticism that Boris Johnson was not up to the job, Sturgeon broke down in tears: ‘I was the first minister when the pandemic struck. There’s a large part of me that wishes I hadn’t been. But I was, and I wanted to be the best first minister I could be during that period. It’s for others to judge the extent to which I succeeded.’ NEW: Nicola Sturgeon breaks down
How and where did Nicola Sturgeon make her big decisions during the pandemic? Not on WhatsApp, and never badly, according to the evidence she has given to the UK Covid Inquiry so far this morning. The questions to the former first minister have largely focused on how she recorded discussions between ministers, and why she deleted WhatsApp messages. She admitted that she did delete them, but insisted that it was not her practice to have detailed discussions with colleagues about decision-making on this channel anyway. ‘It’s not my style’, she said, criticising the use of WhatsApp in government as being too common and that it was too open to misinterpretation.
It is one of those occasions when you don’t need to wait for tomorrow’s newspapers to know what will be inside. There will be the usual photographs of empty supermarket shelves, along with the message ‘It’s Brexit wot done it’. Never mind that there are always some gaps on supermarket shelves and that the blockades on French motorways (as that country’s farmers demonstrate their deep commitment to the single market) are bound to impact on some supply chains. The reason for the gaps, it will be asserted, is that from today animal and vegetable products imported to Britain from the EU will require a veterinary certificate. From 30 April consignments will also be
It’s not been a great morning for Nicola Sturgeon at the Covid Inquiry. In August 2021, she promised bereaved families via Channel 4 News that she would disclose all her WhatsApps, even though by that stage she knew that her messages had been destroyed. Today she insisted that she thought ‘anything of any relevance or substance’ ‘would be properly recorded in the Scottish Government system’ – even though the Channel 4 question was specifically about handing over personal emails and WhatsApps. Sturgeon now claims she was trying to answer ‘the substance of the question’ adding that ‘I apologise if that answer was not as clear’. You can say that again…
Will Labour stick to its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on a green industrial revolution if it wins the election? The party’s leader Keir Starmer appeared to row back on doing so last month by describing the green spending spree as an ‘ambition’. Now, Labour MP Tulip Siddiq has further muddied the waters by saying the plans are merely a ‘commitment’. LBC host Nick Ferrari, who was interviewing Siddiq this morning, was understandably baffled. But having asked the shadow city minister to clarify matters, he was likely to have been left even more confused. Pressed on what the difference is between a ‘commitment and an ambition’, Siddiq used a somewhat bizarre
Another day, another Labour U-turn. This morning it’s the turn of Rachel Reeves, who has done another copy and paste job by following Jeremy Hunt’s lead on lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses – less than 100 days after her own Treasury team lambasted the move. The Shadow Chancellor told the BBC that she had no plans to reinstate it, despite repeated criticism from key Labour figures including, er, herself. She told the Corporation today that: The cap on bankers’ bonuses was bought in in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and that was the right thing to do to rebuild the public finances. But that has gone now
Government borrowing is lower than had been forecast. The economy needs some form of a boost. And perhaps most of all there is an election within a few months. There are plenty of reasons why Chancellor Jeremy Hunt might want to cut taxes slightly in his spring Budget, and perhaps even once more by the autumn. But hold on. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just said it would be ‘fiscally irresponsible’. Well, perhaps. And yet, the IMF’s record on forecasting is very poor, and it is also very committed to a high-tax, big-state economic model. On that basis, Hunt should just ignore it, and cut taxes anyway. There is
With opinion polls predicting an oncoming electoral shellacking for the Conservatives, it is unsurprising that Rishi Sunak is hoping to find extra voters wherever he can. CCHQ’s latest bet is in the two million or so Britons living overseas who have just had their lifetime voting rights restored. On 16 January, rules came into operation allowing all British citizens living abroad to register to vote in general elections. Labour introduced a 15-year limit on voting rights for expats in 2001. Repealing that limit has been a long-standing Tory manifesto commitment. Doing so with last year’s Elections Act has more than doubled the number of eligible overseas voters from 1.4 million to
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After hours of late night negotiations, power sharing looks like it’s back on in Stormont – or is it? James Heale talks to Katy Balls and TalkTV’s Peter Cardwell about the latest political developments in Northern Ireland. Produced by Cindy Yu.
This week, a Conservative Prime Minister announced he was banning something – disposable vapes. The reaction to that ban – or rather, the lack of reaction – is a signpost to future UK health policy, which will lean towards interventionism in the years ahead. Companies making and selling food and drink should pay close attention. Over the last quarter-century around Westminster, I’ve watched many political debates about intervening to make it harder or more expensive for people to buy and consume things that are, in general, bad for them. There was Labour’s ban on smoking indoors, then Gordon Brown’s attempt to deter buy-one get-one free food deals. There was the
Donald Trump should spare a thought for Imran Khan. If the former US president feels overrun by lawsuits, he could comfort himself with the thought that they are a mere bagatelle in comparison with those against Pakistan’s former prime minister. Since being deposed in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in 2022, Khan and his PTI (Pakistan Movement for Justice) party has clocked up hundreds of civil and criminal charges. Some have been charges of corruption, treason, espionage and fraud. Others have been pettifogging in the extreme. Two weeks ago, the election commission of Pakistan won its case in the Supreme Court to deny Khan, a former world cup winning
The toll station on the A9 motorway near the French-Spanish border is closed with cones and guarded by the local gendarmes. A few dozen trucks are parked on the grass verges, waiting for the farmers’ barricades to open. The farmers themselves have gone, heading north to barricade Montpellier. The autoroute is utterly, weirdly silent. A thundering corridor of commerce completely closed. The truckers I talk to like that I’m British, congratulating me on Brexit as if I was personally responsible. They uniformly support the farmers although it is their livelihood that is being disrupted. Why? It is long past the time that credulous French people should support petulant farmer ‘unions’ demanding ever more
Few phrases are more likely to get the blood of ministers going than the words ‘Urgent Question’. Today it was the turn of media minister Julia Lopez, who was summoned to the House to answer MPs’ queries about the sale of the Telegraph and The Spectator to RedBird IMI, an entity bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates. The UQ was tabled in the name of Alicia Kearns, chair of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee, who asked Lopez what safeguards were in place to stop foreign state-owned companies buying up the British media. Lopez told the House that she could not offer any new information, but was there to listen to
It seems that talk of Tory treachery simply won’t go away. Less than 48 hours after Kemi Badenoch declared that colleagues planning to bring down Rishi Sunak are ‘not my friends’, the Guardian has today revealed that the Trade Secretary is a member of WhatsApp group titled ‘Evil Plotters’. Among the members of this group is her fellow cabinet member Michael Gove, a past master of the dark arts of politics. The paper also notes claims she regularly meets with her ‘key MP backers’ and has an aide ‘still working on leadership stuff.’ Team Badenoch have been quick to dismiss suggestions that she is working on any campaign. Her spokesman
Is power-sharing about to finally return to Northern Ireland? That’s the expectation in Westminster and Stormont after the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) endorsed a new deal with the UK government. On Monday evening, the DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson held a tense five-hour meeting with his party’s executive. In a sign of the high stakes nature of the discussion, one DUP executive member has been accused of wearing a wire – so Donaldson’s speech could be leaked to a loyalist activist who shared the details in real time on social media. But despite the commotion, the DUP leader emerged in the early hours of Tuesday morning to declare that after
So, what was the point of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act? What is happening today and for the rest of this week was exactly what it was supposed to prevent: whole rail networks closing down on strike days. The law is in place and rail companies have the power to issue ‘work orders’ to staff demanding that enough employees turn up to work to run 40 percent of the normal service. They also have the powers to dismiss workers if they defy them. Yet not one of the 18 companies which are affected by this week’s rail strikes have used those powers. The one company which did indicate that it would invoke
What sort of trouble is the Rwanda deportation legislation going to get into in the Lords? It passed its second reading last night, as expected, and peers also defeated an attempt by the Liberal Democrats to block the legislation entirely. But the debate gave us some idea of the problems the Safety of Rwanda Bill will encounter when the noble Lords really get down to business. There were truly stinging speeches from some peers who are not given to melodrama. Lord Hennessy, the foremost historian of the British constitution, has been increasingly frustrated by the ways in which he feels the past few iterations of Conservative government have been undermining
Michael Gove has written a staunch defence of the government’s 14 years of ‘achievements’ for Conservative Home. ‘Do we really want to go back to square one?’ the Tory MP and ‘levelling-up secretary’ asks, reminding us of the dim, dark and distant days of the country after 13 years under Labour. If that was genuinely on offer, I’d snap Gove’s hand off. It may seem hard to remember but in 2009 it was still generally understood that jokes are jokes and not statements of genocidal intent, that there are two sexes, that economic growth is a pretty spiffing idea and that the police are there to enforce civic order. Yes,