Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Can Boris leave a nuclear legacy?

16 min listen

Despite a relatively quiet summer from the government, Boris Johnson has waded finally waded into the energy crisis, announcing £700 million of funding for Sizewell C, the nuclear plant. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about what’s behind this development (and whether it could be anything to do with Johnson trying to establish some kind of legacy, in the last days of his premiership). Isabel sums up his energy contribution as: ‘To a certain extent it’s him saying: if you look backwards or forwards, it’s not my fault’. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss’s Oxford Europhilia revealed

Throughout the leadership contest, Liz Truss has been all too keen to paint herself as a Brexit queen, keen to slay the dragons of Brussels. Yet Mr S has been doing some digging into the Foreign Secretary’s past and it transpires she was rather more of a Europhile than previously revealed. Truss even headed up a pro-EU group that backed the Maastricht Treaty while a student at Oxford University doing PPE. Despite being a late convert to the Brexit cause, the PM-in-waiting was once an active Liberal Democrat and pro-European. As a blue stocking girl in the mid-1990s she was a key player in the federalist Oxford Reform Club, even

Steerpike Steerpike

Poll: voters don’t want Boris in Truss’s cabinet

The Tory leadership race is almost over and at last a new PM will be announced. Most expect that next Tuesday it will be Liz Truss, the Insta-loving, Beyonce-quoting, cheese-bashing Foreign Secretary, who will be stutting her way up Downing Street to the famous door of No. 10. Her first order of business – after kissing hands with the Queen and giving her nuclear instructions – will be the appointment of a new cabinet: a chance to reward friends and purge rivals. Steerpike thought it only fair therefore to see what the public makes of the prospect of several well-known Westminster faces making a return under Truss. A poll for The

Steerpike Steerpike

The V&A’s Tory troubles

All political lives, famously, end in failure: but not so for Tristram Hunt, the former Labour education spokesman now recast as Director of the V&A. Back in 2017, Hunt managed to leverage his academic credentials to trade in life on the backbenches under Jeremy Corbyn to run one of the world’s largest art museums instead. He now gets a cushty £200,000 in salary, bonus and pension benefits. Not a bad swap! But is Tristram overcompensating somewhat in a bid to break with his Labour past? For in recent months, the intellectual athenaeum has been lambasted in, unusually, the Guardian of all places, with the liberal organ bemoaning the V&A’s current

Norman Baker

The truth about Xi Jinping’s ‘One China’ policy

As the representative of Her Majesty’s Government in Beijing entered the room through the tall and heavy doors, he was met with a sight of Imperial splendour. At the far end of the glorious room were two comfortable chairs facing down the room, separated by a marble table on which sat a huge vase of flowers. The Chinese government representative sat impassively in one chair, while to his left, a harsh wooden bench stretched down the side of the room, occupied in strict hierarchy by various government functionaries numbering about 15. The British minister took his seat in the other seat, his view of his counterpart blocked by the flowers,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘Those Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me’: Dominic Raab on Truss, Sunak and his own future

If Liz Truss is named prime minister next week, her administration will look rather different to the government of the past few years. Rishi Sunak has suggested he won’t accept any job offer. Michael Gove, a Sunak supporter, has pre-emptively ruled himself out. Other prominent backers are expected to join the pair on the backbenches – such as the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab. Truss’s allies say he deserves what’s coming his way for having likened her economic plans of immediate tax cuts to an ‘electoral suicide note’. Yet for a man on political death row, Raab is remarkably cheery when we meet at The Spectator’s offices.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

After Boris: what will politics look like?

Boris Johnson has so dominated politics for the past few years that it is hard to imagine things without him. His premiership, though relatively brief, has been both eventful and consequential. With him in Downing Street, there was a constant – and exhausting – sense of drama, with frequent cast changes and plot twists. But next week Johnson’s run as Prime Minister will come to an end. Of course, he will not disappear entirely. There will be speeches and memoirs and his comments are bound to attract attention, which will make his successor nervous. Johnson, as previous Tory leaders will attest, knows how to disrupt the news agenda. Already he

Lee Cain

What Rishi Sunak gets wrong about lockdown

Rishi Sunak presents an alarming picture of what happened during lockdown in last week’s Spectator interview – one echoed by lockdown sceptics who claim that Covid policy was a disaster, stoked by fear and based on questionable scientific advice. Worst of all, they cry, the trade-offs were not even discussed. But none of this is true – it is Covid revisionism. I know because I sat around the cabinet table as politicians, scientists, economists and epidemiologists agonised over the extent to which lockdown would devastate lives and livelihoods. It was not an easy decision for anyone. We locked down because we knew the cost of ‘letting Covid rip’ was far

Andrew Tettenborn

Is university good value for money?

Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money. Among graduates, many of whom will have paid these fees, the answer (by a margin of well over two to one) was clear. They didn’t. For good measure, nearly half of the graduates polled thought most degrees actually left them worse off overall, against just over a third who thought they led to financial benefits.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Trussonomics: a beginner’s guide

When polls started to show Liz Truss miles ahead of Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership contest, her team adopted a cautious campaign strategy. Why gamble on another interview with Nick Robinson when last time she had struggled to name a single economist who backed her economic plans? Eventually she landed on Professor Patrick Minford, an academic at Cardiff Business School and a bullish Brexiteer. Minford went on the record calling for interest rates to rise to 7 per cent, which Truss then had to defend and deflect. But that moment in the Robinson interview, widely reported as a humiliation, turned out to be one of the most helpful points

Robin Ashenden

Liz Truss should aspire to emulate Thatcher in Russia

The Russian political and media establishment have got Liz Truss in their sights once again. As well as analyst Igor Korotchenko’s crude declaration that Truss ‘doesn’t belong in politics, but in the kitchen’, a clip currently doing the rounds on Russian TV shows her shocked reaction in July when presenter Kate McCann fainted and keeled over in a TV debate. Vladimir Solovyov, a key Kremlin propagandist, has argued that the same stunned helplessness would be Truss’s reaction ‘when Britain falls’ and accused her of ‘delusions of grandeur’. The Kremlin, it’s clear, doesn’t hold our likely soon-to-be Prime Minister in very high esteem, though whether this reflects a sharp decline in

Wednesday

Rodric Braithwaite

Will Russians soon realise how remarkable Mikhail Gorbachev was?

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final president of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician and as a domestic reformer. I first met him when he came to London in December 1984, when Mrs Thatcher said that she liked him and could do business with him. He was open, friendly, and spoke without notes: the opposite of his predecessors. Some of Thatcher’s own officials suspected that he was merely an old-fashioned communist who had learned new tricks, and that his charm was seducing her from her clear view of the Soviet threat. Thatcher was right, and the sceptics were wrong. By that time, the Soviet

Steerpike Steerpike

GB News shakes up its stars

The winds of change are blowing through Paddington, with news reaching Steerpike of something of a bloodbath over at GB News. The self-proclaimed ‘People’s Channel’ is currently undergoing a shake-up in its personnel and programming, with staff being told today of changes to take effect from the beginning of next week. All individual shows between midday to 4 p.m are to be effectively scrapped and replaced. Stars Gloria De Piero, the former MP, and economics journalist Liam Halligan will therefore no longer work on their current shows: instead they will both expand on their work on other features. De Piero also gets to co-host a new weekday show, titled simply:

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Labour in trouble again with the rail strikes?

11 min listen

Today rail union leaders announced another round of strikes, this time to coincide with the Labour party conference. Is there a message here that they are trying to send to Kier Starmer? Should we expect similar disruption during the Conservative Party Conference? Also on the podcast, after the death of the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was instrumental in ending the Cold War, how well do we understand future geopolitical threats? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. Get tickets to Coffee House Shots Live here: www.spectator.co.uk/afterboris

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will Sunak’s heating bill plan be quashed by Truss?

When the next prime minister is installed in Downing Street on Monday, we can expect a package of initiatives to help households with their heating bills. But will Rishi Sunak’s existing scheme – which promised £400 worth of handouts to every household – survive if, as expected, Liz Truss walks into No. 10? The scheme has already been heavily criticised because it is not means-tested and fails to target help towards the poorest. But this morning came bad news: the Office for National Statistics has decided to treat the £400 handout as extra income, not as a reduction in bills as was intended. This matters because it means the scheme

Douglas Murray

Green parties are facing a reality check

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump’s Al Capone moment is nowhere near

When the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida earlier this month, various pundits suggested the raid could be an ‘Al Capone moment’. The Feds might not have got him for attempted insurrection, collusion with Putin, or corruption, it was said, but he could go down for a technicality: ie, withholding sensitive official documents he legally should have returned. We’ve heard that ‘Capone moment’ motif a lot throughout the Trump years — and it tells you a lot more about the state of American journalism than anything else. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and a deeply shady character in his own right, used to say it to make headlines.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

British bobbies have much to learn from French police officers

Priti Patel wants the police to get back to basics and solve crime instead of parading their progressive credentials at every available opportunity. It’s about time: recorded crime in England and Wales is at a 20-year-old high. Villains have never had it so good. Just 5.6 per cent of offences reported to police resulted in anyone being charged or summonsed in 2021-22, a drop of ten per cent from 2014-2015.   The Home Secretary is said to support a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank that warns that the police’s persistence in espousing social justice causes is ‘hugely damaging’ to public confidence. There is a growing sense among the public that

Steerpike Steerpike

‘Rude and threatening’: MPs bully expenses staff

Given the state of the country, you’d have thought MPs might have better things to do than abuse and belittle those running the parliamentary expenses scheme. But that’s exactly what some of our elected masters appear to have been doing in recent months, according to a Freedom of Information request sent by Mr S. Staff at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) recorded six anonymised incidents of ‘bullying and abusive behaviour by MPs’ in one 14-month period between July 2020 and September 2021. Among them include one male MP ‘threatening to make bullying and harassment complaints against [IPSA’s] validation team if they do not approve his wrongly categorised claims for

Sara Wheeler

How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again

Every country has an origin story but none has ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject is inseparable from myth. In this impressive and deeply immersive book, the author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power manipulate both events and legend to shape the present. It is a saga of multi-millennial identity politics. A bestselling historian with a storied background himself, Figes arranges his material chronologically over ten chapters, beginning with the medieval chronicles of Kievan Rus. Those sources launched myths that became fundamental to the Russian understanding of nationhood. He