Politics

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

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Galacticos descend on Westminster

Westminster is something of a ghost town this week as MPs, staffers and wonks all fan out across the country to pound the doorsteps ahead of polling day. With Parliament prorogued and the airwaves dominated by talk of the Red Wall, there is precious little to amuse those poor souls still remaining in SW1 ahead of the release of the first exit polls at 10 o’clock on Thursday. That is until today when a cavalcade of coaches came to town and parked up opposite St James’s Park tube station. For Mr S understands that on board was none other than the highly paid stars of Real Madrid. Los Blancos have arrived ahead of their Champions League

Andy Owen

Prisoners dilemma: should we pay kidnappers?

British-Mexican national Claudia Uruchurtu Cruz disappeared on the night of Friday 26 March in the town of Nochixtlan, Oaxaca State, Mexico. Claudia had been seen attending a rally protesting the beating of a local labourer, allegedly by security elements linked to the local municipal president. Unconfirmed witness statements claim she was grabbed and pushed into a red car. Claudia never arrived home and her family and friends have not heard from her since.  What is the right response for the British government? The most debated issue is whether to pay ransoms. Some governments refuse, others pay, or at least turn a blind eye to families that do. In Mali, where

Steerpike Steerpike

How would Whitehall respond to wildcat nats?

The SNP wants a second independence referendum. Boris Johnson has ruled one out. So what happens if the Scottish nationalists get a majority at Thursday’s Holyrood elections? Nicola Sturgeon has indicated that she will hold a vote — with or without Westminster’s legal consent. So Mr S decided to ask the Cabinet Office and the Scotland Office how they would respond to an unsanctioned Catalan-style referendum. In response to a Freedom of Information request, both departments said that they did not hold any contingency documents outlining the UK government’s response to an unauthorised vote. (It’s worth noting too that if such plans did exist, the departments would have to say so even if

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hartlepool turning blue would mean a Labour crisis

We have two years of elections on Thursday. But in England, the Hartlepool by-election is fast becoming the defining contest. If the Tories take the seat, which has always been Labour’s, it will show that Keir Starmer hasn’t stopped the bleeding for Labour in the red wall. It will indicate that the realignment of English politics is continuing even without Brexit and Corbyn. A Tory win would suggest that the 2019 general election was not a freak result or a unique product of voters’ desire to get Brexit done combined with their concerns about Corbyn, but rather part of a substantial shift in the electoral geography of England. Hartlepool turning blue

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Why the Lib Dems could soon cause trouble for Boris

Much of the focus when it comes to ‘Super Thursday’ centres on whether or not the Tories can pull off an electoral coup by snatching Hartlepool from Labour.  But the Lib Dems’ role in the drama has largely gone unnoticed – and a good result for Ed Davey’s party could spell the start of trouble for Boris Johnson. Labour needs to hold onto Hartlepool. It’s really that simple. To lose the seat, particularly to a Conservative party that has been in power for eleven years, would be devastating. Starmer is also under pressure in the local elections. To put this into perspective, Labour lost around 400 seats in the areas being contested

Mary Dejevsky

The rise of the female ambassador

It is, of course, an excellent thing and a mark of social progress when an institutional bastion falls to woman-power. If the days are gone when the upper echelons of UK diplomacy were closed to women then so much the better, when a woman who married had to leave the service, and when female diplomats — with the honourable exception of Pauline (now Baroness) Neville-Jones, who resigned after being passed over for Paris — knew better than to hope for the top postings. The 21st century requires no less: entry on equal terms to the men, progression on equal terms to the men, and access to the most senior jobs

Steven Barrett

The dividing wall between law and politics is under attack

All my legal life I have watched with sadness those who are ever groping, Gollum-like, unable to resist the idea that our courts can somehow give them the political victory which the elections deny them. During the fallout from the Brexit vote, I hoped this insanity had reached its peak. I was wrong. We are only four months into the year and already members of the House of Lords have advocated that our courts have a say in determining our foreign policy, while the House of Commons Privileges Committee has suggested our courts should enforce the appearance of witnesses before parliament — and that they should effectively be a court (which they

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Coming soon: the next red wall by-election

This Thursday is set to be a psephologist’s dream with the biggest set of polls outside of a general election in UK history. Amid talk of a ‘British midterms’ the so-called ‘Super Thursday’ will see contests for Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, London’s assembly and some 5,000 council seats across the country. But in Westminster at least one race looms above all others: the Hartlepool by-election and whether the Tories can make further in-roads into Labour’s once impregnable red wall.  Boris Johnson’s visit there today has set alarm bells ringing in Labour HQ as party managers would be unlikely to dispatch a sitting PM to a seat three days before polling unless there was

Debbie Hayton

Caitlyn Jenner is right about transgender athletes and women’s sports

Caitlyn Jenner – gold medallist in the men’s decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics – is now in the running to the be the next governor of California. These days, Jenner is more famous for marrying into the Kardashians before a very public transition in 2015. ‘Call me Caitlyn,’ screamed the headlines at the time. Like me, Jenner seems to be someone for whom gender transition was no impediment in life. Perhaps we both have our feet on the ground when it comes to the reality of biological sex? On Saturday, Jenner was accosted by a journalist in a car park. There were questions to be answered. Not about jobs,

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: PM should resign if he broke Ministerial Code

Douglas Ross – PM should resign if he broke the Ministerial Code Andrew Marr’s first guest of the day was Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. With potentially crucial elections being held all across the UK next week – including to Holyrood – the row about the Prime Minister’s arrangements to pay for the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat continues to rumble on. Marr asked Ross if he thought Boris Johnson should consider his position if the Electoral Commission finds him to have broken the Ministerial Code over the issue: DR: Of course. I think people expect the highest standards of those in the highest office of

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour MP’s platform rally with Tony Greenstein

Brighton MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle has managed to establish quite the reputation as a firebrand during his four years in the Commons, most famously ranting on the night of the 2019 Tory victory that ‘we will fight them in the streets’.  In the eighteen months since, it has emerged he claimed the Conservatives ‘conspired to murder and let die British citizens’ and that he had accused JK Rowling in Tribune of using her own sexual assault as ‘justification for discriminating’ in a row over transgender rights. It also transpired that he had written social media posts suggesting Jewish claims to Israel were ‘not progressive in [their] very nature’ and that Zionism was a ‘dangerous nationalist idea’

Steerpike Steerpike

Former French ambassador’s diplomatic blunder

Thursday was a red-letter day in the history of the Foreign Office with the appointment of the first female ambassador to France. It means that for the first time all the key British postings –Berlin, Tokyo, Washington, Canberra, Beijing, Paris, Rome, Moscow and the UN – are now held by women. Quite an achievement given the FO banned women from diplomacy until 1946 and required them to resign if they married until 1973. Unfortunately diplomatic affairs appear to be somewhat more retrograde just across the Channel. The former French ambassador to the United States Gérard Araud took to Twitter today to offer his thoughts on the four-time Pulitzer prize winning American poet Robert Frost, declaring:  The

Matthew Lynn

Ireland’s low-tax miracle is over

Okay, in fairness it might be the weather. Or the craic in the bars. Or the rugged coastline, golf courses, or the lakes. And yet for all its charms, there was always a far simpler reason why more than a thousand multinational companies have their main European headquarters in Ireland. Tax. For a generation, Ireland has had the lowest corporate tax rate – just 12.5 per cent – in the developed world. Even better, myriad breaks and allowances – in accounting circles the ‘Double Irish’ is not as you might imagine an especially stiff glass of Jameson’s but a fiendishly clever way of re-routing revenues – often take that down

John Keiger John Keiger

France’s military wages war on Macron’s values

On 21 April 1961 France’s most senior generals staged a putsch in French Algiers, still an integral part of France. The military coup was in reaction to the policies of the president of the Republic, General de Gaulle, and his belated decision to abandon Algeria to independence. The generals felt this betrayed their honour and that of their fallen comrades after seven years of a bloody war against Algerian ‘terrorists’ to keep Algeria French. Fast forward sixty years to 21 April 2021. Twenty retired generals (some four-star), a hundred mostly retired senior officers and a thousand military personnel signed a chilling letter in the right-wing French weekly Valeurs actuelles addressed

Dalibor Rohac

Europe should be wary of Biden’s cuddly capitalism

Judging by the European press’ reaction to his address to Congress this week, US president Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is popular outside of the United States as well.  ‘In the choice between going big and going bipartisan, big is winning, remaking America with government at the centre,’ the Guardian writes approvingly. Biden embarks on ‘a historic battle against inequality,’ a Le Monde headline announces. ‘America’s democracy can no longer endure the growing gap in income and education, so Biden has to fight for the middle,’ the Süddeutsche Zeitung piles on. Notwithstanding the president’s unassuming demeanour, there can be no question about the his ambitions. After the sizeable Covid-19 relief package, worth

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Does it matter if Boris did say ‘let the bodies pile high’?

Like almost everyone else writing on the subject, I have no idea whether Boris Johnson told colleagues in October that he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than have another lockdown. When such words are reported, they are given to journalists ‘on lobby terms’ and are therefore unattributable. But surely the report should indicate from which point of view they come. In this case, the BBC cites ‘sources familiar with the conversation’, a phrase which gives it permission, it thinks, to run headlines like ‘Boris Johnson’s “bodies pile high” comments prompt criticism’, as if it knows that the Prime Minister definitely spoke those words. Surely licence-fee

Steerpike Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith, No. 10’s rapid rebuttal service

It’s a tough gig defending this government. So tough in fact that the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson Allegra Stratton left the role before even giving a single press conference. The past week is a case in point – with No. 10 facing miserable headlines over the ongoing feud between Johnson, his fiancée Carrie Symonds and departed No. 10 aide Dominic Cummings.  Johnson has had to deny making a ‘bodies’ comment on Covid deaths while several inquiries are now underway as to how the funding for the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat first came about. Perhaps it’s little wonder then that these days ministers don’t seem overjoyed to be out

Henry Hill

What Arlene Foster’s ousting means for Northern Ireland – and the Union

The brutal defenestration of Arlene Foster as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party could have severe implications for an already volatile situation in Northern Ireland. It is almost certain that whoever succeeds her will lack the instincts which saw the outgoing First Minister try initially to make the Protocol work. Instead, the mission seems to be to try and shore up the base and prevent the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice doing to the DUP what the DUP did to David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists. This is a grim prospect for London, Dublin, and Brussels, although it won’t hurt the former’s case that fundamental change is needed if the Protocol

Roddy McDougall

Roddy McDougall, Theo Zenou, Gus Carter and Toby Young

23 min listen

On this week’s episode, Roddy McDougall remembers heroes of the speedway, (01:15) Theo Zanou examines at Stanley Kubrick’s fascination with Napoleon, (07:20) Gus Carter looks at a memorial to everyday heroism, (17:20) and Toby Young explains what’s wrong with Equity’s anti-racism guidelines. (21:35)

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What does the DUP shakeup mean for Northern Ireland?

21 min listen

Arlene Foster’s departure has left the DUP in a difficult place. Unionists could become disaffected if another relative moderate takes over, but younger voters might abandon the party if a hardliner becomes leader. What does this mean for Northern Ireland? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Denis Staunton, London editor of the Irish Times.