Politics

A number of new Whitehall appointments have been made since the election, but there have been a couple of returning figures too. Sir Oliver Robbins is from the latter camp, with Theresa May’s former Brexit negotiator set to make a political return after accepting a top civil service job at the Foreign Office. He just can’t stay away… As first reported by the Guardian, Robbins is the preferred choice of current Foreign Secretary David Lammy with the civil servant to replace the current permanent under-secretary at the FDCO, Sir Philip Barton. Barton announced he would be stepping down last November after a rather turbulent time in the post – and

Finally, we heard it. At PMQs today, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, dropped the euphemism ‘grooming’ and said ‘rape gangs’ to describe the networks of predominantly Muslim men who prey on underage girls. Sir Keir tried to defuse the issue in his opening comments by dismissing calls for a national enquiry. ‘The Jay inquiry… [took] seven years, which would take us with a further inquiry to 2031,’ he said. (Perhaps he meant 2032.) He knows why a new inquiry would take years just to get started. Every cop and local councillor, fearing prison, would lawyer-up at public expense to minimise their culpability. As for the issue of rape gangs, it’s

Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’. What dark perfidy has been done? What cynical political stunt have the Conservatives pulled, staining their hands with such baseness? Kemi Badenoch has tabled a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is being debated at second reading today. Let me explain briefly. Second reading is – slightly counterintuitively – the first opportunity for the House of Commons to discuss