Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Half of Brits disappointed by Labour so far

Another day, another round of bad news for Sir Keir Starmer’s government. Now a new Ipsos poll has revealed that over half of all Brits feel disappointed by Labour’s achievements (or lack thereof) so far. 53 per cent noted their dissatisfaction with the governing party in the latest survey, which quizzed 1,092 adults between 22-25 November. Given Starmer’s time as PM has been dominated by reports of cronyism rows, freebie fiascos and top team infighting – not to mention Rachel Reeves’s poorly-received Budget – Mr S is hardly surprised… The Starmtroopers haven’t much impressed even their own crowd in the five months they’ve been in power – with almost a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Weight loss drugs won’t solve the obesity crisis

The NHS is about to start doling out ‘the King Kong of weight loss drugs’ to obese patients – the scandal, needless to say, is that not enough people will qualify. The drug, Mounjaro, will be limited to people with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 35 and who have at least one medical condition resulting from their excess weight. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has recommended that 220,000 people be given the drug in the next three years – a small fraction of the 25 per cent of the adult population which is obese.     How dare the NHS be so tight-fisted. It is,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s France is no longer fit for purpose

Emmanuel Macron will address the French people this evening, 24 hours after parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the president’s government. Millions of French will likely tune in and the majority – 63 per cent, according to one poll – would love it to be a resignation speech. No chance, according to the man himself. Earlier this week Macron said he would remain in the Elysee Palace ‘until the very last second of my term to serve the country.’ The fact is that France is in unchartered waters and no one knows what will happen in the coming weeks and months Thursday’s newspapers in France pore over the

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Angela Merkel regrets nothing

Last night, nearly three years to the day since she handed over the reins of power to Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel appeared at London’s Royal Festival Hall to promote her newly published memoir, Freiheit, or ‘Freedom’.  The compulsion to write her memoirs first arose in 2015, she said, out of a desire to explain her decision to open Germany’s doors to over one million asylum seekers Merkel’s autobiography comes at an important moment for the country she used to govern. After the collapse of Scholz’s traffic light government, Germany is staring down the barrel of a snap election expected to take place in February. With the country grappling with all-time

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The marketing genius of Jaguar

Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical slogans (‘live vivid’, ‘delete ordinary’) and strange absence of cars, the 30-second ad has brought global attention to a brand that was dying for want of a new generation of customers, in an auto industry in turmoil over its stalled transition from carbon fuel to battery power. And a week later comes the reveal in Miami of the futuristic Type 00 electric concept car that the fuss was really about. Love it or hate it, the dictum of founder Sir William Lyons that inspired the video’s title, ‘a Jaguar should be a

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour’s Nigel Farage nightmare

Arriving on stage to accept ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Nigel Farage gave a warning to the Westminster establishment. ‘I’ve got a bit of a shock for you,’ he said. ‘If you think that I and four other people – the newcomers into parliament this year in the general election – were a shock, I’m very sorry but at the next election in 2029 or before, there will be hundreds of newcomers under the Reform UK label.’ He added: ‘We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war. Politics

The Spectator

Labour’s confidence tricks

There is nothing new, nor necessarily fatal, about making a poor start in government. Margaret Thatcher had a torrid first couple of years in office, set back by galloping inflation and mass unemployment, before she found her direction. Those who assume that Keir Starmer is doomed to be a one-term prime minister thanks to his plunging popularity are speaking too soon. The resignation of Louise Haigh over a historic fraud conviction will swiftly pass. The mini-scandal of freebies accepted by government ministers, which kept Fleet Street occupied over the summer, has already been largely forgotten. Starmer is good at setting targets, rather less good at coming up with any realistic

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Michel Barnier’s government has fallen

France was plunged into another political crisis on Wednesday evening when the government of Michel Barnier lost a vote of no confidence. 332 MPs voted for the motion and 288 against, an inevitable result once Marine Le Pen’s National Rally let it be known that they would support the left-wing New Front Popular in their censure. It is only the second time in the 66-year history of the Fifth Republic that a government has lost of vote of no confidence; that previous occasion was in 1962 when Georges Pompidou’s premiership was terminated in similar fashion. It is not the opposition who have plunged France into chaos Throughout a tense afternoon

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Devolution is shortchanging England

The English taxpayer is not the primary audience for the Scottish government’s annual Budget, but one wonders what they might make of today’s announcements from SNP finance minister Shona Robison. An extra £2 billion for health and social care, bumping the overall cost of that portfolio to just under £22 billion. An additional £800 million for social security benefits and £768 million for affordable housing, taking the total spend on social justice to £8.2 billion. Plus, £1 billion for roads, raising the transport budget to £4 billion; £355 million for two new prisons as part of the £4.2 billion justice and home affairs budget; and a boost of £158 million

Oscar Edmondson

Spectator Awards: Nigel Farage promises a ‘political revolution’

12 min listen

Last night was The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. Politicians of every stripe were in attendance, with Wes Streeting, Robert Jenrick and Stephen Flynn among those present. There were a number of notable speeches – including a fiery opening monologue from the Health Secretary – but none caused as much of a stir as Nigel Farage’s acceptance speech for Newcomer of the Year. He warned of a ‘political revolution the likes of which we’ve not seen since Labour after the First World War’. How did that go down in the room? Also on the podcast, at PMQs today Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer seemed to have settled into a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The triumph of England’s maths lessons

Hold your hats, but Britain is doing rather well in something – or at least England is. Our children are achieving more at maths than in any country outside South or East Asia. According to the latest Trends in International Maths and Science Study, conducted by the Dutch-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), English 13 to 14-year-olds come out with an average score of 525, sixth behind Singapore (605), Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) (602), Korea (596), Japan (595) and Hong Kong (575). To put that into context, a score of 550 indicates that students ‘can apply their conceptual understanding in a variety of relatively complex situations’, while

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Why won’t the jokes about Rachel Reeves’s CV go away?

Why do jokes about Rachel Reeves’s CV persist? One explanation is simple: it’s funny. The Chancellor’s public persona is strait-laced and orderly; the idea of her doing something slightly naughty and gilding her CV is good material for comedy. But is that all? Reeves’s tweaks to her LinkedIn profile are, bluntly, trivial. They’re also minor compared to the airbrushing some politicians carry out on their personal histories. You might have forgotten a man called Rishi Sunak, but when he became Chancellor then PM, how much fuss was made of the fact that he had deleted whole jobs from his CV? Sunak vanished several years at Goldman Sachs and the TCI hedge

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Named and shamed: the PMQs time wasters

You’re an ambitious backbench Labour MP with a weighty constituency caseload, legislation that you’re interested in improving, and a few personal campaigns to right various wrongs and make the world a better place. You get a spot on the order paper for this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. What could you possibly ask your party leader about? One of the above? For some of the Labour MPs in today’s session, the very best questions they could come up with were ones merely asking Keir Starmer if he agreed he was doing a good job. The utterly pointless question was a regular feature at Prime Minister’s Questions when the Tories were in

Edward Howell

South Korea’s political chaos is far from over

Had you have taken a direct flight from London to Seoul yesterday afternoon, by the time you would have landed you might have been none the wiser that anything had happened at all. At near midnight South Korean time, President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law across the so-called ‘land of the morning calm’. Only six hours later it was subsequently, and pointedly, revoked. As South Korean citizens continue with their daily lives, the political establishment has once again entered a period of precarity. Yoon has scored a significant own goal; its implications do not end there. It is no understatement to say that the decision by President Yoon to impose

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Kemi let Starmer off the hook again

Labour thinks it can win on immigration. Their new strategy was road-tested today at PMQs as backbencher Olivia Bailey opened the session saluting Keir Starmer’s gang-busting policies. ‘Internationalist co-operation, shared intelligence and joint law enforcement,’ said Bailey, ‘are the best way to end the vile people-smuggling trade.’   Starmer rose to agree with his stooge. ‘The broken immigration system’ of the Tories is being fixed, he said, and 9,400 people ‘who have no right to be here’ are being rounded up and sent packing. ‘We got the flights off the ground,’ he boasted. This blew Kemi Badenoch off course. She wanted to talk about Louise Haigh, the ex-transport minister.  ‘He

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC presenter under fire over failure to declare extra work

Another day, another drama at the BBC. Now it transpires that one of the corporation’s top newsreaders Clive Myrie failed to declare up to a quarter of a million pounds worth of ‘external events’ that he was involved in outside of his BBC job. Dear oh dear… As well as undertaking his newsreader role, the Beeb staffer has also been paid for a number of speaking and hosting work – but when it came to logging the additional work on the broadcaster’s external events register, Myrie fell short. It took the press getting in touch with the BBC over the issue for the star presenter to register 29 late entries

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs has become painfully predictable

Kemi Badenoch had an odd line of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions: she chose to pursue Keir Starmer over what he knew about Louise Haigh’s fraud conviction. It is not a story that has any impact on people outside Westminster, but it did still highlight how much Starmer has become like the politicians he used to ridicule: he did not answer the questions at all and often ended up making points about the Tories being just as bad as Labour. The Conservative leader initially mocked Starmer for using a planted question from an overly loyal Labour backbencher about immigration to celebrate what he was doing to control Britain’s borders. Badenoch

Christopher Booth

A true popular uprising is taking place in Georgia

Georgia’s government recently decided to spend money on fresh black ‘Robocop’ uniforms for their riot police, with shiny new helmets to match. After parliamentary elections in October, they might have been forgiven for thinking the kit would go back on the precinct shelves with barely a scuff – a little shopsoiled at worst.  Protests immediately after the vote were predicted, but turned out to be sporadic and rudderless. The lacklustre opposition figures were hopelessly divided, little known and incapable of inspiring a following. And while there were credible allegations of vote-rigging, enough voters were fearful of losing their meagre state incomes – or fearful of rattling observers in the Kremlin,

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Sue Gray get a peerage?

Sue Gray may no longer be Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still making headlines. Now it transpires that the Prime Minister is planning to award a peerage to the former civil servant, despite the rather negative press attention Gray managed to garner while in the top job. How very interesting… According to the Financial Times, Starmer has grand plans to award the former mandarin with a seat in the House of Lords – while a number of other ex-MPs who allowed fresh candidates to stand in the July election are also expected to make Sir Keir’s ‘political’ list of peerages. Gray had a

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is politics killing art?

45 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by journalist Dean Kissick, a writer and author, to discuss the contemporary art sector and how it has come to be overrun by superficial forms of political gesturing.