Politics

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

Monday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Kemi Badenoch isn’t the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’

We need to talk about Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. Labour’s Dawn Butler retweeted tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’ Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

What will Robert Jenrick do next?

Poor old Robert Jenrick. He has spent eleven gruelling months touring associations, existing on a diet of Ozempic and rubber-chicken, only to lose to Kemi Badenoch by a double-digit margin on Saturday. Badenoch may yet offer Jenrick a role in her shadow cabinet. But if she doesn’t – or if Jenrick politely declines any such offer – the question then becomes what will he do next? Prior to entering politics, one career that Jenrick did try his hand at was journalism. Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the Newark MP actually has something of a flair for words. A history student of St John’s College,

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Dawn Butler lose the whip?

With his super-majority in the Commons, Keir Starmer isn’t afraid of losing the odd MP or two. Back in July he was was willing to remove the whip off seven of his colleagues after they had the effrontery to dare vote against lifting the two-child benefit cap. So the case of Dawn Butler – the gaffe-machine otherwise known as the Honourable Member for Brent East – offers a useful test case for how seriously Sir Keir takes matters of discipline. Butler yesterday shared a social media post accusing Kemi Badenoch of representing ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and suggesting her election amounted to a ‘victory for racism’. It also called the

Alexander Larman

Is King Charles’s honeymoon over?

Since King Charles became monarch in September 2022, after the death of Elizabeth II, he has received reasonably warm treatment from the press. It is easy to forget that, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, he was seen as an unpopular figure, lambasted by the Diana-supporting tabloids for being an adulterer (never mind his former wife’s behaviour; he, apparently should have known better) and criticised in the broadsheets for excessive intervention in the work of the government. The notorious ‘black spider’ memos revealed the-then Prince of Wales as an interventionist figure, keen (perhaps overly so) to have his opinions and thoughts taken very seriously at the highest level, despite

Joe Bedell-Brill

Partygate was overblown, says Kemi in first interviews as leader

Rachel Reeves: ‘I was wrong’ to say no major tax rises would be needed In her first big interviews since last week’s Budget announced tax rises of £40 billion, Rachel Reeves claimed this morning that she had been unaware of the extent of the ‘huge black hole’ in public finances before the election. On Sky News, Reeves told Trevor Phillips: ‘I was wrong… I didn’t know everything’. The Chancellor said the Conservatives had hidden the reality of the situation from the country, and that she’d had to put public finances back on a ‘firm trajectory’. Reeves: ‘We have wiped the slate clean… it’s now on us’ The Chancellor told Trevor

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Rachel Reeves’s new gamble

Credit to Rachel Reeves: while some chancellors opt to take part in the Sunday shows ahead of a fiscal event, the Chancellor has decided to do the media round the Sunday after her first Budget. Rather than spending the entire interview refusing to say what will be announced in the week ahead (the information is considered to be market-sensitive), she is instead having to answer difficult questions about what she announced on Wednesday. It wasn’t an easy morning, as Labour’s Budget narrative continues to get tested to breaking point. Reeves was played a video on Sky News this morning of her comments back in June, when she said no tax increases would

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Will China tell North Korea to pull out of Russia?

Throughout the Russian invasion, China has, for the most part, refused to be drawn into the conflict. It has not condemned Russia or asked Putin to pull back (except when the threat of nuclear warfare was on the table). But it has also acquiesced to western sanctions and refrained from giving Russia lethal aid. In the meantime, the invasion has allowed Beijing to pull Moscow closer to its own economic orbit and use Russia’s gas reserves to secure its own energy imports. All this has come as western military and economic resources are bogged down in Europe, depleting the same resources which might eventually be turned to containing China in

David Starkey

How Kemi Badenoch’s Tories can rebuild Britain

The Conservatives finally have a new leader. But Kemi Badenoch must be under no illusions: after the disastrous July election, we have a mountain to climb and a revolution to undo. But we can remain hopeful, because we have been here before – and found a way out. In 1974, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, having taken Britain into Europe, blown up the economy and been humiliated by the miners, was defeated by Labour’s Harold Wilson. The future of the Tory party was in doubt. Surveying the wreckage, Sir Keith Joseph, who had served in Heath’s cabinet, had a revelation: ‘I had thought I was a Conservative, but now

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

It’s rich of the French to call Trump ‘vulgar’

There has always been a touch of snobbery in the way the French elite regard American politics. The word one reads and hears most often in the mainstream media is ‘vulgarity’. This is particularly true of Donald Trump, who is abhorred as much by the right-wing press as by the left. ‘Trump, vulgarity on the loose,’ was the headline in a recent article in the centre-right Le Figaro. This snootiness is long-standing, but it became more acute two decades ago during the war in Iraq. France’s refusal – correct, as it turned out – to join George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ led to a torrent of abuse in Washington. The French

Niall Ferguson

Why Kemi was the right choice

A version of this article was originally published in last week’s issue of The Spectator. What set Margaret Thatcher apart from so many other Conservatives in the 1970s was that she had read Friedrich von Hayek. In Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable – his indispensable account of the intellectual origins of Thatcherism – he describes how Thatcher used to pull a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty out of her handbag, declaring, ‘This is what we believe.’ Charles Moore shows in his definitive biography just how widely Thatcher read in the period before she became prime minister. Karl Popper, Frédéric Bastiat, John Maynard Keynes, Edmund Burke, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Marshall, C.S.

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s embarrassing Badenoch blunder

So Kemi Badenoch is the new leader of the opposition. How best should Labour respond? One person who has shown the perfect example of what not to do is Dawn Butler, the gaffe machine otherwise known as the Honourable Member for Brent East. Shortly before the result was announced she shared a post on Twitter/X accusing Kemi Badenoch of representing ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and suggesting it amounted to a ‘victory for racism.’ Work that one out. The post has subsequently been removed from Butler’s profile. So much for a new Dawn eh? Next up, it was the turn of Zarah Sultana – Coventry’s answer to Citizen Smith. The teenage Trotskyite declared that

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

My unsolicited advice to Kemi Badenoch

If there are two things new leaders of political parties dread, it’s unsolicited advice and Scotland. The advice because, even when it’s helpful, and it’s mostly not, it underscores the sheer volume of work that lies head. Scotland because, in recent years at least, its politics have been so volatile and unpredictable that anyone stepping into it, especially an English politician, has done so only under duress. I intend to combine these two political headaches by offering Kemi Badenoch some advice on Scotland, but to make up for it my advice draws on the example of one of her political heroes. After Margaret Thatcher took over the leadership of the

William Atkinson

Badenoch must explain why the Tories deserve power

Kemi Badenoch’s victory was not overwhelming. Her margin of victory was smaller than of any of her Tory predecessors since the current leadership rules were introduced. With the support of 57 per cent of the membership and a third of MPs – similar proportions to what Liz Truss managed in 2022 – her immediate task will be to unite her querulous parliamentary party and reach out to her opponents. Her finishing cry – ‘It’s time to get down to business, it’s time to renew’ – is familiar from the campaign trail. The most immediate task is building a shadow cabinet. James Cleverly’s choice to go to the backbenches frees a space but

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Has the Trump campaign stalled?

The ‘Trumpmentum’ of the last few weeks couldn’t last forever. Now, with less than four days to go until election day, concern is spreading in Republican circles that the Trump train has ‘stalled’ as the Democrats make late and potentially decisive gains in key areas.  Across the battleground states, and especially in Pennsylvania, early voting numbers suggest that women are turning out in far bigger numbers than men. This is good news for the Democrats because 2024 is widely thought to be ‘the gender election’: a majority of men favour Trump; a majority of women support Harris. The Trump campaign is also lagging behind Harris in early voting among senior

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Badenoch wins: what next?

18 min listen

Kemi Badenoch has won the Tory leadership election. She beat Robert Jenrick in a tight race, winning 53,806 votes against his 41,318. What will a Badenoch opposition look like? What are her strengths? Her weaknesses? Cindy Yu speaks to Michael Gove and Katy Balls.

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Tory membership falls by almost a quarter in two years

Will the last person to leave the Tory party please turn out the lights? After an exodus of Conservative MPs from their jobs before the election (75 of them decided to quit rather than contest) we found out at today’s leadership announcement, courtesy of Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, that members have bolted from the party too. The Tories don’t like to release their official membership numbers, but Blackman, just before announcing the results, said that the ‘total number of eligible electors’ (really meaning members) was 131,680. Now, if Mr Steerpike’s memory serves him correctly, in the 2022 run-off between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there were allegedly

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What Kemi Badenoch’s victory means for the Conservatives

The results of the Conservative leadership contest are in. Almost four months after the Tory party suffered its worst general defeat in its history, Kemi Badenoch has been crowned as the party’s new leader. Badenoch won 53,806 votes to Robert Jenrick on 41,388 – the turnout was 72.8 per cent, down on the 2022 contest which saw a turnout of 82.2 per cent. On being announced as the victor, Badenoch gave a short speech – beginning by thanking her husband Hamish for his support, saying her candidacy would not have been possible without him. Badenoch opted to be magnanimous in victory – praising Rishi Sunak for his hard work and

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Kemi Badenoch will face an exposed Keir Starmer

Kemi Badenoch could probably already have served a truncated term as prime minister had she made different choices. Back at the turn of the year, key figures inside the secretive group behind the commissioning of giant MRP polls that indicated how badly the Tories would lose under Rishi Sunak hoped she might indicate her willingness to take over in response. Instead, she played things safe, staying resolutely loyal to the then prime minister and not ‘playing the game’. So the bid to replace Sunak before the election ran out of steam and those involved cast around for an alternative right-wing champion, which they found in the form of Robert Jenrick.

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss blasts ‘dishonest’ Sunak on his last day

Happy Tory leadership results day! Much like teenagers collecting their A-levels, there will be plenty of tears, cheers and multiple beers, as one of either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick seizes the crown. But one person who might not be smiling this morning is Rishi Sunak, whose final morning as Conservative leader has been overshadowed by a no-holds-barred assault by his predecessor.  In today’s Daily Mail, a seething Liz Truss uses a 2,000-word article to eviscerate the man who replaced her as prime minister. Truss claims Sunak was ‘complicit in amplifying Labour’s lies and spreading smears about me and my premiership’. As premier, he was ‘fundamentally dishonest about illegal immigration, taxes,

Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell, Gus Carter, Ruaridh Nicoll, Tanya Gold, and Books of the Year I

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Christopher Caldwell asks what a Trump victory could mean for Ukraine (1:07); Gus Carter argues that leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration system (8:29); Ruaridh Nicoll reads his letter from Havana (18:04); Tanya Gold provides her notes on toffee apples (23:51); and a selection of our books of the year from Jonathan Sumption, Hadley Freeman, Mark Mason, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith and Frances Wilson (27:08).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.