Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Sam Leith

Do we care that the King is rich?

For the first time, the true extent of the property held by the King and the Prince of Wales’s private estates, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall has been revealed, according to a splashy Sunday Times investigation. There are 5,410 separate properties up and down the country paying millions of pounds annually in rents and

Steerpike

Southport suspect: A timeline of what was said and when 

Three months after the Southport attack in July, suspect Axel Rudakubana has been charged with two new fresh offences. With his trial set to go ahead in January, there has been much comment in Westminster as to when the authorities were first informed. To try and make sense of the case, Steerpike has laid out

Steerpike

Michael Caine turns on Labour’s taxes

Taxes, thousands of ‘em! In her bid to alienate the bulk of the British electorate, it seems that Rachel Reeves can add another to her enemies’ list: film legend Sir Michael Caine. The Zulu star – a true working-class talent made good – used an interview this weekend to send a warning about the Budget

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

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

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

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

What Gen Z need to know about the 1990s

‘Nothing,’ said Vladimir Nabokov, ‘revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it’. If smell is the most evocative of all the senses, it seems that Gen Z’s fabled nostalgia for the 1990s has reached new heights. It isn’t just the fashions and music they’re now spending their money on

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

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,’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Republicans be trusted with the US economy?

When it comes to the economy, Americans typically trust the Republicans. They’re the party traditionally aligned with big capital; and their policies – low taxes and minimal government interference – sound sweet in a believer’s ear. Donald Trump, leading the GOP for the third election in a row, is a famous businessman; and the party’s

Does Qatar still hold the key to a Hamas hostage deal?

Qatar is the Middle East’s mediator-in-chief. The assassination of Hamas’s senior leadership and Gaza War’s regionalisation to Lebanon have not thwarted Qatar’s push for a ceasefire and the release of ninety-seven Israeli hostages in Hamas’s custody.  The CIA and Mossad chiefs brainstormed plans for a hostage release deal Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman

History has been cruel to Wallis Simpson

If there is one thing that Paul French’s forthcoming book Her Lotus Year should put right about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it is that her so-called ‘lotus year’ in China in the 1920s was not the sexual bacchanal that it has been painted as by the prurient and the envious. Instead it was

Steerpike

Tories overtake Labour in Sunak’s final poll

It’s Rishi Sunak’s final week as Tory leader, but should he be asked to carry on? On Wednesday he charmed the Commons at PMQs before stealing Rachel Reeves’s thunder with a virtuoso Budget speech. And now, in the final poll of his leadership, it transpires that the Conservatives have, at long last, overtaken Labour in

Germany’s gender madness is a worry for women everywhere

Germany has gone further than most countries in failing to stand up to the relentless march of transgender ideology. Its Self-Determination Act, which comes into effect today, makes it far easier for people to change gender. The law enables Germans to alter their name and gender, or even have the gender marker removed altogether, on

Ross Clark

Can the OBR be trusted?

It was the absence of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s judgment that was blamed for the bond market crisis after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had rushed to enact their vision for a fast-growing economy without waiting for the wisdom of the government’s official fiscal watchdog. For Truss, the OBR is

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump, Liz Cheney and the great realignment in US politics

For Donald Trump fans, one of the many creepy curiosities of this year’s presidential election is that Liz and Dick Cheney and other disgruntled Bush-era Republicans are firmly supporting the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Donald Trump understands this dynamic better than most For Harris supporters, meanwhile, it’s strangely alarming that Robert F. Kennedy Junior, scion