Freebies

Saturday

Katy Balls

100 Days of Starmer: the verdict

25 min listen

Today marks Labour’s 100th day in office. But they are unlikely to be popping champagne corks in Downing Street – even if Lord Alli offered to pay for the Dom Pérignon. This has been a disheartening time for the government and those who wished it well. The promise of dramatic change has been overshadowed by a series of errors, misjudgments and scandals that one would associate more with an administration in its dying days than a government enjoying a fresh mandate, a massive majority and an absent opposition. Former shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire and former deputy prime minister Thérèse Coffey join The Spectator’s Katy Balls to discuss what went

Thursday

James Heale

What the Sue Gray row is really about

14 min listen

It’s been a sticky week for Labour. Whilst they will have hoped to spend the run up to this weekend’s conference talking about the policy wins of their first 100 days in power, Labour MPs are instead having to defend the Prime Minister for accepting freebies and talk down speculation of a rift at the heart of government. Is there a power struggle in Number 10?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former political secretary to tony Blair.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Monday

Sam Leith

Keir Starmer and his wife don’t need a personal shopper

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics. I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made ‘hard decisions’ that nobody liked – it would be a long time before he was caught making chiselling excuses for accepting freebies, or rewarding donors with favours. His background as a lawyer, his punctilious attention to detail, that whole stiff air of priggishness he brought with him from the campaign trail to Downing Street: these may not have been attractive qualities, may not have been qualities that enhanced his personal charisma (as Boris’s

Thursday

Claire Lowdon

Anthony Holden is nostalgic for journalism’s good old bad old days

After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based on a True Story is bookended by touching accounts of his childhood and old age. Born in 1947, Holden grew up in Southport. His adored grandfather, Ivan Sharpe, played football for England, winning gold at the 1912 Olympics. In later life he was a sports writer, and would take the young Holden to the press box at Liverpool or Everton, tasking him with noting down the game’s statistics. Holden dates his journalistic ambitions to the early thrill of ‘seeing my numbers in print in the very next day’s edition of