Katy Balls is The Spectator’s political editor.
22 min listen
Santa will have had a tricky time this year fulfilling all the Christmas wish lists in Westminster. Keir Starmer is desperately hoping for a change in the political weather, and Kemi Badenoch would like an in with Donald Trump. Ed Davey dreams that Labour’s electoral troubles will get so bad that proportional representation starts to
The next election may not be expected for another four years but that won’t stop politicos speculating as to what would happen were a vote called now. Less than six months after Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory, the Sunday Times has published a mega poll which finds that if an election was held today, Keir
Nigel Farage has called on Kemi Badenoch to say sorry after the Conservative party leader accused him of inflating Reform membership numbers. ‘I am asking Kemi Badenoch to apologise immediately for this intemperate outburst,’ the Reform leader said. Badenoch has accused Farage of ‘fakery’ over the claim that Reform’s total membership overtook the Conservatives this
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Kemi Badenoch is just over a month into her tenure as leader of the opposition, and already she has been criticised for her performances at PMQs and for failing to offer much in the way of policy proposals. It has been a consistent gripe of many of Badenoch’s detractors that she is a culture warrior
Nigel Farage has received a late Christmas present. According to figures released by Reform, his party has overtaken the Conservatives on the number of party members. The Reform party say it now has over 132,000 members. While the Tories don’t provide regular updates on their membership numbers, the recent Conservative party leadership contest suggested they
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This week is a special episode of the podcast where we are looking back on some of our favourite pieces from the magazine over the past year and revisiting some of the conversations we had around them. First up: the Starmer supremacy Let’s start with undoubtedly the biggest news of the year: Starmer’s supermajority and
Christmas may be two days away but there is little reason for cheer in 11 Downing Street. The Chancellor faces another wave of bad economic news this morning. Revised figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show there was no growth in the last quarter, between July and September. The update comes as the
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It’s been a historic year in British politics. At the start of 2024, the UK had a different Prime Minister, the Tories had a different leader, and The Spectator had a different editor! Michael Gove, Katy Balls, and Quentin Letts join Cindy Yu to review the biggest political stories of 2024. On the podcast, the panel discuss
14 min listen
Last night we got the news that Peter Mandelson is expected to be named the next UK ambassador to Washington. Despite months of speculation, Labour held firm on making a decision until the results of the US election, and with Trump entering the White House in the new year they have gone with an experienced
36 min listen
Dame Maureen Lipman has been a fixture of stage and screen for over five decades. She has been a member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company and the Royal Shakespeare Company; she is well known for her roles in acclaimed films like Educating Rita and The Pianist; and most recently she has had an award-winning
10 min listen
The Bank of England has voted to hold interest rates at 4.75%. The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews joins Katy Balls and Freddy Gray to discuss the decision and what this means for the economy. Also on the podcast they discuss how a potential donation from Elon Musk to Reform UK has rattled politicians across
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New figures have shown that, for the year to November, inflation rose by 2.6%. While unsurprising, how much will this impact the Chancellor’s plans going into the new year? Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and Isabel Hardman about the impact on Labour, especially given their October budget. Also on the podcast: do the WASPI
Is the Chagos Islands deal dead? Ever since Keir Starmer and his foreign secretary David Lammy announced plans to hand the remote archipelago to Mauritius, the UK government has been accused of risking national security. The proposed agreement would end 200 years of British rule and impact the US air base on the island of
11 min listen
After days of speculation online, the alleged Chinese spy has been named as Yang Tegbo. This latest example of Chinese espionage has opened up a number of debates in Westminster, firstly around Labour’s push to ‘reset’ its relationship with China, as well as the conversation around the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme – a number of
It’s happened. To the likely dismay of both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage has met with Elon Musk to discuss his party’s electoral prospects. The Reform party leader along with the party’s new treasurer Nick Candy spoke to the tech billionaire and close Donald Trump ally at Mar-A-Lago, in Florida, on Monday. Announcing
14 min listen
Labour will reveal plans today to re-design local government, with district councils set to be abolished, and more elected mayors introduced across England. The plans could be the biggest reforms of their type since the 1970s, but with the May 2025 local elections set to be Labour’s first big electoral test since the general election,
37 min listen
On this week’s Christmas Out Loud – part one: Katy Balls runs through the Westminster wishlists for 2025 (1:26); Craig Brown reads his satirist’s notebook (7:06); Kate Weinberg explains the healing power of a father’s bedtime reading (13:47); Craig Raine reviews a new four volume edition of the prose of T.S. Eliot (19:10); Lisa Haseldine provides
18 min listen
Labour is supposed to be going for growth, so Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves will be disappointed with the news today that the economy unexpectedly shrank in October, and for the second month in a row. Rachel Reeves’s mood seems to have visibly changed in the last month or so, is she having her George
Another day, another piece of bad news for the chancellor. The economy shrank in October for the second month in a row. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show a 0.1 per cent drop despite speculation that the economy would return to growth following a fall in September. The ONS said pubs, restaurants
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Today Downing Street has continued its reset – that is definitely not a reset – by providing more details on Labour’s plan to cut the planning red tape and deliver a housing revolution. Their target is to build one and a half million new homes over the next five years by building on green belt
