Katy Balls is The Spectator’s political editor.
14 min listen
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has reshuffled his shadow cabinet but just who has made it in and who has been moved aside? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Linden Kemkaran.
Who is the big winner so far from Keir Starmer’s reshuffle? The MP with the most to complain about is Lisa Nandy. She has been demoted from Levelling Up secretary to shadow cabinet minister for international development. Given she held the Foreign Office brief in Starmer’s first shadow cabinet, it’s quite a fall from grace.
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Parliament is back from recess and the row which will be dominating MPs inboxes is the school concrete crisis, which has disrupted the start of term for over 100 schools. Why didn’t the government act sooner? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
28 min listen
This week Katy Balls asks whether Rishi is a risk taker or whether he’ll choose to play it safe as Conference season approaches (01.17), Owen Matthews explains why America is still Ukraine’s best hope for victory (07.27), Kate Andrews is totally baffled and exasperated by the British refusal to get checked out by a doctor
Thursday’s cabinet reshuffle may have been minor but the No. 10 shake-up is proving more substantive. Amber de Botton has stepped down as Director of Communications saying ‘it is the right time to move on’. In her statement, the former broadcast journalist describes No. 10 as ‘a demanding and high pressure place to work –
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Rishi Sunak may have shelved his plan for a big reshuffle but we have had some cabinet changes today. Grant Shapps has taken his fifth cabinet position in one year, replacing Ben Wallace as Defence Secretary, and Sunak loyalist Claire Coutinho will take over as Energy Secretary. What does Coutinho’s appointment reveal? James Heale speaks
Rishi Sunak has completed his very mini reshuffle with the appointment of Claire Coutinho as Energy Secretary, the role left vacant by Grant Shapps’s move to the Ministry of Defence. Coutinho leaves her role as a minister in the Department for Education and becomes the first of the 2019 intake to make it to the
Grant Shapps is the new Defence Secretary, after Ben Wallace officially resigned this morning. The seasoned cabinet minister moves from energy secretary to the coveted role. As I reported in this week’s politics column for the magazine, the desired criteria in No. 10 for the candidate included ‘efficient, non-flashy, loyal, decent’. Does Shapps fit all
When prime ministers sense the end is near, they tend to follow a similar pattern. They change senior civil servants and appointees, as Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown did. They avoid consulting their cabinet and instead hide behind special advisers. They declare they don’t like polls, before saying that the only poll that matters is
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James Cleverly is in Beijing, a decision which he has been pushed to defend in a clip given to the BBC. Much has changed in the five years since a British foreign secretary last visited China. What’s the purpose of the trip? How has it been received in Westminster? Katy Balls speaks to Cindy Yu.
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Nadine Dorries’s seat in Mid Bedfordshire has a majority of 25,000. With the Boris Johnson ally now leaving Parliament, the seat is set to be a three-way race between the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Who stands the best chance of challenging the Conservatives? Also on the podcast: Suella Braverman has instructed police to
Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen
Nadine Dorries has finally bowed to pressure from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and her own party and quit as an MP. The former culture secretary has announced – through an interview with the Mail on Sunday – that she will today inform the Chancellor of her intention to take the Chiltern Hundreds, the formal process for quitting,
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This episode of Spectator Out Loud features Katy Balls on the new divisions within the Labour Party and what Jeremy Corbyn might run for next (01:08); Peter Hitchens describes the joys of cycling and his dislike of e-bikes and scooters (07:40); and Anthony Horowitz joins us from Crete where he ponders the end of the
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It’s been 16 years since Tony Blair walked away from frontline politics, but rather than retiring to Fife to write his books – like another Labour leader – he has managed to build his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change into one of the most sophisticated and influential think tanks in modern politics. What role
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Katy Balls and editor of Conservative Home Paul Goodman join Natasha Feroze to discuss the troublemaker, Lee Anderson. This week his inflammatory comments on small boats dominated the news – is this good or bad for the Conservatives? And what role does Rishi Sunak have in mind for the former miner and deputy Chairman of
Who is the most divisive figure in politics? Last year the Daily Mirror claimed Lee Anderson was ‘the worst man in Britain’. This week the Conservative MP is managing to cause a headache both for Labour and his own party. Anderson is a grassroots favourite who even before he was made deputy chairman of the
It’s ‘stop the boats’ week in 10 Downing Street as part of government plans to avoid a news vacuum over the summer recess. There have been a range of announcements – from new measures against businesses that knowingly employ illegal migrants, along with plans to crackdown on ‘lefty lawyers’. However, Rishi Sunak’s problem can be summed
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This morning the UK’s electoral watchdog The Electoral Commission said that it had been the victim of a ‘complex cyber attack’ by ‘hostile actors’. What do we know about the attack? The cyberattack has been a distraction from what was meant to be the government’s small boats week. We’ve had migrants refusing to board the
Earlier this summer, a hundred or so Londoners gathered around a solar-powered stage truck at Highbury Fields to celebrate 40 years of Jeremy Corbyn in parliament. There was music, magic tricks and merriment. Attendees were encouraged to party like it was 2017. The opening act sang: ‘Jezza and me, we agree, we’re all for peace