The Spectator

Home The Conservatives argued about tax and HS2 at their conference in the former Manchester Central railway station. At the end, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, announced cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2. He promised £36 billion for a ‘Network North’ and for transport outside London (where there would be a ‘Euston development zone’). He proposed raising the legal age for smoking by one year every year. He declared his values as ‘service, family, work’ and said: ‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman.’ He wore a bracelet saying ‘Dada’. In her own speech, Akshata Murty, his wife, said ‘aspiration’ summed him up. Lightning struck a food waste recycling tank at Cassington, Oxfordshire, causing a huge explosion.

The Conservatives gather in Manchester this weekend for what may well be their last hurrah as a governing party. Bookmakers are offering odds of 7:1 to anyone bold enough to bet on Rishi Sunak winning the next general election. The Prime Minister himself is in a gambling mood and has started to make some brave and overdue decisions: rethinking HS2 and overhauling net-zero policies. Such decisions bring short-term embarrassment, and were avoided by his predecessors, but they offer long-term dividends. The question is whether this is a wise strategy in the lead-up to an election. Typically, a prime minister makes their big promises in a pre-election year.

Home Average wages (including bonuses) in the three months to July were 8.5 per cent higher than a year earlier. This should mean that state pensions rise by 8.5 per cent from April 2024, if the government does not claw back anything; the predicted rise would bring into the tax-paying bracket 650,000 more pensioners, a total of 9.15 million. GDP fell by 0.5 per cent in July. Wilko shops began closing as attempts to rescue the chain failed; Poundland offered to take on the leases of up to 71 shops. The cost of a first-class stamp is to rise from £1.10 to £1.25; before April this year it was only 95p. Bernard Looney resigned as chief executive of BP over a matter of personal relationships. A government auction for contracts for new offshore wind farms brought not a single bid.

Identity politics Sir: Your lead article (‘On board’, 12 August) highlights numerous issues related to refugees, but does not offer much in regard to why this country is a magnet for economic migrants. You state that this is a rich country. How can this be the case when government debt is 100 per cent of GDP? Further, when we cannot provide adequate services in healthcare, education and housing, why should we take in migrants who cannot make an immediate contribution to the country’s tax base? The reasons that this country is so attractive are, firstly, the English language, which we can’t do much about. Secondly, we have an easily accessible benefits system, including healthcare.

Over decades of service as a floating hotel, the Bibby Stockholm has accommodated all manner of people. It has housed workers for a Swedish wind farm and for the new Shetland gas plant; homeless people in Hamburg, asylum seekers in Rotterdam. It was briefly considered as a ‘high-end’ barge for students: with 222 en-suite rooms, a restaurant, TV room and gym, it was touted to Irish universities as a floating hall of residence. It makes sense, then, that the government considers the vessel a suitable place to house asylum seekers – given that Britain has so few large residential spaces available. But the mooring of the Bibby Stockholm in Portland harbour has triggered yet another round of hysterical outrage.

Joe Shmoe Sir: Your piece ‘Not so special’ (Leading article, 8 July) was right. Joe Biden doesn’t like us and a brief 45 minutes with Rishi Sunak last week doesn’t change that. In Saudi Arabia last year, Biden compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Britain’s past in Ireland. This was outrageous – what about the US historical treatment of Mexicans, Cubans and Filipinos, and Biden’s friendliness towards IRA terrorists? Britain enjoyed excellent relations with the US under Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, all of whom had Irish ancestry, and it is self-indulgent and a dereliction for this President to make his chosen personal background an issue, as he does.

Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s Low Life columnist, died this morning at his home in France. He was 66. For 23 years, his column was, for many readers, the first page they turned to in the magazine. Here is a brief selection of the best of Low Life: On self-confidence  30 March 2002: ‘Two Christmases ago, Sharon gave her Mum a self-help paperback called The Duty Trap. The book is aimed at people who persist in unhappy, one-sided relationships out of a misplaced sense of duty. On New Year's Eve, says Sharon, her Mum finished the book, went upstairs, packed a suitcase and walked out. She went back to the farmer, now widowed, with whom she'd had the one love affair of her life.

Home ‘China is carrying out the biggest military build-up in peacetime history,’ warned James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, in his Mansion House speech, but said ‘no significant global problem’ could be ‘solved without China’. The government borrowed £139.2 billion last year, £13 billion less than expected, bringing public debt to 99.6 per cent of GDP. In an opinion poll by YouGov for the BBC’s Panorama, 58 per cent of the 4,592 people asked thought that the United Kingdom should continue to have a monarchy and 16 per cent did not know.