Steerpike is The Spectator's gossip columnist, serving up the latest tittle tattle from Westminster and beyond. Email tips to steerpike@spectator.co.uk or message @MrSteerpike
Oh dear. Poor Richard Tice is the latest politician to have an embarrassing memory lapse. During his first trip to Scotland of 2025, the Boston and Skegness MP appeared in Glasgow this morning to reveal his party’s newest defectors. Except, er, he couldn’t quite remember their names… When he was grilled by one Scottish hack
It seems that NHS Scotland still hasn’t learned the lessons from the Sandie Peggie furore. Now it turns out that a ‘cultural humility’ training module for healthcare workers produced in December 2023 told them to call bearded trans staff ‘women’ – and even suggested gender-neutral toilets should be introduced in care homes. With over 700,000
It’s a day ending in ‘y’ – which means there’s more bad news for the BBC. Now the government has taken aim at the broadcaster, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy slamming the Beeb today in a parliamentary statement. In the scathing text, Nandy wrote of how she is ‘deeply shocked and disappointed’ about the Hamas
Is Lindsay Hoyle turning into John Bercow? Mr S first asked the question in January after revealing that the Speakers’ Office had doubled in size on Hoyle’s watch. And now other outlets are running with the same theme, by looking at the Speaker’s trips abroad. It seems the man of the people rather enjoys the
It’s a turbulent time for the Western world, but Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government doesn’t seem to be taking things all that seriously. At least, not where its National Security Adviser is concerned. Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s lineman on the Chagos deal, is apparently banned from speaking to the national security committee on the grounds he
The western world might be collapsing but here in Westminster it is business as usual. In one of parliament’s dusty old committee rooms, Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill continues to slowly make its way through the legislative process, one agonising line at a time. But if you hoped that this exercise would be a Socratic
As if transatlantic relations could not get any worse. Barely 72 hours after the Oval Office bust up, the Trump administration announced that the US had suspended all military aid to Ukraine – a move that caught much of Whitehall off guard. Now UK politicians of all stripes have hit out at JD Vance, after the Vice-President made some
Graham Stuart is perhaps not the best-known Tory backbencher, but the former energy minister has catapulted himself into the national limelight with his remarks this morning. Stuart, the longstanding MP for Beverley and Holderness since 2005, took to X today to float the idea that President Donald Trump is an, er, ‘Russian asset’. He wrote
When you’ve got a majority of 167, how do you keep control? The answer, it seems, is jobs for the boys (and girls). Another round of government appointments made a week ago has seen yet more new MPs promoted. Alex Barros-Curtis, Joe Morris and Jack Abbott are among the 2024 intake who ascended the first rung
There’s a drama a day in Westminster. Today’s bust-up is between Reform MP Lee Anderson and the party’s former deputy leader Ben Habib who accused him of plagiarism. Following the jibe, the Ashfield MP took to Twitter to brand Habib a ‘pathetic little man’ trying to ‘smear’ Reform. And you thought Mike Amesbury was punchy… Early this morning Anderson posted online a long list of Labour failures
The extraordinary scenes that came from the White House on Friday were the talk of the weekend – and relations between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump remain under the spotlight this week too. As Sir Keir Starmer prepares to address MPs this afternoon on Ukraine, Reform leader Nigel Farage has this morning offered up his
Oh dear. It has only been 22 days since Peter Mandelson formally became Britain’s Ambassador to Washington – and he is already causing controversy. As European talks over Ukraine negotiations raged over the weekend, up popped the Labour peer on ABC to offer his take on things. In response to comments by Marco Rubio, the
Well, you can’t say they don’t try. With Europe still reeling from Donald Trump’s oval office bust-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, over in Scotland the SNP have piped up to make their feelings known about the American President. Never ones to miss a chance to try and stay relevant, the party’s leader
Dear oh dear. Just as positive polling had lifted the spirits of the Scottish Nats, news of their membership exodus will bring them crashing down. As revealed by the august paper that is the Scotsman, the SNP has lost more than 5,500 members in six months alone. It’s hardly what you want to hear when
Back in 2023, when Joe Biden was President of the United States, there was something of a drugs scandal in the White House, when the Secret Service found a gram of cocaine in the West Wing. An investigation was launched, but while Secret Service officials trawled through their security systems and indexed ‘several hundred’ people
By most accounts, Keir Starmer seems to have done a good job keeping Donald Trump on side when the two men met at the White House yesterday. Starmer offered his counterpart a second state visit to the UK, with a handwritten invitation from the King, while the Donald suggested that Britain may well escape the
The Beeb is better at becoming the news than making it these days. The last fortnight has seen the corporation come under fire after a rather controversial Gaza documentary – whose child narrator was, er, the son of a Hamas minister – was first released and then pulled from streaming services. Now Steerpike has had
As Prime Minister Keir Starmer is making headlines stateside after his big talk with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage is busy making news of his own. The Reform UK leader has tonight announced that Olympic boxer Luke Campbell will be the party’s candidate to become the first elected mayor for Hull and East Yorkshire. ‘He’s a
To the curious case of Mike Amesbury. The former Labour politician for Runcorn and Helsby was on Monday handed a 10-week prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to punching a man in the street. But after appealing the sentence at Chester Crown Court today, Amesbury will now avoid prison. During the ex-Labour man’s appeal hearing
With Reform surging in the polls, no one in No. 10 wants a by-election anytime soon. But thanks to ‘Iron’ Mike Amesbury, such a contest now looms in Runcorn and Helsby. The ex-Labour MP was sentenced on Monday to ten weeks in prison, triggering a recall petition. Already Nigel Farage’s ‘People’s army’ is up in
