Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Matthew Lynn

Replacing Churchill with wildlife on our banknotes is a mistake

The Bank of England has announced that pictures of wildlife will replace famous faces on our banknotes. A cute kitten, perhaps? Or a puppy doing some tricks? Or, given that China may well have hacked into the system, even a panda bear? Whichever animals end up making the cut, it’s goodbye to Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing – and the proud tradition of honouring our greatest Brits. What a travesty. There is nothing wrong, of course, with wildlife pictures in themselves. But on a bank note? Seriously? In reality, paper money, at least since we came off the gold standard, has always been a bit of

Isabel Hardman

Starmer and Badenoch were like squabbling kids at PMQs

Prime Minister’s Questions today saw a leader under repeated attack for a ‘screeching U-turn’ and their suitability to be Prime Minister called into question. Unusually, though, Keir Starmer was the one making that accusation, rather than being on the receiving end of it. He came to the chamber determined to tell Kemi Badenoch that she had made the wrong call on whether to join the US-Israeli action in Iran and that he, therefore, didn’t need to take lectures from her. Badenoch was, as it happens, not really lecturing Starmer; she just wanted to know whether he was going to go ahead with the planned rise in fuel duty in September. The Prime

Simon Hunt

Why shouldn’t Nigel Farage invest in crypto?

The nation is – apparently – in shock. After giving endless speeches about how much he loves cryptocurrencies, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has revealed that he himself has invested in a crypto firm called Stack. Despite being accused of ‘grift’, Farage is far from the first politician to hold stocks and shares that risk overlapping with his professional duties. Indeed, it is hardly an established convention that politicians must divest all their assets upon entering Parliament. There are, in fact, plenty of examples to the contrary. The Sunak family, comfortably the wealthiest-ever occupants of Downing Street, have a net worth of north of half a billion pounds thanks to

Ross Clark

Slavery reparations will be the next Chagos betrayal

Well, who would have guessed? Emboldened by Mauritius’s success in persuading Keir Starmer to surrender the Chagos Islands – which were never even part of Mauritius in the first place – the African Union is reported to be planning to take Britain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand reparations for slavery and colonisation. Their case is pretty feeble, and for reasons which ought to be obvious. You can’t compensate slaves who lived 200 years ago by making cash transfers to nations from which they were taken, especially when the tribal kingdoms which existed when the slaves were taken were themselves involved in the slave trade. Moreover, the

Today

Madeline Grant

Keir Starmer has no interest in answering Kemi Badenoch’s questions

In the last 48 hours the government of Sir Keir Starmer has ended a link between the House of Lords and the Anglo-Saxon Witan by booting out the hereditary peers and beginning the process of removing the right to trial by jury which goes back to Magna Carta. He probably, genuinely, believes this to have been a good couple of days in the office. After this bout of constitutional vandalism, Sir Keir came to one thing he probably also wants to abolish but currently cannot: PMQs. Mrs Badenoch tried to ask him about fuel duty – Sir Keir, however, thought he had detected a change in Tory tone and policy

Oscar Edmondson

Starmer should be honest about why he picked Mandelson

15 min listen

This afternoon we have had the first tranche of documents released by the government relating to the process by which Peter Mandelson was chosen to be US ambassador. Whilst we have got a clearer picture on the big question – how much Starmer and the government knew about Mandelson’s association with Epstein – Labour are not out of the woods. Quotes from Jonathan Powell reveal that the vetting process was rushed and that – he thought – they didn’t dig deep enough. There is also the small matter of Peter Mandelson’s request for a payout of over half a million pounds. Oscar Edmondson, Tim Shipman and Isabel Hardman discuss. Produced

Starmer should be honest about why he picked Mandelson
Steerpike

Trail hunting battle looms for rural lobby

Tally ho! That sound you can hear is Keir Starmer’s barmy army charging into the fray once more. Having waged war over the Chagos Islands, assisted dying and hereditary peers, now the Labour party has found another cause on which to burn precious political capital: trail hunting. This is the process whereby hounds following a scent-based trail rather than live animals, following the ban in the New Labour years. A decision that Tony Blair rued bitterly in his memoirs… Ministers promised a consultation on trail hunting in early 2026, with an announcement expected this month. But opponents are not sitting on their hands, with a serious fundraising operation in the

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The Al-Quds march should have been banned years ago

The government has approved a request from the Metropolitan Police to ban the annual Al-Quds day march in London, which was due to take place this Sunday. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said the decision was necessary to prevent ‘serious public disorder’. The Met cited the expected scale of the protest, the likelihood of large counter-demonstrations, and the wider tensions generated by the conflict in the Middle East. Each year the same scenes returned: Hezbollah banners, chants celebrating the ‘resistance’, speakers denouncing Zionism as an open expression of hostility towards Jews The march itself will not take place. A stationary protest may still occur under strict conditions. While this is a

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is tarnishing Brand America

Donald Trump has become something of a sole man. His cabinet members and White House visitors report that the President has developed a penchant for handing out $145 (£108) Florsheim shoes in an effort to up their sartorial game. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reported that Dr. Johnson recoiled at an ‘eleemosynary supply’ of charitably donated shoes as an impecunious student at Christ Church, Oxford, and threw them away with indignation. Trump’s followers have no such freedom of action. ‘All the boys have them,’ one official told The Wall Street Journal, which ran a picture of his administration leaders obediently lined up and wearing the same shiny black leather numbers. Despite Trump’s best efforts, however, the administration

Michael Murphy

Should Reform really have backed Trump’s Iran war?

As the opening salvos of a possible third world war were fired across the Middle East, Britain’s once peerless navy was nowhere to be seen. HMS Dragon, one of our ‘Daring-class’ air-defence destroyers, sat idle in Portsmouth for a week after a drone struck a British base in Cyprus, partly because MoD contractors dare not work out of hours. It is unclear what the Tories and Reform thought was to be gained from rattling blunt sabres in support of this conflict If only our politicians showed the same insouciance. Instead, Kemi Badenoch has been pictured sitting resolutely in a tank, an impressive feat given how few remain in existence. Badenoch

David Shipley

Why the state wants to clamp down on homeschooling

The government’s new cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom’, has attracted attention because of its introduction of an ‘anti Muslim hostility’ code, its erasure of the English as an ethnic identity, and its quite confused and bizarre messaging. What has so far gone unremarked is its Mussolinian energy regarding education. This goal is clear. A whole raft of new rules will apply to schools. There will be obligatory citizenship classes, including a promise to ‘raise awareness of threats to democracy’. This takes on a rather more sinister tone when you realise that elsewhere the document redefines patriotism to mean agreeing with the

Laurie Wastell

Multicultural Britain is becoming harder to defend

‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, trilled the opening of a government social cohesion plan just two years ago. The very fact the plan had to be created may have suggested otherwise, but back then, the captains of the multicultural state were at least still trying to keep appearances up. Multiculturalism now expects ordinary Brits to channel the Blitz spirit just to live in their own country. Two years later, following scores of appalling crimes by asylum seekers, ever more revelations about the rape gangs, Islamist terrorism, country-wide anti-immigration riots and blatant electoral sectarianism, those going to bat for multicultural Britain can scarcely muster the strength

Mani Basharzad

Why the Venezuela model would be a disaster for Iran

What next for Iran? Donald Trump appears to have a plan: the Venezuela model. The US president has hinted that, just as with the South American nation, he wants to try working with elements inside the existing regime, rather than backing exiled opposition figures. The biggest massacres in Iran’s recent history happened under so-called reformers ‘We have a formula, Venezuela, smart country,’ he said this week. ‘We’ve taken out 100 million barrels of oil which is now in Houston…being taken care of and made so beautiful in refineries.’ But if Trump really is planning on copying his playbook for Venezuela in Iran, he should be warned: it will be a

Patrick West

Why do Britain’s councils hate patriotism so much?

The war waged by those in authority on those who make overt displays of patriotism shows no sign of relenting. This campaign against Englishness and Britishness has never been an open, honest one, undertaken with manifest intent. This is a devious war pursued through crafty bureaucratic means and framed in the timorous language of health and safety. This offensive began as a response to events last summer, when, under the banner of ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, many individuals took it upon themselves to attach St George’s and Union flags to lampposts throughout England. In response, many councils, prompted by complaints from some who felt ‘uncomfortable’, or run by those who

Lara Brown

The social media moral panic

There is rarely much to commend Keir Starmer for. But on Monday he blocked an amendment to the schools bill which would have required all social media companies to ban under-16s from using their products. In voting against this legislation, MPs have preserved anonymity on the internet, resisted further state powers over what we see online and avoided caving in to a moral panic gripping Westminster. I don’t want to lavish too much praise on the Prime Minister just yet. The sweeping powers brought in by the Online Safety Act already censor most of online life. Unless you provide companies like Substack and X with identification, you aren’t able to watch speeches in parliament about grooming gangs or content which refers to ‘illegal immigration and people smuggling’.

Yesterday

Freddy Gray

Will Donald Trump avoid the mistakes made by George Bush in Iraq?

26 min listen

Trump has signalled that the Middle East war could be ‘over ​soon’ and pledged to lift sanctions after talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Freddy Gray is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn and Robert Bryce to discuss why Trump was potentially unprepared for Iran’s retaliation, what could come from the talks with Putin, and why Britain can only get their energy prices down by drilling.

Will Donald Trump avoid the mistakes made by George Bush in Iraq?
Stephen Daisley

Why Alba failed

Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it. When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded only two months before the Scottish Parliament elections. And that was Alba’s only real purpose: to contribute to a pro-independence majority at Holyrood which, so the notion went, would then notify Westminster that Scotland was leaving. This was the plan set out by the late Alex Salmond in which he would have played the part

Michael Gove

Is Britain still a great power? – and why Ed Miliband should go

42 min listen

This week: Michael and Maddie discuss the escalating crisis in the Middle East and ask a bigger question about Britain’s place in the world – is the UK still a great power, or has the conflict exposed just how limited our influence has become? They debate whether Britain has any real choice but to follow America in foreign policy, what the war reveals about the country’s diminished military capabilities, and whether Westminster is finally confronting the reality of Britain’s global position. Also on the podcast, they examine the growing backlash against Ed Miliband’s energy agenda. With war in the Middle East sending shockwaves through global energy markets, has Labour’s push

Michael Simmons

Should Reeves cut fuel duty?

With Donald Trump signalling that he does not want a long war in Iran, markets have started to settle down. Traders are no longer betting on interest rate hikes, the FTSE is in the green and a barrel of oil is hovering around $90. Nevertheless, the pressure on the Chancellor to set out further financial support to tackle the cost of living is on. The average five-year fixed mortgage passed 5 per cent today for the first time since November, prices at the pumps have jumped at their fastest pace in four years, and Morgan Stanley is the latest bank to warn that inflation could hit 5 per cent later

John Power

No, Britain is not about to run out of gas

Over the weekend, following continued US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the resulting disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, several newspapers warned that Britain has ‘just two days of gas’ left in storage. This line appeared prominently in coverage from outlets including the Guardian and the Times, leaving readers with the impression that the country may be only days away from running out. It is a striking statistic, but one that is also profoundly misleading. Britain does indeed have relatively little gas in storage compared with continental European countries. But the implication that the country could somehow run out of gas within a matter of days reflects a fundamental

Is the special relationship over?
Freddy Gray

Is the special relationship over?

The US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said today will be the most intense day yet of American strikes on Iran. Over the weekend, Donald Trump claimed the war could soon be over – and suggested the US has already effectively won. He also took aim at Keir Starmer, accusing Britain of joining wars America has ‘already won’. Deputy and US editor Freddy Gray joins the podcast to explain what’s really happening in Washington and why he believes the ‘special relationship’ may be over – and not coming back. Economics editor Michael Simmons also joins to discuss the fallout. As oil prices surge and markets react, Reform UK is seizing

William Atkinson

What would Katie Lam’s defection to Reform mean for the Tories?

Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch is reportedly planning a ‘root and branch’ shadow cabinet reshuffle. Those most at risk are said to be her top team of Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. For Lam, there are plenty of reasons to defect to Nigel Farage’s party The intention, the Daily Mail suggests, is to promote younger MPs ‘to energise the battered Tory brand’. Stride is said to ‘lack energy’, Patel ‘reminds voters of record levels of migration’, and Philp is believed to ‘no longer [be] fully

Harry Mount

The BBC will regret jettisoning the Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race

And so, slowly but regularly, the BBC loses touch with British national life. The BBC has just lost the radio broadcast rights to the Oxford vs. Cambridge Boat Race to Times Radio, which will cover the event for three years. It comes after Channel 4 won the deal last year for TV rights for the next five years, meaning it will cover the 200th anniversary of the first boat race in 1829. What was once the finest broadcaster in the world becomes a navel-gazing, self-obsessed purveyor of frivolous rubbish Until now, the BBC had broadcast the radio commentary of the race since 1927, except for a brief spell from 2005

Alexander Kolyandr

The Iran war is just what Putin’s depleted coffers need

Of all the parties watching the chaos in the Middle East unfold, one should be rubbing its hands together with particular satisfaction. Russia has not fired a shot in this conflict, lost no allies it cannot afford to lose, and has so far gained rather a lot, with more to come. A cynic might call it the perfect war for Vladimir Putin. Moscow’s public reaction has been characteristically theatrical. The Foreign Ministry denounced American and Israeli actions as a ‘reckless step’ and a ‘dangerous adventure’. Things have gone no further. There has been no announcement of political or military support for Iran from the Kremlin – nor is there likely