Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Katy Balls

The Camilla Tominey Edition

36 min listen

Camilla Tominey is known on both sides of the pond as one of the world's go-to Royal correspondents. She began her career in journalism at the Hemel Hempstead Gazette before moving to cover the Royals for the Daily Express and is now the associate editor at the Telegraph. On the episode, she talks to Katy about how studying law ended up inspiring her to get into journalism, the differences between coving politics and the Royal family and the perils of engaging on social media.'I've been accused on the same day of being a far-right extremist and a socialist.

Steerpike

The Steerpike Awards of 2021

Well 2021 is at an end and what a hell of a year it's been. There were laughs, tears, shock, disgust and despair – and that was just the reaction to footage of Matt Hancock's video nasty. The past twelve months have seen various ups and downs in Britain and abroad, ranging from the highlights of the vaccine rollout and England's Euro run to low points like the Capitol coup, the Afghanistan debacle and various pandemic pitfalls. And Mr S has been there throughout it all to chart the gossip, drama, high politics and low shenanigans. Tony Benn once sniffed that it was 'issues, not personalities' that mattered; Steerpike holds that the inverse is true when looking back at the events of 2021.

Thursday

Patrick O’Flynn

Why have the Tories given up on fixing immigration?

In the fiercely competitive world of politics, it is not often that an opponent presents you with an Achilles heel that runs the whole way up the back of his leg. It would be even more unusual for someone presented with such a copious target to then fail to go in hard, studs-up against it. Yet both those conditions prevail in British politics today. The Labour party’s bizarre attitude towards immigration policy ought to render it utterly incapable of depriving the Conservatives of a parliamentary majority. And yet the Conservatives are conspiring to undermine rather than underline their own natural advantage on this crucial issue.

Steerpike

Revealed: Huawei’s Oxbridge millions

British universities have received twice as much funding from Huawei as previous estimates suggest, according to new figures obtained by The Spectator. Freedom of Information requests sent by Steerpike show that a further £28.7 million has been received from the Chinese tech giant by nine leading UK universities, on top of the sums identified in a landmark report by the China Research Group in June. By far the biggest recipient of donations and research grants is Cambridge University which has taken £25.7 million from Huawei alone since 2016. Huawei has been banned from participating in Britain’s 5G network from 2027 amid security concerns.

John Jenkins

A blurred distinction between refugees and migrants is a recipe for chaos

Among the most evocative and distressing press images of the year were those of Maryam Nuri Hama Amin. The 24-year-old Kurd from Soran, in northeastern Iraq, drowned along with 26 others in the Channel last month. In photographs published after her death, she is seen at her engagement party smiling at the camera in a park, by a lake, amid fallen leaves. She looks beautiful, bright, confident and full of hope. If you read reports and trawl through Twitter, you’ll find that many believe Maryam was a victim of a heartless international order, of European xenophobia, of the British government’s inability to manage its own affairs properly. But how did she come to end up in a dinghy that would sink in the cold waters of the Channel?

Wednesday

Posie Parker

Why should I be ‘cancelled’ for arguing that biological sex is real?

‘I just get the impression she hates men’, said a wound-licking James Max, on TalkRADIO, after he interviewed me on Wednesday. It’s a familiar accusation from those who fail to drum up rational arguments for the destruction of women’s rights. Max is currently filling in for Julia Hartley-Brewer this week on the station, which is a self-styled ‘home of free speech’ radio and TV station. In our interview, which lasted less than ten minutes and in which I appeared under my real name, Max offered a masterclass in how to ignore women’s concerns and centre men’s feelings above all. The tone was set when Max tried to link the views of J.K.

Steerpike

David Cameron winds his office up

In 2021 we bid many things farewell: Philip Green's retail empire, England's Euro chances and Donald Trump's presidency. And now, joining them on the ash heap of history, appears to be David Cameron's short-lived career as a lobbyist, after months of damning revelations about his multi-million pound efforts for Greensill Capital. After the conclusion of the Brexit wars, the onetime Prime Minister might have harboured some hopes of a retrospective rehabilitation but the collapse of Greensill and the release of the Old Etonian's accompanying cringe-worthy texts has put paid to that. It's not just Greensill that suffered in 2021 of course: since leaving office Cameron has acquired something of the reverse Midas touch.

Stephen Daisley

The pure cynicism of David Lammy

David Lammy says he regrets nominating Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader. We are meant, presumably, to be impressed by this admission. Given that it was delivered at Limmud, a Jewish festival of ideas, it sounds perilously close to an expression of contrition. Lammy has every reason to be contrite given the part he played in the Corbyn catastrophe. The guilty men of the Corbyn era typically belong to one of four categories. There were the True Believers — the pensionable Bennites and millenarian millennials with righteous faith in the leader and the (never properly defined) ideology he represented.

Steerpike

Labour MP demands ‘free movement for all’

New year, old Labour. As 2021 draws to a close and Keir Starmer's managers seek to establish Labour as A Very Serious Party again, it's good to be reminded of some of the talent found on his backbenches. The Corbyn era may be over but Jezza's children remain, still sitting in the Commons, the legacy of a dozen different local selection squabbles. One of them is 25-year-old vegan socialist Nadia Whittome, who since her election in 2019 has used savvy social media skills to launch herself as a sort of ersatz Dawn Butler – like Zarah Sultana, without the comebacks. Like many of her brethren in the Socialist Campaign Group, Whittome has quickly become adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Alicia Kearns

No, babies shouldn’t be allowed in the Commons

Babies have no place in the chamber. I've asked to leave debates to feed my child a few times and have never been turned down. This is a debate about childcare that is wrongly being presented as one of rights and representation. Is this a question of being banned from doing our jobs unless babies are allowed? No. The ultimate way MPs have their say is when we vote. New mums have proxy voting for six months, where we tell someone else how we want to vote each time so we don't have to be in parliament. But what about MP mums wanting to take part in debates? You can — I came into parliament for a few crucial debates while my baby was under six months.

Steerpike

David Lammy’s Labour lament

Foreign affairs is a difficult brief, demanding tact, sober judgement and discretion of the highest order. So who best to embody all these qualities than Labour's recently promoted man of the hour, David Lammy? The Shadow Foreign Secretary made his first diplomatic foray this week while appearing at this year’s Limmud festival, a Jewish event where he attempted to atone for the sins of his past.  The Talleyrand of Tottenham apologised to his audience for being one of the 35 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for leader in 2015, declaring that 'If I knew what I do now, I never would have nominated him... I never believed he would become leader. That was a mistake and I am sorry for that.

James Delingpole

Around the World In Eighty Days is the worst TV this Christmas

'In many ways, Phileas Fogg represents everything that's alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire. Potentially, it's a story about an England that should elicit very little sympathy,' says David Tennant, explaining, better than any review ever could, exactly why every fraction of a second's time spent watching him in Around the World In 80 Days (BBC1) is life spent utterly squandered. Truly if David Tennant had been offered the role of a giant, steaming dog turd, he could hardly have approached it with less enthusiasm than he gives to his sour, bloodless, joyless impersonation of Jules Verne's upper class English adventurer.

George Chesterton

Banana republic Britain and the curse of reverse exceptionalism

A day did not go by on social media in 2021 without some high-profile performative outrage about Boris Johnson and the hell hole he has bequeathed us. Britain is a 'banana republic' apparently. We live in a 'tinpot dictatorship' and are an 'international embarrassment'. This sort of thing is most often touted by talk radio hosts, former Labour spin doctors, actors and anyone who’s ever appeared on Live At The Apollo. The consequences of this language, both for the health of the nation and for those wishing for some especially humiliating deposition in Number Ten, is that it achieves nothing. It merely legitimises the idea of reverse exceptionalism: that Britain’s historic mission is to be irredeemably awful.

John Keiger

France has the most to lose from Britain’s turn away from Europe

It was Napoleon who declared that ‘a state has the politics of its geography’. We do well to remember that in taking stock of European international relations as we speculate on a new year and beyond. By Europe is meant the European continent, ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, in de Gaulle’s words. Not the 27-member European Union, which Brussels linguistically and imperialistically conflates with the 44 sovereign states that the UN defines as Europe. Of those 44 states, four are still the European great powers, as they have been since at least 1870: Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. They are still the continent’s most populous, wealthiest (except Russia), and militarily prepared (except Germany).

Tuesday

Steerpike

The ten most-read Steerpikes of 2021

Farewell then 2021 – what a year it's been. Twelve months of Covid craziness brought with it ample opportunities to lampoon the great and the not-so-good in British public life, from narcissistic royals to inept Europhiles.  Below is a round-up of Steerpike's most read articles from 2021, covering some of the year's biggest moments such as the vaccine procurement wars and the death of Prince Philip to lighter episodes like Prince Harry's thoughts on freedom of speech.  But while the dilettante Duke and Duchess of Sussex took both bronze and silver medals, gold could only go to the Guardian for its attempted self-immolation over how to cover transgender issues.

Ross Clark

Remember panic-buying? Here’s what will happen next time

It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and shortages of loo paper at the beginning of the first lockdown, these things can rapidly develop into major crises, purely as a result of panic-buying. Tesco, whose store on the Isle of Wight is reportedly especially empty post-Christmas, denies it has any problem with its supply chain — which had been threatened with disruption thanks to an industrial dispute involving the company’s lorry drivers in early December. People may, on the other hand, have stocked up more than usual in response to fears of a post-Christmas lockdown — a fear which appears for the moment to have gone away.

Steerpike

Five howlers from Jenny Harries

It's just two days to go until the New Year's Honours List is announced and already speculation is rife as to who the lucky names will be. Tennis teen Emma Raducanu is set to become the youngest MBE recipient ever while outgoing 007 Daniel Craig should get a gong for his many years of fictitious sacrifice on Her Majesty's secret service. And in light of the ongoing pandemic, it's no surprise that the list is set to be stuffed full of NHS heroes being recognised for their work, with Chris Whitty among those tipped for a knighthood. The Lancelot of the lancet, if you will. But one name unlikely to be on the list will be that of Dr Jenny Harries.

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris’s lockdown gamble could spell big trouble for Labour

Has Boris Johnson just been thrown a lifeline by a devolution settlement that has caused nothing but trouble for UK prime ministers over the past 20 years? The PM’s decision not to impose further restrictions on social mixing before New Year celebrations has been underlined in the public consciousness by the opposite choices of devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Among the UK nations, only in England will people be free to indulge in New Year festivities on anything like a normal basis. In Scotland, in particular, where the occasion customarily eclipses Christmas as the key celebration of the year, there is growing resentment that Nicola Sturgeon has chosen to be a party-pooper once again.

Debbie Hayton

Stonewall’s annus horribilis

The year 2021 has been an annus horribilis for Stonewall. For much of the last decade, the charity could do no wrong in the eyes of those who mattered. Stonewall's influence cut straight into the heart of government. As Nikki da Costa, Boris Johnson's former director of legislative affairs, pointed out: 'There is no other organisation — no business, or charity, no matter how big — that can pick up the phone to a special adviser sitting outside Boris Johnson's office and get that person to speak directly to the Prime Minister. But that is the kind of access that Stonewall has' Through its Diversity Champions Programme, Stonewall advised businesses, police, NHS Trusts and universities.

Steerpike

Labour in limbo over Covid curbs

Wes Streeting has enjoyed something of a dream start since his promotion to shadow health secretary a month ago. Confident at the despatch box and assured on a media round, his performance in the 'Plan B' debate had centrist dads of a certain vintage humming 'Things Can Only Get Better' once more. But while Labour's poll lead has shot up in recent weeks, the spectre of Covid has emerged once more to remind Sir Keir's Starm troopers of the unpredictable perils of pandemic politics. The emergence of Omicron just before Christmas posed a challenge to politicians of all stripes: should we reintroduce restrictions to stop the health service being overwhelmed?