Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson shows his lack of grip

Boris Johnson has just had a particularly bad Prime Minister’s Questions, underlining his poor grip not just on the second jobs row but on other aspects of his own job. Sir Keir Starmer has had a fair bit of bad luck since becoming Labour leader, having to self-isolate five times as a result of positive Covid tests or contacts, but today he was able to make a rare appearance in person. And he really turned up to work. He was at his most forceful since he became leader, accusing Johnson of being a ‘coward, not a leader’ and giving the ‘green light for corruption’. Starmer opened his six questions by asking about the government’s forthcoming integrated rail review, which is expected to drop commitments on lines in the north of England.

Steerpike

Watch: Hoyle slaps down Boris

John Bercow may have gone but his successor is faring little better with the government. Relations between No. 10 and Lindsay Hoyle have been decidedly frosty in recent months, thanks in part to the Speaker's mounting irritation with ministers continually making announcements to the press before Parliament. Now the row over Owen Paterson and the humiliating u-turn over the standards committee has only made things worse, with Hoyle clearly angry at the way in which Parliament has been dragged into an avoidable sleaze scandal. Today that frustration was for all to see when the Speaker issued not one, but two, magisterial putdowns to Boris Johnson.

Steerpike

‘We’re like Martin Luther King’: Insulate Britain jailed

It looks like a winter lockdown has come early for some. Nine Insulate Britain members have been jailed at the High Court today, after breaching injunctions designed to prevent disruptive protests. Despite the eco-activists' protests – with one tearfully telling LBC that 'I’m crapping myself this morning and I feel like crying' – judge Dame Victoria Sharp said there was no alternative to custodial sentences, given the severity of their actions and their expressed intention to further flout court orders. She said: 'The defendants, or some of them, seem to want to be martyrs for their cause, and the media campaign surrounding this hearing appears designed to suggest this. We, however, have to act dispassionately and proportionately.

Isabel Hardman

Johnson is making the sleaze row worse

Is there anyone left in the Conservative party who is happy with Boris Johnson? The Prime Minister has now managed to wind up pretty much every single Tory MP with his handling of the second jobs row, opening up still more fault lines in the past 24 hours. His letter to the Speaker yesterday saying he wanted a ban on MPs taking paid work as parliamentary strategists, advisers or consultants — and that outside work should also be within 'reasonable limits' — has upset the many backbench Tories. They now worry that they'll suffer a big drop in income thanks to the mishandling of the Owen Paterson case.

Steerpike

Boris bottles it on Tory outreach

After the farrago of the past fortnight, it’s damage control time in No. 10. Within the parliamentary party there’s a palpable sense of divide between the 'oiks' and 'toffs,' 'officers' and 'infantry,' old guard versus new. Some younger, newer members feel neglected and ignored, having repeatedly followed orders to go over the top, only for the whips to order a  U-turn after humiliation. In such circumstances, Downing Street has decided to launch a rearguard operation to lovebomb the newbies and do some long-overdue outreach. Such an operation is many pronged, with one such tactic being the Prime Minister signing as many bottles of port and champagne he can lay his hands on.

Gabriel Gavin

How the EU hardened its heart towards refugees

'They wanted me to fight, and I knew I had to leave, or die.' My translator, a former English teacher from Syria, was explaining how, after the army knocked on his door one day, he had fled the country and moved more than 2,000 miles to Liverpool. This was 2018, the bloody civil war was raging. Everyone we met in the north west – an old couple, a young family, single men – had said the same thing. As soon as it was safe, they just wanted to go home. Now, three years on, thousands of their countrymen are in a far more precarious situation, sleeping rough in tents and makeshift shelters on the Belarusian border, as temperatures plummet to below freezing at night.

Tuesday

Max Jeffery

What do the new lobbying rules mean for MPs?

12 min listen

The Prime Minister has written to the Commons Speaker to propose new lobbying rules for MPs. While some may welcome the measure, like former PM Theresa May, who gave a blistering critique of the way the Owen Paterson affair was handled, others in his party might not be so happy. ‘The challenge for him is that it is going to worsen relations with a bit of the Parliamentary party that he already finds it difficult to deal with.’ – James Forsyth Max Jeffery sits down with James Forsyth and Katy Balls to discuss these possible changes and what they could mean for parliament. As well as looking at the issues of racism in cricket and the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Steerpike

Osborne masters the politics of art

As MPs spent the afternoon debating second jobs, a former colleague who knows all about the subject was holding court elsewhere. George Osborne, the part time banker and full time mischief-maker, was unveiling a plaque in Piccadilly to the legendary caricaturist James Gillray – a satirist who would no doubt have had great fun with the former Chancellor. Wearing one of his many, many hats, Osborne – in his capacity as chairman of the British Museum – told the assembled crowds of his love of the great British tradition of print cartoons, remarking:  As a teenager I used to go to Camden Passage to the antique shops there to try and get hold of some Gillray prints.

Andrew McQuillan

Could the rise of Sinn Fein lead to a united Ireland?

The possibility of a political wing of a terrorist organisation becoming a party of government in an EU member state would normally be headline news. But that's precisely what's happening in Ireland.  Sinn Fein is currently enjoying a consistent lead at the top of the polls in the Republic; a recent example from the Irish edition of the Sunday Times shows it had surged by six points to 37 per cent, some distance ahead of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, currently coalition partners. Public approval of the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — the middle-class Dubliner who described the IRA campaign as 'justified' and mused that there was 'every chance' she would have joined in if she had the chance — is at 50 per cent.

James Forsyth

Is Boris Johnson’s sleaze nightmare over?

Two weeks into this self-inflicted Tory sleaze scandal, Boris Johnson has set out plans to bar MPs from political consultancy roles and to make sure their outside interests are within ‘reasonable’ limits. Downing Street released this news just as Keir Starmer was giving a speech on Labour plans to bar most second jobs ahead of an opposition day debate on the matter tomorrow. The bar on political consultancy raises questions of how that would be defined, as I say in the magazine this week. Where is the line, for instance, between providing advice on the international economic situation and political consultancy? I suspect that for this ban to be meaningful it will have to be extended.

Tom Goodenough

Tulip Siddiq’s selective attacks on foreign leaders

Tulip Siddiq has campaigned nobly for the return of her constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The Labour MP is again doing her bit to try and persuade the Iranian government to free the British-Iranian mum, who has been locked up on trumped-up charges in Iran. ‘After over four years in Evin Prison, Nazanin has been under house arrest in Iran and is unable to leave the country,’ write Siddiq and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in the Evening Standard today. ‘Though responsibility for her predicament lies with Iran, there is more that the UK Government could be doing to help her,’ she writes. She’s got a point: Boris Johnson has made the situation worse, not better, for Nazanin, by clumsily intervening to suggest that she was training journalists.

Steerpike

Blue on Blue: May savages Boris

The faults in the Tory party were on show for all to see today, as MPs were forced to debate No 10's efforts to block Owen Paterson's suspension from the Commons. Ministers had hoped to quietly u-turn on their efforts to overhaul the standards system but following Sir Chris Chope's last minute intervention, a very public debate played out in public today. Members on both sides of the aisle queued up to savage the government's handling of the case. Shadow Commons leader Thangham Debbonaire attacked the 'total absence of leadership we have seen from this sorry government over this sorry affair' while her SNP counterpart Pete Wishart noted how 'public trust' in Boris Johnson was 'at an all time low' with Tory MPs facing inboxes 'swamped with furious constituents.

Freddy Gray

What’s the truth about Kyle Rittenhouse?

On the night of 25 August 2020, Richie McGinniss, a somewhat gonzo video journalist, interviewed Kyle Rittenhouse for the right-wing Daily Caller website. Rittenhouse wore his cap backwards, had rubbery purple medical gloves on and an assault rifle dangling between his legs. He had decided for some reason that he, a 17-year-old boy, had to help the forces of law and order during the Black Lives Matter riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. ‘People are getting injured,’ he said. ‘If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself, obviously. I also have my med kit.

Ross Clark

Why wasn’t the furlough scheme wound up sooner?

October’s employment figures, according to the Chancellor Rishi Sunak are ‘testament to the success of the furlough scheme’. The other way of looking at the figures, released this morning, is that they show why the furlough scheme should have been wound up months ago, rather than at the end of September. The number of people on payroll in October rose by 160,000 to 29.3 million in spite of furlough ending. The unemployment rate fell by 0.5 per cent. The employment rate, at 75.4 per cent, is now just 1.1 percentage points lower than it was in the three months leading up to the pandemic. It is astonishing because at the moment the furlough scheme ended, it was still paying the wages of 1.14 million people.

Philip Patrick

Why COP26 flopped

King coal is dead, long live king coal! That might be a fitting epitaph for COP26, which mercifully ended last Friday. It culminated with an agreement, which had not so much been watered down as to have virtually evaporated. Fossil fuels, it seems, are here for the foreseeable. What went wrong? That’s a question the ‘deeply frustrated’ COP26 president Alok Sharma might well be asking himself. He appeared to be close to tears at the denouement of the negotiations, pushed to emotional extremis by the last-minute wrangling over a single word: should we commit ourselves to phase out our use of coal, or phase- down our use of coal.

Steerpike

Truss fails her first big test

Can anything stop the irresistible rise of Liz Truss? The power-dressing insta lover reinvented herself at International Trade, becoming the darling of the Tory faithful and rising to the top of the ConservativeHome ministerial rankings, where she sits 15 points ahead of her nearest rival. Having served at the top table of Tory politics since 2014, the longest serving Cabinet minister was finally given a Great Office of State eight weeks ago when Boris Johnson entrusted her with the Foreign Office. Since taking up the role, Truss and her allies have been keen to project a more Sinosceptic image than her defenestrated predecessor Dominic Raab.

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Christopher Chope torpedoes end to sleaze affair

You'd have thought certain Tory grandees would be chastened after the past fortnight. But while most Conservatives on the green benches now admit the decision to try to overrule the standards committee's recommendations on Owen Paterson was a mistake, it seems that one diehard remains unbowed. Step forward Sir Christopher Chope, the veteran MP for Christchurch, and no stranger to political controversy. Chope of course is a long-time member of the Tory awkward squad who specialises in filibustering parliamentary bills, most famously in 2018 when he blocked legislation that would have made upskirting an offence – an act which led to Commons staff placing a bunting of women's underwear outside his office entrance.

Stephen Daisley

Why aren’t we more horrified by the Liverpool bombing?

Back when the West was still pretending to fight the ‘war on terror’, Martin Amis made an observation about the enemy’s tactics: Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. The horror was not long in going out of horrorism. Not that the acts themselves became any less horrific: self-detonation to take out a pop concert, nail-bomb seppuku against subway passengers. Rather, we stopped being horrified.  Of course, the initial spectacle continues to startle us, and we utter oaths while shaking our heads, but it is a hollow response.

Steerpike

Prince Harry declares war on disinformation

Democracy is in crisis, faith in institutions is at an all-time low. The public's trust in our leaders has collapsed; cynicism is all around. Which pillar of integrity can save us from the morass and rescue our crumbling polity? Step forward erstwhile aristo Prince Harry, the hereditary hedonist reborn as a fearless fighter of fake news. Since joining the beautiful people in LA eighteen months ago, the exiled royal has gone round collecting pseudo-jobs like a less employable George Osborne. Eco-warrior, occasional podcaster, ethical banker and interminable speech-giver: there are many hats now worn by the dilettante Duke.