Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

22 September 2021

Peers tear their hair out over wigs in the Lords

'The House of Lords' remarked Clement Attlee is 'like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.' But there's more vim and vigour in the current vintage and now peers are fizzing with righteous anger. The source of the outrage? Recent efforts by certain staff in the Palace to usurp what many feel are the traditional rights of members of the Upper House. A virtual Parliament with the advent of Covid has given self-styled modernisers the ideal chance to mount what traditionalists fear is a hostile takeover on the Palace of Westminster. Peers have already been subject to the indignities of the 'Valuing Everyone' sexual harassment training at taxpayers' expense – a move which saw the nonagenarian Betty Boothroyd probed by a parliamentary watchdog.

Lloyd Evans

Angela Rayner’s PMQs performance wasn’t a triumph

The firecracker and the damp squib stood in at PMQs today. With Boris abroad, the deputies took to the dispatch box. Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab have certain qualities in common. Both are eyeing the leadership of their parties and both are keen to offer a contrast with the present incumbent. The pendulum of popularity tends to swing in predictable directions. The dashing showman is often succeeded by the dead-safe dullard. Major after Thatcher. Brown after Blair. Why not Raab after Boris? And Angela Rayner’s eye-catching flamboyance would be a welcome change from the dreary swattishness of Sir Keir Starmer. Today was all about appearances. Raab will be pleased to note that he played to a half-empty house and bored everyone rigid.

Amber Athey

We need to talk about Joe Biden

Americans are increasingly concerned about President Joe Biden’s mental state, and for good reason. It’s not just some mean right-wing trope. Biden routinely forgets the names of world leaders as well as officials in his own cabinet. He can just about get through a speech with a teleprompter, but anything off script leads to trouble. This is embarrassing enough to watch when Biden is addressing domestic issues. When his fatuity plays out on the world stage, as it did on Tuesday, it can be downright horrifying. The most powerful man in the world isn’t all there. Biden’s first address to the United Nations General Assembly suggested that he lives in an alternate reality.

Steerpike

Rob Roberts’ recruitment crisis

Over the summer Britain has been facing something of an employment crisis. Shops, bars and restaurants have all had a tough time recruiting workers, forcing bosses to up their salary offers. And it appears no man in Parliament knows that better than the Member for Delyn, Rob Roberts. For those not aware, Roberts' main claim to fame since being elected in 2019 has been the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct made against him by not one, but two, former staff members. He texted a junior female employee with an offer to 'fool around with no strings' while Roberts also asked another male staffer out for dinner.

Isabel Hardman

Like Boris but with less aplomb: Raab survives PMQs

Angela Rayner had an enjoyable six rounds against Dominic Raab as their pair deputised for their respective party leaders at Prime Minister’s Questions today. She didn't lack material, for one thing: the energy crisis, the universal credit cut and of course the deputy Prime Minister's luxury holiday in Crete all gave Rayner plenty to pummel Raab with. He didn't respond well. Throughout the row over his badly-timed holiday, Raab showed a tendency to make things worse by trying to quibble over the details. He did so again today: he could quite easily have ignored a throwaway line from Rayner about him reportedly squabbling with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss over who gets Chevening, but instead couldn’t resist pointing out that it is ‘funded by a charity’.

Ross Clark

Is this Boris’s ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ moment?

Will it turn out to be Boris Johnson’s Jim Callaghan moment? Briefing reporters on his plane to the US on Sunday, the current PM tried to play down the energy crisis, saying: 'It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the world supply systems.' The gas price spike would be over just as soon as it occurred, he implied, and was caused by nothing more than the global economy rebounding after many months on the Covid couch.

Steerpike

Is Piers Corbyn still Boris Johnson’s climate guru?

Listening to Boris Johnson delivering his pearls of climate wisdom to the United Nations this week, Steerpike could not help but wonder from where the Prime Minister draws his eco-inspiration. Luckily a resurfaced clip this week serves as a useful reminder of the top scientific advisors the Tory leader once relied on: none other than discredited weatherman Piers Corbyn. At one of his regular London Assembly grillings during his time as Mayor, Johnson was hauled up by Green AM Jenny Jones for citing Corbyn as his source for a Telegraph article casting doubts on global warming. The Old Etonian hailed the work of Corbyn – the brother of future Labour leader Jeremy – declaring his forecasts are right '85 per cent of the time.

Steerpike

Watch: Eco-warrior storms off morning television

For a movement dedicated to dramatically reducing the world’s CO2 emissions, Britain’s eco-warriors certainly produce a lot of hot air. That at least appeared to be the case when Liam Norton of Insulate Britain appeared on Good Morning Britain today. Norton was on the show to explain why his fellow activists were currently blockading the M25 – a stunt which prevented a woman reaching a hospital before she was paralysed – as part of their campaign to get the government to insulate everyone’s homes. The argument quickly became heated after Norton was asked – considering the immense inconvenience his eco-stunts were causing – if he had actually bothered to insulate his own home first.

Isabel Hardman

Is Keir Starmer picking a fight with the left?

Sir Keir Starmer is holding talks with the Labour-affiliated trade unions today as he tries to change the way his party elects its leaders. He’s hoping that he will get the backing of Unison, Usdaw and the GMB, which party sources say will then unlock the support of his deputy Angela Rayner. Starmer didn’t share his plans to shake up the party’s voting system – by returning it to the electoral college rather than one member, one vote (OMOV) – with Rayner before he announced it to the shadow cabinet yesterday. So far the reaction has been as noisy as Starmer presumably planned it to be. The left of Labour is furious, saying that removing OMOV means MPs will be more important than rank-and-file members. Unite and CWU have flat out opposed the move.

Freddy Gray

No, Biden didn’t just snub Brexit Britain

For European Union enthusiasts, the ‘trade deal with America’ has joined ‘£350 million pledge on a bus’ as one of the great Brexit lies. A certain amount of gloating has therefore greeted the news that Joe Biden last night ‘downplayed’ the possibility of a US-U.K. Free Trade Agreement. It’s a ‘snub’, Brexiteer hopes are dashed, and so on. But did Biden actually ‘downplay’ anything? Not really, since nobody has been seriously playing up the possibility of late. Many journalists are today talking as if the Prime Minister had been hoping to announce with Biden the trade deal Donald Trump promised Britain in 2017. But Boris has been the one minimising the government’s hopes.

Mary Dejevsky

Why won’t German politicians talk about migration?

For a country with a reputation for being staid and predictable, the election campaign that closes the Merkel era in Germany has not been without its dramas. The opening of the campaign coincided with a flood disaster in the north-west of the country, which propelled climate change to the top of the agenda. Then favourite and assumed Merkel-successor, Armin Laschet, was undone when he was caught on camera joshing with colleagues amid the human misery. Then, earlier this month, police raided the offices of the finance and justice ministries as part of a money-laundering investigation that could harm the prospects of the current front-runner, the deputy chancellor, finance minister and Social-Democrat contender, Olaf Scholz.

Steerpike

Boris pressgangs Biden at White House love-in

You can take the boy out of journalism but you can’t the journalism out of the boy. That’s the rule Prime Minister Boris Johnson proved yet again last night in his Oval Office press event with President Joe Biden. Steerpike understands that the White House was not expecting the two leaders to field inquiries from the press. Yet the PM appeared to pressgang, as it were, the President into taking a couple of questions at the end of their statements – even if, in their thick masks, it was almost impossible to hear what they were actually saying... https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1440496083575066626?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw 'Would it be ok if we had a couple of questions? Just a couple?' asked Boris hopefully. 'Good luck' Biden shot back tartly.

Tuesday

21 September 2021

Katy Balls

What do Boris and Biden want?

7 min listen

The Prime Minister is in America to meet Joe Biden and discuss COP26 and the new Aukus security pact. But what do the two leaders hope to achieve? Also, the Labour party conference is this weekend. can Keir Starmer get the left of his party to heel or will his leadership be brought even more into question? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.

Steerpike

Seven awful Indyref predictions seven years on

On Saturday it was the seventh anniversary of the Scottish vote on independence – how time flies. That contest saw a decisive ten point majority against separation; not that you'd know it from the way Nicola Sturgeon conducts her affairs. The SNP First Minister succeeded Alex Salmond in the post just weeks after the plebiscite and has spent most of her time in office talking tough and delivering little on making Scexit a reality. In many ways it's a good thing the vote did not go the SNP's way. There's the whole 300 years of history shtick of course but as the calculations of the 2013 White Paper on independence make clear, not all of the predictions necessary for the sunlit uplands of an independent Scotland have managed to come true.

Freddy Gray

Boris is a mini-Biden

It’s been said far too many times that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have a lot in common. Trump himself called the Prime Minister ‘Britain Trump’ – to Donald’s mind, the greatest compliment any man could give. Others use the Trump-Boris analogy to pour scorn. French newspapers have called him ‘mini-Trump’. Or ‘Trump with a thesaurus,’ is how Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister who now works for Facebook, put it. To most international media, Brexit and Trump, and therefore Boris and Trump, were part of the same horrid phenomenon. Both men were called populists, nationalists, demagogues, liars – yet they kept winning.

Matthew Lynn

The EU should keep out of France’s spat with Australia

Ursula von der Leyen has demanded a full investigation. EU officials are considering pulling out of technology talks with the US. And negotiations over a trade deal with Australia have been put in doubt. Over the last 24 hours, the full might of the European Union has been deployed on the side of France in the row over a cancelled submarine contract and the creation of the Australian-US-UK defence pact. But hold on. Why exactly is the EU getting behind what is, after all, just an export order for a French arms manufacturer?

Conrad Black

Another stupid, redundant, dismal Canadian election

Canada has just surpassed even its own previous records for absurd and boring elections yielding predictable and dreary results. Almost inexplicably, Trudeau called this election with the shortest possible campaign. He believed he could regain his majority as a recognition of what he imagined to be his distinguished leadership of the country through the coronavirus pandemic. Like Theresa May seeking a strong mandate to leave Europe and remain within it, Trudeau wanted a strong mandate to take the country on a drastic turn to the left which most people did not wish and Trudeau never seriously outlined. In fact, Trudeau's imposition of the Covid shutdown was far too severe and prolonged. He started negotiating with the Chinese for a vaccine which was soon shown to be ineffective.

Stephen Daisley

Why The Spectator is wrong to call for amnesty for illegal migrants

The Spectator is a magazine for conservatives written by liberals. From that tension comes an editorial persuasion — there is no line — that can seem winsome, beguiling, even perverse. Optimistic but never idealist, sceptical of the big but not the new, The Spectator combines a radical’s grasp of the possible with a reactionary’s sense of the inevitable. It is instinctually Whiggish but plagued by spasms of Toryism, looking forward through the rear-view mirror of life. If National Review is in the business of standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’, the The Spectator has more often been found sprinting ahead of history yelling ‘hurry up’.

Brendan O’Neill

Starmer’s shameful silence on the Rosie Duffield trans row

One of the most shocking images from the Corbyn years of the Labour party was Luciana Berger flanked by police officers at Labour conference. Here was a Labour MP who had been subjected to so much hostility and outright racism from cesspit leftists that she felt unsafe at her own annual party gathering. That a Jewish woman was made to feel so unwelcome, so threatened, was a black mark against the Corbynista left. I would never have guessed that Keir Starmer, the anti-Corbyn, the man who said he would rescue Labour from its nutty wing and restore its respectability, would have a similarly shameful moment. And yet he has. At this year’s conference, which starts on Saturday, one Labour MP will be absent.

Steerpike

Ian Blackford reaffirms his crofting credentials

The last few months have been a period of change for SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford. The waistcoat-wearing MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber placed one of his two Skye homes on sales for £400,000 and quit his £39,000-a-year directorship of Golden Charter – the investment firm which gets its money from pre-paid funeral plans. The company caused Blackford a fair amount of embarrassment last year after it was revealed to have bemoaned how 'excess deaths' caused by Covid meant it had to hand over more than usual to cover the costs of customers' funerals and cremations. Classy. Now such Gordon Gekko antics are behind the former investment banker.