Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Gavin Rice

MAGA-nomics is working

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the longest in history, served as a reminder of the relentless will and unstoppable energy he brings to the office of the presidency. In a coup de grace he humiliated Congressional Democrats, securing footage of them remaining seated en masse as they refused to accept that the role of the government is to prioritise American citizens. He gently chastised the Supreme Court judges, assembled in the front row, for declaring his tariff programme unlawful last Friday. Our political right should take heed: for all its roughness, this agenda isn’t going away The President’s opponents may be celebrating the judgment, but the Donald is

Megan McElroy

Badenoch rattles Starmer – but are they as bad as each other?

17 min listen

Megan McElroy unpacks a rowdy PMQs with Tim Shipman and Isabel Hardman. Kemi Badenoch made Keir Starmer uncomfortable over student loans but – at a time when trust in the Conservative brand is low – could some of her rhetoric backfire? Plus, what did they make of the revelation that it was the Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle that reported Peter Mandelson to police as a flight risk? Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

Badenoch rattles Starmer – but are they as bad as each other?
Joe Whittaker

It’s time to treat social media like tobacco

There is growing momentum behind a ban on social media for the under-16s. Last week, the Prime Minister hinted that legislation could be fast-tracked. This week, Kemi Badenoch, at a press conference with the parents of children whose deaths have been connected to social media, called for a digital ‘counter-revolution’ to protect kids. If Britain did ban social media for under-16s, it would be following in the footsteps of Australia, which enacted a ban in December. Denmark, France and Spain are signalling similar intentions. The logic behind these bans is simple: social media’s harms have become too severe for children to navigate safely, and tech companies have repeatedly shown that

Philip Patrick

Japan is holding firm against China’s Taiwan bullying

One of the most serious issues in the well-filled in-tray of freshly endorsed Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi is Taiwan (which China claims as its own sovereign territory) and the lamentable state of Sino-Japanese relations. Takaichi provoked fury with comments in the Japanese parliament in November when she stated that were China to attack Taiwan, it would be interpreted as a ‘survival-threatening situation’ for Japan, implying a military response could follow. Under the terms of its constitution, Japan is severely limited in its military options but Takaichi appeared to be preparing more solid ground with her phrasing. A 2015 law changed the constitution allowing Japan to retaliate if the country

Michael Simmons

‘It’s a Faustian pact’: Rachel Reeves is giving bankers what they want

The Epstein files lift the curtain on how power is exercised and influence traded by our financial elite. It is not a cheering sight. Business and economic gurus like the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asking for dating advice from a convicted paedophile does not build confidence in the masters of the universe. Distasteful as these details are, the most telling insights into the predatory behaviour of the private-jet classes relate to how they exploit all of us, not just the vulnerable young women who catch their eye. Institutional logic does not explain Reeves’s love-in with the banks. They seem to have made a Faustian pact Peter Mandelson may

John Power

Can Rupert Lowe stop Farage from becoming prime minister?

The crowded market place emerging on Britain’s right is bewildering. Nigel Farage and Reform UK appeared to have successfully colonised the space for positions more robust than those offered by the current Tory party. They have been ahead in the national opinion polls for months now. But the launch of Restore Britain, a new party founded by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, suggests that Farage himself now faces a threat on his exposed flank. No party to the right of Farage has posed a substantive electoral threat since the British National Party virtually disappeared in 2015. But that could be about to change. Restore claims to have 90,000 members.

Tim Shipman

Has it all gone wrong between Trump and Starmer?

‘The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,’ a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected the Chagos Islands deal. There are profound differences between London and Washington over military action against Iran while the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine this week has exposed further fault lines. The result is that Anglo-American relations are at their worst point since the general election. Starmer’s team argues he should not be ousted at a time of huge international instability. But the reality of the Anglo-American relationship raises three questions. Where did things go wrong? Does the PM still have some kind of relationship with Trump? And

Isabel Hardman

Badenoch savaged Starmer at PMQs

Kemi Badenoch was on savage form at Prime Minister’s Questions. The leader of the opposition has generally improved her performance in this session, but she has always been particularly good at verbally kicking politicians when they are down. Today, she came out with some brutal lines, including that Labour MPs were saying they were being called ‘the paedo defenders party’ and that Starmer had ‘411 MPs and not a single one of them has any imagination’. Starmer by contrast was still waffling on about ‘the party of Liz Truss’ and complaining that she was ‘carping from the sidelines’. Badenoch was vicious when Starmer tried his regular joke about Conservatives defecting

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Andrew’s arrest, tariff rulings and Boris in Ukraine

Home Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on his 66th birthday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and released under investigation. The King said: ‘The law must take its course.’ The government proposed introducing legislation to remove Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of royal succession, and agreed to a motion compelling ministers to release information relating to his appointment as a trade envoy ‘as soon as practicable and possible within the law’. Global Counsel, the consultancy co-founded by Peter Mandelson in 2010, collapsed into administration. Lord Mandelson, aged 72, was arrested in London on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and released on bail nine hours later. His lawyers said: ‘The arrest

Steerpike

Hoyle: I tipped off the Met about Mandy

Peter Mandelson is in a right old funk. Having been ignominiously hauled in by the Met for questioning on Monday, his lawyers have now been firing off furious statements, indignantly asking why the rozzers viewed him as a flight risk. Who could have tipped them off? But now the mysterious source has chosen to identify themselves. Ahead of Prime Ministers’ Questions, Lindsay Hoyle revealed today that it was he who told the Met that he had heard Peter Mandelson was planning to leave the country. Dun dun duh…. Mandelson blames this tip-off – which he claims was wrong – led to him being arrested by the police, rather than being allowed

Ian Maxwell

My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theatre of global online outrage

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father Robert went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offences linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimised villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. My sister became a digital-age Myra Hindley, a single face through which the internet could monetise disgust Old protections – the presumption

Paul Wood

Inside the daring plan to reclaim the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years. The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway

Shabnam Nasimi

Afghanistan is not ready for mass ‘returnees’

The word ‘return’ suggests something voluntary, even restorative: the closing of a long chapter of exile and the beginning of a new one at home. That is not what is happening on Afghanistan’s borders. We are witnessing a mass expulsion.  Three million Afghans have been pushed out of Iran and Pakistan over the past year, and 150,000 alone in the past six weeks, according to the UN. This is while Afghanistan’s population has risen 12 per cent from 40 million in 2023. These people are being deposited into a country that lacks the economic capacity, institutional infrastructure, and political conditions to absorb them. Pakistan’s expulsions are piling into the east

Danny Shaw

Can ‘calamity Lammy’ fix the justice system?

David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, has had a bruising five months. Last September, he took charge of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which oversees the courts, prisons and probation, as part of a reshuffle sparked by the forced resignation of Angela Rayner. Within weeks, the former foreign secretary had to deal with the accidental release from prison of Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker convicted of sexual assault who’d been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping. The error, by prison staff, was deeply embarrassing for everyone at the department, but it was compounded by Lammy’s ham-fisted handling of it. After he’d publicly pledged to grip the problem it emerged other

Atbin Moayedi

The Iranian case for bombing Iran

Think about how bad things would have to be for ordinary Iranians to plead for Donald Trump to carry out military intervention against their own country (though in reality, against their hostage takers, the Islamic Republic). Iranian women, children, men, flora and fauna are dying at the hands of the Iranian regime. Killing is what they do Iran, the world’s oldest country, has been ruled by a theocratic authoritarian terrorist regime for the past 47 years. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the ayatollahs took over, a mafia of clerical families took the Iranian people hostage. In the ensuing half decade, the country with the fourth largest oil reserves

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Donald Trump may have celebrated Team USA for winning the gold at the Olympics in hockey, but he was not in a puckish mood during his State of the Union speech. Instead, Trump stuck to his tried-and-true script of denouncing Democrats as ‘sick’, mocking concerns about affordability and cooing over Melania as a great new movie star. Far from nobody ever seeing anything like it, Trump delivered what everybody has already seen. At times, the State of the Union devolved into a saccharine reality show as Trump focused in on the plight or bravery of one of the plain folks who served as his props Ever the salesman, he was

‘This is as scandalous as the grooming gangs’ – Munira Mirza | Part one
Michael Gove

‘This is as scandalous as the grooming gangs’ – Munira Mirza | part one

42 min listen

This week, Michael is joined by Munira Mirza. Raised in Oldham and educated at Oxford, Munira worked at Policy Exchange before serving as Deputy Mayor of London under Boris Johnson and later as Director of the No.10 Policy Unit, where she helped shape the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto. She now leads Civic Future and the think tank Fix Britain. In the first of this two-part interview, Munira reflects on Labour’s vulnerability in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, and the ‘serious threat’ it faces if the Muslim votes flees to the Greens. She discusses the politicisation of religious identity, the influence of Islamism in Britain, and what she sees as

Tuesday

Steerpike

Ed Davey’s Andrew stunt backfires

Oh dear. It seems that Ed Davey – the most righteous man in all of parliament – has got it wrong again. He and his party must have thought it a terrific wheeze when they announced that they would today be pushing for documents on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as a UK trade envoy to be released, following his arrest last week. But poor old Sir Ed had a torrid time on the morning media round, given his historic support for Andrew’s position when he was a business minister in the Coalition government. Whoops! Invited on to the Today programme, host Nick Robinson pressed Sir Ed on his 2011 comments that

James Heale

Reform has stepped up its donations game

One intriguing element of the battle on the right is the arms race for donations. Twelve months ago, Kemi Badenoch’s supporters could point to her prowess in this field; the Tory leader managed to raise £3.3 million in the first three months of 2025. By contrast Reform UK, the pop-up party, were struggling to keep the lights on for much of 2024. They received just £280,000 large donations in the final quarter that year – less than the moribund Communist Party of Great Britain registered. Indeed, when I interviewed Nigel Farage last May, he wondered aloud just how the Tories were still able to raise so much money, given their

Isabel Hardman

Why ministers want to talk about Andrew

This afternoon’s Commons debate on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was unusual for all kinds of reasons. It was not just that the Speaker had decided that MPs could directly criticise the former Duke of York even though parliamentary convention normally prevents them from discussing the monarchy in the Chamber. It was not even that the government accepted the humble Address motion tabled by the Liberal Democrats calling for the release of the documents relating to Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy. It was also that the minister responding to the debate was able to spend most of his speech criticising someone else, rather than being on the defensive the whole time. There was,