Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: Rees-Mogg mocks Oxford ‘pimply adolescents’

In recent months Jacob Rees-Mogg has kept a low profile in Westminster. The leader of the House is kept mainly these days to the confines of managing parliamentary business with the mile-long 'Mogg conga' queuing system last June being one of the few occasions he has returned to the limelight. So Mr S was delighted to see the Old Etonian demonstrate he has lost none of his wit or wisdom when he came to the Commons today to field questions from backbenchers.

Steven Barrett

What the Covid contract ruling against the government really means

The High Court's ruling that Boris Johnson's government broke the law by awarding a Covid contract worth £560,000 has been loudly celebrated by campaigners. 'The Government’s handling of pandemic procurement was a kind of institutionalised cronyism,' said Jolyon Maugham, from the 'Good Law Project', which brought the case. But this isn't quite the victory it is being made out to be. It's true that judges did decide that the contract handed to Public First, a communications firm, was unlawful because of a risk of apparent bias. But the Court rejected two of the three things the Project complained about. It also refused to quash, or end, the contract.

Matthew Lynn

Two reasons why Andy Haldane is right to worry about inflation

Companies are facing critical shortages of staff. Commodity prices keep spiking upwards. Central banks are printing money on an unprecedented scale, and governments are running deficits of a size that haven’t been seen in peacetime before. What could possibly go wrong?  Well, quite a bit, as it happens. And the departing chief economist of the Bank of England Andy Haldane is completely right to warn that the real risk we face over the next couple of years is not a prolonged slump, but a re-run of the spiralling prices of the 1970s.  To his credit, Haldane was seldom afraid of challenging orthodox views during his time at the Bank. Now that he is leaving, he has become increasingly off-message.

Steerpike

Watch: 2019 Tories queue up to condemn ‘leftie lawyers’

Happy birthday Lindsay Hoyle. The Speaker of the House was bombarded with such messages today as he celebrated his 64th birthday by granting an urgent question to Yvette Cooper on the accommodation of asylum seekers at Napier Barracks. Last week, six asylum seekers won a legal challenge against the government after a judge ruled that their accommodation in the barracks failed to meet a minimum standard.  Today MPs clashed over whether or not such accommodation was justified with Cooper claiming the Home Office was guilty of 'ignoring public health advice in the middle of a pandemic and putting public health at risk.' A trio of Tories led the counterattack on Labour.

Katy Balls

Boris’s three unlocking options for 21 June

What will Boris Johnson announce on Monday? The Prime Minister is due to update the nation on whether the final stage of the roadmap out of lockdown can proceed on 21 June as planned. However, with cases on the rise and the Indian variant spreading, various government advisers have spent the past few weeks taking to the airwaves to warn of calamity ahead should Johnson lift all restrictions. There is also a push from some in the Cabinet to either delay the roadmap or opt for a more limited easing. In truth, no final decision will be made until Sunday. The Prime Minister is currently busy in Cornwall attempting to woo world leaders (and avoid a diplomatic row with the US over the Northern Ireland protocol).

Andrew Willshire

Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you

Dorian Lynskey recently wrote a piece celebrating Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday entitled 'Bob Dylan doesn’t like you'. The article highlighted the disdain Dylan has for fans, critics, journalists, and even the Nobel Prize Committee. Feted as the voice of a generation, and often acting like it, he still has nothing but scorn for those who acclaim him as such. Another 'voice of a generation', some three generations removed, Greta Thunberg has been acclaimed by many politicians for her climate activism. But there is little sign that Thunberg has anything but scorn for them in return. It would be fair to say to most world leaders 'Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you'.

Steerpike

Sage scientist claims social distancing should remain ‘forever’

First we were told it would be just 12 weeks to 'turn the tide'; then it was that the pandemic would be over by September (2020). But now, amid yet more calls to push back the 21 June reopening date, it appears one scientist is happy for the current restrictions of social distancing to continue 'forever.' Professor Susan Michie is a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and has previously caught Steerpike's eye as a key pillar of the Communist party of Great Britain who once boasted the nickname 'Stalin's granny.' The former wife of key Corbyn adviser Andrew Murray, Michie has been omnipresent on the nation's television screens through out the pandemic, continually popping up on Newsnight to preach the virtues of lockdowns and Covid restrictions.

Joanna Rossiter

The shallowness of the Oxford dons’ Rhodes protest

Rhodes must fall. At least, that’s the conclusion of 150 Oxford dons who have joined a boycott of Oriel college over its decision to keep its Cecil Rhodes statue in place. The protest may have made national headlines but who does it really serve? Certainly not the students at Oriel who will feel the brunt of the impact: the rebel dons say they will refuse to give tutorials to Oriel undergraduate students and will not assist the college with its outreach work, including interviewing undergraduates. In short, their chosen form of protest costs them nothing and punishes students who largely support the removal of the statue anyway.

James Forsyth

Why this G7 summit matters more than most

It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is to be believed, Boris Johnson will get away with this gamble at the weekend’s meeting of the G7 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Brexit’s critics were always going to seize on any evidence that Britain was being sidelined by the rest of the world after we left the EU. So it is fortunate for the government that the UK is the host of this year’s summit because it has placed this country at the centre of things. This G7 is unusually consequential. It is the first time that these leaders have met in person for well over a year. This will give the meeting momentum; it would be hard to think of a worse format for diplomacy than group video calls.

Charles Moore

Would you pay £80 for a video from John Bercow?

There is much to be said for meritocracy, and Adrian Wooldridge, in his new book, The Aristocracy of Talent, says it very well. He is right: a society organised on anti-meritocratic principles will decay, making life worse for all, not just for the naturally successful. And yet I feel that meritocracy is inadequate. Most of us, sensing our lack of merit, feel left out. It takes small account of things that matter in real life — love of family and friends, relationships across generations, enduring ill health and bereavement, beauty, landscapes, animals, flowers, kindness, joy, pleasing idleness, traditions, prayer, being silly, jokes, song, meals, bed. Meritocracy rightly seeks results. But life is better understood as a predicament, not a race.

Freddy Gray

Boris, Biden and the orange elephant in the room

Donald who? As Boris Johnson meets Joe Biden in Cornwall this week, the Prime Minister will hope that the President doesn’t dwell on his efforts to woo the last occupant of the Oval Office. Boris’s dalliance with Donald Trump is a bit like his affair with Jennifer Arcuri — an embarrassing fling with a rotund, brash American conspiracy theorist, something he’d rather the world forgot. He’s moved on and so should we.

The Spectator

It’s time to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol

Britain has already seen two ‘Brexit days’ — when it formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and the end of the transition period 11 months later. But given that it has taken less than six months for the Northern Ireland protocol to unravel, it’s horribly clear that our future relationship with the EU is anything but settled. The transport of sausages and other chilled meats from Britain to Northern Irish supermarkets may seem a trivial matter. But the attempt by the EU to enforce a ban on this trade demonstrates what so many people found problematic about the idea of an internal UK border down the Irish Sea. And it is surely a harbinger of battles to come.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Are Brexit talks back to the bad old days?

10 min listen

Today, talks between David Frost and the EU's negotiator Maroš Šefčovič ended with little agreement about how to move forward on the Northern Ireland Protocol. As James Forsyth says on the podcast: 'it didn't end with either man walking out of the meeting, but you probably can't say much more for it than that.' This is partly down to Lord Frost's negotiating style. Katy Balls points out that he's learning from the lessons of the Brexit talks of recent years: 'David Frost, who gets a lot of criticism for being very confrontational in his methods, looks back at the Brexit negotiations which he led on the UK side, and thinks that "Well it worked then, it might work now". And therefore, all these people saying his approach is wrong...

Katy Balls

The ‘sausage war’ escalates between the UK and EU

Any hope that a solution to the Northern Ireland protocol could be found ahead of the G7 summit have been dashed. This morning, David Frost – the minister in charge of Brexit relations – met with European Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič at Admiralty House on Whitehall to discuss the current impasse over Irish Sea border checks. The row? After the UK unilaterally extended grace periods on several checks, the EU has threatened to retaliate if the UK tries to extend these on imports of chilled meat products to Northern Ireland from Great Britain. This has led to talk of a ‘sausage war’ which threatens to cast a shadow over Boris Johnson’s attempt to woo world leaders, including Joe Biden in Cornwall on Thursday.

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Hoyle takes on Johnson

What is Prime Ministers' Questions? Is it a simple contest of ideas? Or is it a judicial roasting in which a lone defendant, governed by strict rules, must face an army of malign inquisitors? Boris thinks it’s an open debate about policy. Speaker Hoyle sees it as a court-hearing over which he presides as judge and procedural expert. Today they clashed. It began with Sir Keir Starmer blowing holes in Boris’s botched catch-up plan for schools. A government wonk, Sir Kevan Collins, had ordered huge sums to be lavished on the programme but the Treasury declined. Boris agreed with the Treasury. And Sir Kevan flounced off into obscurity leaving a few stinging insults about the education department in his wake. Ho-hum. Just another day in Whitehall.

Ross Clark

Will the G7 tax deal survive?

What are the chances of the G7’s agreement on a minimum rate of corporation tax actually coming into effect? While it was presented as a done deal last weekend, things are not going too well. Firstly, the G20 will have to agree — which is far from guaranteed given that smaller countries have less to gain from the proposal than the US. It is a tax designed to help countries with a large number of multinational companies who currently operate through subsidiaries in countries with lower corporation tax rates. While no G20 country currently has a rate below the agreed 15 per cent, (and the biggest loser, Ireland, with its 12.

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson takes aim at ‘lefty’ aid rebels

Normally when a Prime Minister goes on the attack in the Commons, it's the opposition in his sights. Not so today, when Boris Johnson accidentally attacked his own MPs, including former prime minister Theresa May, for being 'lefty' propagandists. He was responding to questions from SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford about the cuts in foreign aid spending from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent, and said: 'We are in very very difficult financial times but you shouldn't believe the lefty propaganda that you're hearing from the people opposite.' Blackford was amused by this and quipped that he'd never expected to hear May referred to as a leftist.

Steerpike

Labour’s summer of hubristic books

Tomorrow Gordon Brown is set to release his latest messianic tome. Grandly titled Seven Ways to Change the World: How to Fix the Most Pressing Issues We Face – presumably from some of the problems he first caused – it is set to be released exactly one week after his successor Ed Miliband published a rival guide: Go Big: How to Fix our World . Mr S wonders whether actually winning an election could be the answer to any of these questions? Other Labour books out include the ironically titled The Dignity of Labour by Jon Cruddas and Jess Phillips’s Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics – a surprising title for a candidate who had to withdraw last year from the Labour leadership race after 18 days owing to a lack of support.

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s growing backbench problem

When will Boris Johnson reshuffle his Cabinet? It's a question that’s asked every couple of weeks in Westminster with frequent briefings about who is up (Liz Truss, if recent ConservativeHome polls are anything to go by) and who is down (Gavin Williamson is the most recent minister to be tipped for the axe). Yet despite the talk, so far the Prime Minister has proven reluctant to refresh his top team. A hint of why can be found in the events of this week. A series of Tory rebellions are bubbling up. As Johnson considers whether to green-light the June 21 unlocking, members of the Covid Recovery Group are once again going public with their concerns. More troubling for the government, however, is the unease behind the scenes.

Leo McKinstry

Judge Ollie Robinson on his cricket skills, not his tweets

Ollie Robinson, who made his Test debut for England at Lord’s last week against New Zealand, is an outstanding cricketer with both bat and ball. But that ability apparently counts for little. His performance was overshadowed by the discovery of some incendiary, tasteless tweets he had sent almost a decade ago as a teenage professional. An abject apology was not enough to save him. The England Cricket Board promptly banned Robinson from the next Test match, and a full inquiry has been launched into his conduct. Quite rightly, sports minister Oliver Dowden has called the penalty 'over the top'. But that intervention has not helped Robinson. This row marks a depressing moment for English cricket. It also raises a key question: is any player safe?