Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Saturday

James Innes-Smith

How to apply for a post-truth position

Anyone over the age of 35 would be advised to hire a translator before rifling through the jobs section of the Guardian. Looking for a role in education? You will need a first in doublespeak just to understand what it is you are applying for. When I clicked on a listing for an 'Infrastructure Support Officer' - not something I do very often admittedly - I was assailed by a tsunami of 'comprehensive, personalised, integrated, safeguarding of frameworks and best practices' masquerading as a 'vibrant and cooperative environment in which to work.' Having read the listing several times I am still no wiser as to what sort of infrastructure I would be supporting or why I'd need to be paid £75,000 a year for the privilege.

Patrick O’Flynn

How Boris eclipsed Cameron

Remember the days when David Cameron was the sleek young prime minister who had brought to an end 13 years of Labour government and Boris Johnson was just a clown on a zipwire? There seemed little doubt that Dave had won the race between the Bullingdon Club contemporaries for the glittering prizes of political life, seizing the chance to fashion a moderate Conservatism for the modern age. Boris, the great entertainer, was destined to be a far less consequential figure – a squanderer of his own talents. The Greensill affair underlines the perils of rushing to premature judgment.

Friday

Steven Barrett

The EU needs to stop playing politics with law

The Lugano convention – part of a tapestry of complicated international law agreements ensuring the courts of one country recognise the courts of another – has a dull name but it matters a great deal. Since the EU referendum, the convention has played a small role in the great internecine conflict between Britain and Brussels. Much energy has been wasted in this series of pointless bust-ups. And now, the EU is determined to use the Lugano convention – a playing field it claims to control – to ensure Britain pays a price for Brexit, by effectively blocking us from rejoining the convention. Why does this matter? Because without the convention, business suffers.

Cindy Yu

Can the UK and EU fix the Protocol?

9 min listen

The UK and EU are holding talks over how to fix the Northern Ireland Protocol and stop the continuing violence on the island. Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman about whether there's a way forward.

Freddy Gray

What’s happening in Minneapolis?

26 min listen

Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who knelt on George Floyd's neck, is currently on trial in Minneapolis. What does the evidence say, will the city stay peaceful when the verdict is delivered, do violent viral videos do more harm than good, and should the country's political leaders call for order? Freddy Gray speaks to Scott Johnson, a lawyer and contributor to Power Line.

Steerpike

Coming soon: lockdown politics book bonanza

As Westminster reels from Alan Duncan’s shocking revelations that he didn’t much like Boris and that he should have been in the cabinet (not that he cared) who will be next to publish their tell all book? With the watering holes of SW1 shut for most of the last twelve months, politicians have been forced to find new ways to entertain themselves – including, err, writing about themselves.  Below Steerpike runs down the list of those who are or will be shortly bringing out their lockdown projects: Seumas Milne – the ‘thin Controller’ spent four years at the coalface of Corbynism as Labour’s director of communications between 2015 and 2019.

Nick Tyrone

Labour’s problems are piling up

Can things get any worse for Keir Starmer? Yes appears to be the answer, if the latest YouGov poll is anything to go on. While the Tories have surged ahead to 43 per cent, support for Labour has tumbled down to 29 per cent. It's important not to blow a single poll out of proportion, but nonetheless these numbers make for grim reading for the Labour leader. That 14 per cent lead for the Conservatives is the largest since mid-May 2020, when the recently elected Starmer was still digging his party out of the polling abyss of the Corbyn period. A year on – and coming weeks before a crucial set of local elections and a by-election – it shows all too clearly that Starmer has so far failed to rescue Labour.

Henry Hill

The Northern Ireland Protocol is untenable

The process that delivered us the Northern Ireland Protocol already seems to have been rewritten in official memory. It suits most parties involved to pretend the outcome was inevitable. For Brussels, it helps them defend an arrangement designed to ‘protect the peace’ which is instead corroding loyalist support for the Belfast Agreement. For those in London, it is infinitely preferable to pretend that they were honouring the UK’s ‘obligations under the Good Friday Agreement’ rather than own one of the most abject episodes of British diplomacy in recent memory. It also helps to shift the blame onto preferred targets.

Debbie Hayton

What happened when the mob came for Robert Webb?

Robert Webb is best known for making people laugh, but he conducted himself with poise and grace when he was ambushed by American podcast host Jesse Thorn. Thorn had invited Webb and long-time collaborator David Mitchell to talk about their latest show, and their experiences performing together as a double act over the years. But the programme ended in yet another episode of the transgender inquisition. This was personal. Thorn told listeners he has two gender non-conforming children, 'one of who is transgender,' as he called Webb to account for criticising gender charity Mermaids UK in December 2018.

Katy Balls

The latest polling spells trouble for Keir Starmer

It's been a bruising week for the government as ministers have come under fire over their involvement in David Cameron’s Greensill lobbying scandal. Labour have gone on the attack on the issue – with Keir Starmer putting in one of his more assured performances at PMQs on the topic this week. With numerous inquiries now due and new revelations emerging each day, the affair is not about to go away. But although Labour have been making hay with the lobbying row, Starmer still has his own problems. A reminder of the challenge facing the Labour leader in next month's local elections can be found in the latest YouGov/Times poll. It found that the Conservatives have a 14-point lead over Labour – with the Tories on 43 points to Labour's 29.

Kristian Niemietz

Berlin’s failed rent freeze offers a warning to Sadiq Khan

Berlin’s rent freeze, hailed by some as a potential model for London, is already coming to an end after less than two years. In its final ruling this week, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down the rent freeze as unconstitutional. In this sorry saga, there are plenty of lessons for those who supported rent freezes in our capital – not least London's mayor Sadiq Khan. The rent freeze was passed in June 2019, and took effect in February 2020. It froze nearly all rents across the city at their 2019-level, supposedly for a period of five years. It was hugely popular in Berlin, and attracted a lot of attention beyond. Rent controls were official Labour party and Green party policy in the 2019 General Election, and some specifically referenced the Berlin example.

Katy Balls

The Nus Ghani Edition

37 min listen

Nusrat Ghani is the Conservative MP for Wealden, having previously served as a transport minister under the May then Johnson governments. On the podcast, she tells Katy Balls about her upbringing under a father who was a headteacher; how she narrowly escaped arranged marriage through university; and how it feels to be one of nine Brits to be sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The green games: Boris’s plan to rebrand Britain

37 min listen

In this week’s podcast, Katy Balls expands on her cover story, analysing Number 10’s hopes for November’s COP26 summit in Glasgow (01:10). She’s joined by Boris Johnson’s former advisor and co-author of the last Conservative election manifesto, Rachel Wolf and together, they ponder whether the much-anticipated green jamboree signposts a supercharged boost not only for global climate policy, post Covid but also the Johnson premiership?

Steerpike

Trudeau’s Canada hit by Covid third wave

It was just two days ago that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was claiming in his country's parliament that Britain was 'facing a very serious third wave.' But now cases in the country have overtaken those of its southern neighbour the USA, whose approach to the pandemic received widespread criticism prior to the vaccine roll out.  Data from Johns Hopkins University show Canada now have cases of 207.3 per million people compared to those in the United States where numbers are 206.7 per million. A day before Trudeau's comments on the UK situation, Canada registered a record 10,859 new cases despite the country's original response to the virus being widely praised.

Peter Hunt

The royal redemption of Prince Andrew

Seventeen months is clearly long enough, as far as Prince Andrew is concerned, to spend in the royal wilderness. While mourning the passing of his father, he’s made tentative steps to reclaim his position as one of the public faces of the House of Windsor. His private status, close to his mother, has never been under threat. His first act, on this path to redemption, was an audacious one. He gave a television interview. Emily Maitlis was nowhere in sight and it passed off without incident. Indeed, it generated positive headlines with his account of how the Queen had described the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh as 'having left a huge void in her life'. Andrew also told reporters Prince Philip was a 'remarkable man' and he 'loved him as a father'.

Steerpike

Labour’s union trouble

It’s arguably been a good week for Labour, as the Tory party becomes more and more implicated in the Greensill lobbying scandal, which saw the former PM David Cameron ringing around ministers last year to secure emergency cash for the flailing financial firm. Labour leader Keir Starmer certainly seemed to enjoy the ongoing revelations about Greensill at PMQs this week, when he said Boris Johnson was overseeing the ‘return of Tory sleaze’. Wiser heads wondered though if the Labour Party should be championing a crackdown on outside organisations influencing politics, considering its own close links to the unions… Lo and behold, that appeared to play out last night when Labour’s Rachel Reeves appeared on ITV’s Peston.

Steerpike

Covid advisor’s Cheltenham amnesia

Steerpike finally got his hands this week on a copy of Failures of State by the Sunday Times Insight duo Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott about Britain's experience of Covid. While not exactly a barrel of laughs, Mr S did enjoy one contribution from SAGE member Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London and a Communist party member of 40 years. Reflecting on the decision to allow Cheltenham racing festival to go ahead in March 2020, Michie told the authors: I thought Cheltenham should definitely not have been allowed to go ahead. I remember looking at the television images of what was happening there and feeling slightly nauseous about it, just feeling: 'God, this is awful.

Ross Clark

How much of a threat is the South African variant?

For residents of six London boroughs, as well as those in Smethwick in the West Midlands, the partial relaxation of lockdown rules this week hasn’t quite gone according to plan. They’ve had a day out in the sun, alright, but not necessarily sitting enjoying food and drinks in a pub garden – more likely they have been standing in a long queue to get ‘surge tested’ for the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. So how much of a threat is the South African variant? In spite of anecdotal claims from South Africa that the new variant was affecting younger people, there is no evidence that it causes more severe illness.

Isabel Hardman

What happened to Cameron’s original retirement plan?

When David Cameron started contemplating life after Downing Street, he settled quite quickly on a model of what it should look like. He would stay on the backbenches, providing advice and wisdom to whoever came after him, earn a little bit of extra money while still working as an MP, and continue in public service with charities and others. In 2016, he outlined his approach to me as we sat in a cafe in Witney, and I wrote it up in my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians: He mourned the number of former ministers who had departed at the 2015 election, and suggested that you could do other things alongside being an MP if you did fancy a little bit more income to make up the ministerial salary you had lost.