Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Coffee House

The Spectator at Conservative conference 2025: events programme

The Spectator is delighted to be at Conservative party conference in Manchester this year. Join us in Exchange 11, MCCC. Our schedule is below: Sunday 5 October Coffee House Shots Live – welcome reception  3.30-4.30pm Join The Spectator’s team to kick off party conference with a glass of wine. Meet Michael Gove, Tim Shipman, James Heale and subscribers from across the country to toast the start of three days of stimulating discussion and debate. Private drinks reception: The Spectator in association with Santander  5.30-7pm The Tories have traditionally prided themselves on being the party of small business. But is that still the case? Ahead of Rachel Reeves’s second Budget, Sir Mel Stride will argue that it

Thursday

Steerpike

Nadine Dorries defects to Reform

On the eve of Reform’s annual conference, the party has dropped another bombshell. Former Tory culture secretary Nadine Dorries has defected to Reform UK – a move Nigel Farage has gushed he is ‘absolutely delighted’ about. In an explosive interview with the Daily Mail, Dorries has declared ‘the Tory party is dead’ – and advised party members to ‘now think the unthinkable and look to the future’.  Dorries’ defection follows the ex-cabinet minister’s three decades as a Conservative party member. As reported by the Mail, her talks with Farage did not involve a guaranteed place in a Reform government. Yet while the once-vociferous Boris Johnson ally is not currently a

Lucy Dunn

Bell Hotel asylum seeker found guilty of sexually assaulting teenager

Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia who was staying at the Bell Hotel in Epping, has been found guilty of two counts of sexual assault, one count of attempted sexual assault, inciting a child into sexual activity, and harassment without violence. Kebatu did not react as he was found guilty at Chelmsford magistrates’ court of all five counts he was charged with, keeping his hand held to his face. During the proceedings, the court heard that the 38-year-old asylum seeker had approached a group of teenagers and asked a girl back to his room at the hotel to ‘make babies’. The judge told Kebatu the evidence against him was

Steerpike

Reform to launch new campaign app

Reform UK kicks off party conference season tomorrow. Thousands of attendees are expected to flock to the Birmingham NEC to hear from Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf and others. A year after the last jamboree, the party is keen to emphasise how much it has grown in the 12 months since: 700 councillors, the Runcorn triumph and four months of poll leads to boot too. And now, in the party’s bid to make further gains next May, Steerpike can reveal that the party is launching its own campaign app to co-ordinate Reform’s 230,000 members across 400 active branches. Chairman David Bull will be touting the new ’ReformGo’ app in the coming

Gareth Roberts

Reform’s camp following, masculine rage & why do people make up languages?

51 min listen

First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters’. ‘From Farage on down,’ Roberts argues, ‘there is a glorious kind of naffness’ to Reform: daytime-TV aesthetics, ‘bargain-basement’ celebrities and big-breasted local councillors. ‘The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying they had won it’, but ‘the John Bulls and

Freddy Gray

How scary is China's military?

Freddy is joined by Harry Kazianis, editor in chief of the National Security Journal, to assess China’s military rise. He argues Beijing aims to dominate the Indo-Pacific with missiles, drones and naval power, posing a growing threat to U.S. influence and Taiwan.

Steerpike

Linehan in court over criminal damages charges

To Westminster magistrates’ court, where Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan appeared today to face charges of harassment and criminal damage against a teenage trans activist. The court heard today that the comedian smashed the phone of a transgender activist, 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, and made targeted ‘vindictive’ social media posts between 11-27 October 2024. The comedy writer has been accused of damaging a £369 phone belonging to Brooks at a Westminster conference on 19 October last year. The prosecuting barrister Julia Faure Walker said today that the Irish comedian had began to post about the trans activist ‘relentlessly’ after falsely accusing Brooks of disrupting the LGB Alliance conference last year by

Madeline Grant

Paraffin Powell comes to Angela Rayner’s defence

Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess. Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not to out themselves as perverts over the summer break. Inevitably this was accompanied by self-back-patting on how much more family-friendly parliament was under Labour. Well, it increasingly resembles a crèche, of that there is no doubt. I pity Jesse Norman, one of the unambiguously impressive and intelligent MPs left in parliament. He has to suffer

Paul Burke

Angela Rayner is no working-class hero

First of all, some poverty top trumps: I’m one of five kids. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a labourer but only when he was well enough to labour. For much of my childhood, he wasn’t, so we had to subsist on state benefits, free school meals and clothes that arrived in bin bags from the local church. My childhood was scarred by poverty and petty crime. However, before you reach for the violin, it was a childhood leavened by love and laughter which I wouldn’t have swapped for the world. Not least because, all these years later, it’s given me a natural understanding of Angela Rayner and why

Steerpike

Tories beat Labour and Reform in donations

They may be trailing both the party of government and the unofficial opposition in the polls, but it’s not all bad for the Conservatives. The latest Electoral Commission figures show that the Tories have managed to out-fundraise all other political parties when it comes to donations – for the third quarter in a row. Talk about a silver lining, eh? The figures for the second quarter of 2025 – between April and June – show the Tories have topped the donation charts, accepting £2.9 million. Kemi Badenoch’s boys in blues managed to fundraise £300,000 more than Labour, which received £2.6 million (£1.6 million of which came from trade unions) –

Tim Shipman

Can Rayner survive tax row?

16 min listen

24 hours after Angela Rayner admitted underpaying tax, the pressure remains on the deputy prime minister as Westminster now waits the outcome of the probe by the Prime Minister’s standards adviser. The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman and the Sunday Times’s Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund join Patrick Gibbons to discuss whether Rayner can retain her briefs. As Gabriel points out, regardless of the outcome of the ethics probe, Rayner was seen as Labour’s ‘sleaze-buster in chief’. So how damaging is this to ‘brand Ang’? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

David Spencer

The questions the Met must answer over the Graham Linehan debacle

Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year. A senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been

Ross Clark

The real scandal is how much stamp duty Angela Rayner had to pay

Angela Rayner must resign as Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, obviously. How could she sit on the front bench through a tax-raising budget without everyone’s eyes gravitating towards her, as the minister who thinks tax rises are for everyone else, not her? But the fate of Rayner obscures the bigger scandal here, which is stamp duty itself. No one should be facing a £70,000 bill for buying a two-bedroom flat – nor, for that matter, a £30,000 one, which is the what the bill would be for someone who is genuinely buying a main home for £800,000. The latter sum is not far short of the annual average salary.

Steerpike

TaxPayers' Alliance invite Rayner to join anti-stamp duty campaign

It would be putting it mildly to say that Angela Rayner has had better weeks in politics. The Deputy Prime Minister has been in the spotlight over the last few days after admitting on Wednesday that she had underpaid stamp duty on her third property. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a spirited defence of his second-in-command in PMQs, a number of her lefty colleagues are turning against her over the tax affair mess. One Labour MP remarked to the Telegraph: ‘She said she had thought about resigning, and she should give that some more thought now.’ Ouch. But it’s not all bad. The palaver could lead to an unlikely

Laurie Wastell

Labour can’t be trusted to protect free speech

The outrageous arrest of Graham Linehan this week seems almost designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the British government. Just a day after the news broke, Nigel Farage was already raising the case at a free-speech Congressional committee in Washington, DC, where the Reform leader happily played prime-minister-in-waiting as he opined gravely about our values having gone astray. The row comes as US trade talks loom, where free speech will be high on the agenda. The cause célèbre of Lucy Connolly, arrests for prayer in abortion buffer zones, and the effects of the Online Safety Act on US companies will all be discussed. Now, a beloved comedy writer – already forced

John Foreman

The Chief of the Defence Staff who faced Russia head on

On Tuesday, Admiral Tony Radakin finished his term as Chief of the Defence Staff much as he started it – dealing with the immediate and long-term consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is an irony that Radakin, appointed by Boris Johnson to ‘restore Britain’s position as the foremost naval power in Europe’ as part of a global, maritime strategy, has been defined by his response to a major land war in Europe. During a flying visit to Kyiv, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief praised Radakin for his ‘personal contribution’ to stiffening Ukraine’s defences, and for being the ‘leading advocate’ for providing it with lethal weapons when others wobbled. Radakin was leading

James Heale

The Tories have played Raynergate well

Angela Rayner is now in a bind. Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s independent ethics adviser, will report shortly on whether the Deputy Prime Minister’s purchase of a Hove flat broke the ministerial code. If Magnus finds that she did, then Rayner, who in opposition demanded that the code be strengthened, will have to resign. Even if Magnus clears Rayner, questions will remain about the answers that her spokesman has given to the press. Last week, it was claimed that Rayner had ‘paid the correct duty owed on the purchase, entire properly’ and that ‘any suggestion otherwise is entirely without basis.’ Now, Rayner has admitted that she failed to pay a

Stephen Daisley

Britain needs a First Amendment

Well, if they’re arresting comedians, at least Nish Kumar is safe. Graham Linehan, not so much. The British like to sniff that Americans don’t get irony. Arresting a comedian fresh off the plane from the US after months of dismissing US concerns about freedom of speech is one way to teach them. Not only was Linehan detained by the police for tweets attacking an establishment-approved ideology, he was subsequently bailed on the condition that he not post any further tweets. Britain is never beating the allegations.  I’m a Glinner (his X handle) sceptic. I began writing in opposition to gender identity ideology in 2019, and have the scars to show for it,

Theo Hobson

The vampiric desires of Putin and Xi

‘They’re vampires’ was my first thought. I had just heard the news that Putin and Xi were discussing how to prolong their lives, as they walked toward their places at the Tiananmen Square military parade. On the official news footage, Putin’s translator could be heard saying in Chinese: ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing.’ And then: ‘Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’ Xi responded: ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.’ Kim Jong-un was there too, but is not known to have contributed to the conversation. Maybe the blood-sucking image came to

Dalibor Rohac

Poland's divisions are bad news for Europe

Against the background of turbulent transatlantic relations, the visit this week of Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, to Washington was deemed a success. US president Donald Trump affirmed continuation of US commitment to Poland’s security and invited Poland to join G20, in a testament to the country’s impressive economic record. Yet the trip also leaves a bitter aftertaste by exposing the depth of Poland’s political divisions. These splits are starting to affect Poland’s ability to throw around its weight on the global stage – precisely at a moment when Poland’s voice is more needed than ever. The world is not standing still, waiting for Poland to sort out its affairs Poland