Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is arrested

Happy birthday to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He has today been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, after photos showed cars arriving at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk earlier this morning. Thames Valley Police have previously said they were assessing a complaint over the alleged sharing of confidential material by the former prince with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement, the force said: As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2) arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. The man remains in police custody at this time. We

Steerpike

Antonia Romeo is the new cabinet secretary

We have a new cabinet secretary! After a shambolic week in which Downing Street were forced to admit to the lobby that they did not know who was running the Civil Service, today we finally get our answer. Antonia Romeo is the first woman to rule Whitehall, taking over from the somewhat plodding Chris Wormald. He earns the distinction of being the shortest serving cabinet secretary in history – a blow that will be somewhat softened by a pay-off worth at least £260,000. Ching ching! Romeo faced multiple bullying complaints earlier in her career but government sources have told the BBC today that Sir Keir Starmer was impressed by her

Ross Clark

A homegrown Visa card won't save Britain in a crisis

It is finally dawning on the government and the banking industry that it is not such a good idea to put the entire economy at the mercy of a couple of large overseas corporations. Today, a consortium of banks are meeting to hammer out a plan to create a homegrown alternative to Visa and Mastercard, which at present have a virtual duopoly on the handling of card payments in Britain and much of the developed world. Their fear, in particular, is that Donald Trump could simply order Visa and Mastercard to switch off their services to any country which displeased him. This is what happened in Russia after the Ukraine

Michael Simmons

The dodgy data behind child poverty

Britain is set for another dodgy data scandal. In last Friday’s Reality Check newsletter I picked up on reporting from the Times which called into question the income data used to calculate Britain’s child poverty metrics. Now, the BBC reports that those figures are going to be revised. The result: half a million children who the government previously claimed were in poverty were in fact not. This is obviously good news. But let’s be clear: it’s also a total and utter scandal. The way we measure child poverty has always been a bit of nonsense. It uses ‘relative poverty’, which sets a breadline of 60 per cent of median income. The

Charlie Gammell

The US is offering Iran a lifeline – will it take it?

The talks are still alive. Just. Iranian and US diplomats, engaging indirectly through Omani intermediaries, have yet to make any substantive progress towards a framework of understanding that governs further talks – as Kafkaesque as that might sound – but they are talking, and that is the best that the diplomats can hope for right now.  What separates Iran and America is a vast chasm between their respective red lines, and beyond that, the very substance of the talks themselves. The US is not willing to countenance an Iran that enriches uranium, has a ballistic missile programme and arms proxies throughout the region.  Iran, for its part, perhaps unwisely – as

Michael Simmons

Is Reform brave enough to take on the pensions triple lock?

Will any political party ever take on the triple lock? The answer from Reform’s Robert Jenrick yesterday appeared to be no.  At a press conference where Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesman, appeared to junk nearly everything Reform had previously said on economic and fiscal policy. He chucked overboard what was in many ways a left-leaning approach to both economic and fiscal policy and adopted a list of proposals that would be right at home in a Tory manifesto. That included committing to keeping the triple lock – which guarantees the state pension rises by the highest of earnings, inflation or a floor of 2.5 per cent.  Afterwards, however, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage appeared

How prepared is Britain for war? – with Gen Sir Nick Carter
Nick Carter

How prepared is Britain for war? – with Gen Sir Nick Carter

35 min listen

General Sir Nick Carter, former chief of the defence staff, joins Tim Shipman to discuss Britain’s military preparedness – or rather, lack thereof. While a friendlier US presence at the Munich Security Conference may have provided some relief, the military threats to the UK and to Europe presented are still stark. So what choices need to be addressed to ensure that Britain is equipped to deal with these threats? Is the government doing enough to address the awareness gap with the public? And how could AI change warfare? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Trump slaps down State Department on Chagos

Just what is happening in Washington? It was only yesterday that the State Department was trying to merrily wave through Keir Starmer’s great Chagos sell-out, issuing a glowing statement suggesting that ‘The United States supports the decision of the United Kingdom to proceed with its agreement with Mauritius concerning the Chagos archipelago.’ Nothing more to see here guv. So it was presumably to some diplomatic chagrin then that Donald J Trump clearly thinks rather differently about the wisdom of such a deal. The US President took to Truth Social tonight to declare: I have been telling Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the United Kingdom, that Leases are no good when

Freddy Gray

Why do men in dresses keep killing people?

20 min listen

Kellie-Jay Keen joins Americano to discuss the disturbing rise of trans killers. Freddy Gray and Kellie discuss why she doesn’t like to call them ‘trans’, what role the internet and hormone medication have played in their violent outbreaks, and why the left holds some responsibility for encouraging violence.

Why do men in dresses keep killing people?
Maxwell Marlow

It’s time to abolish the minimum wage

Forty-five per cent of 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment, or training – known as ‘NEETs’ – have never had a job. Not a Saturday shift at a café, not a summer stacking shelves, not an entry-level role that teaches you what an invoice or balance sheet looks like. Alan Milburn, former Labour health secretary and now chair of the government’s own young people and work review, delivered this verdict this week with the weary authority of a doctor who knows the patient is deteriorating but cannot persuade them to change the treatment. The latest figures from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) confirm what anyone with a

Oscar Edmondson

Is Reform now part of the ‘orthodoxy’?

It is Robert Jenrick’s big day out today. The newly-minted Reform ‘shadow chancellor’ made his first speech this morning, where he had the chance to show what kind of chancellor he would be and – sporting a snazzy pair of specs – he had plenty of soothing words to calm the jitters of the bond markets. The top news lines from his presser was his decision to kill Reform’s two-child benefit cap – Nigel Farage’s big offer to Labour voters last summer – and the announcement that he he would support the independence of the OBR and the Bank of England. Is this a missed opportunity for Reform UK? Oscar

Is Reform now part of the ‘orthodoxy’?
Ross Clark

Just how bad are Nato’s armies?

Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France

dominic cummings
William Atkinson

What Labour should have learnt from Dominic Cummings

‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Keir Starmer seems to have mirrored Juliet after deciding to move on Chris Wormald on as Cabinet Secretary. Yet the young Capulet was asking not where her lover was, but why he must be Romeo – a Montague. ‘Deny they father and refuse they name’, she implored, so that the pair could be together. With Antonia Romeo widely expected to be Wormald’s successor, a similar chorus of ‘whys?’ seems to be pricking up across Whitehall. Cutting NHS waiting lists should not be harder than defeating Napoleon Sir Simon McDonald, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary and reliably pompous avatar of the Ancien Régime , has said that ‘more due diligence’ needs

Tim Shipman

The truth about Britain’s hollowed-out armed forces

When Keir Starmer was told his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament was not enough to fund his vision for the armed forces, as outlined in the strategic defence review (SDR), he put his head in his hands and snapped: ‘Why are you doing this to me? I thought this was costed!’ That striking image of a leader on the edge was widely talked about at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Three senior defence figures relayed it to me. Remove the self-pity and it is still a telling insight. The SDR, drawn up by George Robertson, the former Labour

Druin Burch

Is it a surprise middle-class women are using Ozempic most?

New research reveals a startling truth about the people paying thousands for weight-loss drugs: they’re mostly middle-aged, wealthy women. In other news, February is cold and the snowdrops are here. The Health Foundation, a British health charity backed by a billion-pound endowment, confirmed today what most people would have guessed: those paying thousands of pounds a year for these drugs are not the poorest and most deprived, nor the fattest, nor the most in need: People living in deprived areas already face poorer health outcomes than those in more affluent areas, and men experience worse health outcomes than women. Yet these are the groups that have the lowest uptake of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Gender in schools, election U-turns and the ‘truth’ about Navalny

Home Pupils will be allowed to change gender at school, according to guidance issued by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary; parents would be consulted, unless there was a safeguarding reason not to, and children would have their preferred pronouns used in the classroom. However, children older than eight would still have to use facilities according to their biological sex. A High Court judge dismissed a challenge to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance last April that single-sex lavatories or changing rooms should be used by people of the same biological sex; the EHRC withdrew its guidance in October, and its revised guidance is being considered by the government. The

Rod Liddle

Don’t underestimate the ‘stop Farage’ alliance

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the pollsAnd made its coward vote and the streets resoundedTo the triumphant cheers of the lost souls –The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, (1938) The electorate quite often gets it wrong, even if we are not meant to admit as much. It certainly got it wrong at the Oxford by-election held in October 1938, when the left allied itself around a ‘Progressive Independent’ candidate in the hope of defeating the Conservative, Quintin Hogg (later Baron Hailsham, of course). Labour’s Patrick Gordon Walker and the Liberal party’s Ivor Davies had both been persuaded to stand aside, allowing the master

James Heale

The thinking behind Nigel Farage’s shadow cabinet

There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?… Because nothing grows under him.’ The comparison to this acid-leafed tree which stifles all beneath it is one the Reform UK leader has never accepted. ‘I don’t fall out with people,’ he once said. ‘They fall out with me.’ Like Tintin, Farage has enjoyed many different adventures in different guises: ‘Nigel in America’, ‘Nigel in the Jungle’, ‘Nigel in the City’. This week, we got another: ‘Nigel and the Gang of Four’, the leader who seeks power only to yield it to others. Four names were unveiled as part of

The Spectator

Can Keir Starmer keep us safe?

‘Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force, gesture without motion.’ T.S Eliot’s lines from ‘The Hollow Men’ sum up in 11 words the emptiness of Sir Keir Starmer’s administration. Nowhere is the shade darker and the force more paralysed than in our government’s defence policy. At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, the Prime Minister boasted that he has demonstrated ‘Britain’s leadership on the world stage’ and pledged to augment our ‘huge defence capabilities’. A promise to increase defence spending further, faster, followed. But this is all gesture and no motion. The Prime Minister’s promises that Britain will be ready for global conflict are all shape and no form

David Shipley

Why can’t this advert depict a black sexual harasser?

A Transport for London (TfL) advert has been banned for ‘perpetuating a negative racial stereotype about black men’. The decision, issued today by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), relates to an advert TfL from October last year. According to the ASA it: ‘Featured a video of a black teenage boy on a bus. The teenage boy, who was turned around in his seat, said to the passenger seated behind him, “Am I not good enough for you or something? Why you not chatting to me?”.’ The next shot was of a white teenage boy sitting on the bus with text overlaid which stated, “Would you know how to defuse incidents