Politics Archives

Friday

13 February 2026

Labour turns on Starmer – inside the collapse, with Guto Harri, Tim Shipman & Toby Young

45 min listen

‘Authority is like virginity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone’ – that’s just one of the damning quotes about Keir Starmer that Tim Shipman has extracted from sources inside the Labour government. Much of Starmer’s bad luck this week is arguably of his own making, so why is he seemingly so bad at being the Prime Minister? For this week’s Edition, host Lara Prendergast is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, associate editor – and Conservative peer – Toby Young, and the broadcaster Guto Harri, who – as a former director of communications at Number Ten himself – knows a thing or two about the brutal reality of being at the

Thursday

12 February 2026

Lara Brown

Labour has watered down guidance on child transition

Wilson is said to have claimed that ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Not for the civil servants tasked with producing guidance for schools attempting to support gender-questioning children. On Thursday, seven years after the government first promised statutory advice, we got another draft document for consultation. The delay might not be so egregious were it not for the fact that the last consultation on this issue opened in December 2023 (and closed in March 2024 without a whisper from officials about next steps). Since then, teachers have been navigating the safeguarding issues raised in the Cass Review without any legal direction. The delay might not be so egregious

Brendan O’Neill

Why was Jim Ratcliffe punished for speaking the truth?

Imagine getting angrier over a word than a rape. This will go down in history as the week when there was more digital fury over one man’s criticism of mass immigration than there was over the dire impact those untrammelled flows of people are having on Britain’s women and girls. Millions of decent Brits are worried about our broken borders. And some might express themselves in an un-PC way The conviction of an Afghan illegal migrant for the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton barely seemed to trouble the conscience of the virtuous of our chattering classes. But Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s lamenting of our broken borders? Worse, his use

James Heale

Is Antonia Romeo what the civil service needs?

13 min listen

When a PM is in crisis, what do they do? Sack the head of the civil service. Having lost both his Chief of Staff and Director of Communications at the beginning of the week, Keir Starmer resolved to make it a hat-trick by dispensing with the services of his short-serving Cabinet Secretary. The favourite to replace him is Antonia Romeo – currently doing great work at the Home Office, but comes with a series of ‘caveats’ concerning historic allegations of bullying and irregularities over expenses when she was in New York. She has been cleared of these and passed the civil service vetting process (with caveats) – although Simon McDonald,

Is Antonia Romeo what the civil service needs?

Tim Shipman

The case for Antonia Romeo

A few thoughts about the Antonia Romeo furore. This will doubtless not help her at all but Starmer would be nuts to cave in on appointing her as the first female cabinet secretary. 1) Yes, she is ballsy and brassy (in a very posh way), likes a party and mixes with all sorts of interesting folk. She’s flirty and fun and scary in equal measure but these outgoing people skills mean she brings people with her. Is she better with men than women? Possibly. She’s ambitious! And admits it! Good grief. A woman with ambition. Whatever next? Starmer would be nuts to cave in on appointing her as the first

Freddy Gray

Will Trump ‘totally obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear programme – again?

Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear programme, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.” Trump and Hegseth protested too much Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer –

Steerpike

Starmer pick slammed by ex-mandarin

When a PM is in crisis, what do they do? Sack the head of the civil service. Having lost both his Chief of Staff and Director of Communications at the beginning of the week, Keir Starmer resolved to make it a hattrick by dispensing with the services of his short-serving Cabinet Secretary. Poor old Chris Wormald is on the way out – but it does not look like his intended replacement is going to be easy for Starmer either… For Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has now popped up in the news to warn No. 10 about plans to replace Wormald with Antonia Romeo without

Ross Clark

Jim Ratcliffe has a point about Britain

Jim Ratcliffe is not a polished media performer, and neither does he have an accurate set of UK demographic statistics in his head. But how typical that the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues, as well as the Guardian and many others, have chosen to latch onto a loose remark the billionaire Manchester United co-owner made about migration rather than address the very genuine concerns he has for the UK economy. Read between the heavily edited clips from Sky News’s interview with the chemicals entrepreneur and the point he was trying to make when he said that Britain is “being colonised by immigrants” is clear. You cannot grow an economy healthily when

Michael Simmons

Is there a silver lining in Britain’s dismal growth figures?

Wes Streeting was bang on when he told Peter Mandelson the government had ‘no growth strategy at all’. The Health Secretary’s claim seems to have been confirmed by figures, just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show Britain’s economy grew by just 0.1 per cent in the last three months of 2025. On a per capita basis the numbers were even worse: we’re in recession. What is worrying given the make up of our economy is that there was no services growth at all, and construction contracted by 2.1 per cent. The only area of the economy that expanded (by 1.2 per cent) was production. Taken together,

Tom Slater

The question we keep asking after Afghan sex attacks

Why was he here? It’s a question we are forced to ask over and over again in borderless Britain, after another asylum seeker is convicted of another monstrous crime. This time, it is the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. Twenty-three-year-old Afghan national Ahmad Mulakhil was found guilty on Tuesday of rape, child abduction, sexual assault and taking indecent photos of a child following his ten-day trial at Warwick Crown Court. The details boil the blood. Mulakhil came across the girl playing in a park The details boil the blood. Mulakhil came across the girl playing in a park. He took her to a cul-de-sac, where he repeatedly raped her. He

James Price

Why I left London, the city I loved

My friends never let me forget the first time I came to London. They couldn’t understand why I was so desperate to cross the city to meet them at London Bridge when I was coming into Paddington. The reason was simple: I thought London Bridge was actually Tower Bridge. I wanted to see this icon of the city for the first time. London left me sorely disappointed – and not for the last time. London isn’t what it was: from the endless hate marches to the random violence; the sectarian clashes that flare up After trying and failing to see Tower Bridge on that first visit, I subsequently moved to

Stephen Daisley

Britain has an antisemitism problem

Want to know what kind of country you live in? You live in a country in which there are more than 300 antisemitic incidents a month. Three-hundred. Every month. Last year, there were 80 incidents on Yom Kippur alone, including the Islamist attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester which resulted in the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby. Anyone who still needs a wake-up call about antisemitism is in a civilisational coma On a day Jews spend in fasting and prayer to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins, a day when you would be hard-pressed to encounter a Jew, still the murder and the libels and the intimidation

Wednesday

11 February 2026

James Heale

Keir Starmer staggers on for another day

Sir Keir Starmer is now the Black Knight of British politics. Like the mutilated pugilist of Monty Python, he stumbles around the Westminster battlefield, blustering and boasting while desperately trying not to totter over. Starmer and his team have spent most of the day trying to defend their decision to hand a peerage to Matthew Doyle, No. 10’s former communications chief. Doyle was appointed to the House of Lords last month – despite having campaigned for a friend charged with child sex offenses. The subject dominated Prime Ministers’ Questions this lunchtime and the subsequent briefing for journalists. Downing Street’s claim that Doyle’s peerage could not be withdrawn after the nomination stage has

Michael Simmons

Keir Starmer has done nothing for Britain's young

10 min listen

This week Keir Starmer faced the greatest challenge to his premiership yet. What will this Prime Minister will be remembered for? Policies which hurt young people. From student loan debt crisis, tax thresholds, ISA allowances and the pensions triple lock, what hope is there for young Brits? Michael Simmons has the data.

Keir Starmer has done nothing for Britain's young

James Heale

Keir Starmer gets angry

15 min listen

PMQs today and – as predicted – Keir Starmer came out worst in a pretty unpleasant session. Kemi Badenoch pinned the Prime Minister on the continued Mandelson fallout and now the scandal over Matthew Doyle, the former No. 10 comms chief who – just four weeks after his ennoblement – Labour have already been forced to kick out of their party in the House of Lords, after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children. Once again, one of those mysterious appointments for which the Prime Minister is never responsible came back to haunt him in public – sound familiar? The response from

Madeline Grant

Keir Starmer’s PMQs cluckings convinced no one

Sir Keir got probably the biggest cheer he’s had all year at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Unfortunately for him, it came from the Tory benches. After all the Mandelson revelations, it now transpires that Sir Keir gave a peerage to his former director of communications (a chocolate teapot job if ever there was one), Matthew Doyle, despite knowing that he helped campaign for a convicted sex offender. To put it simply, becoming known as the nation’s premier employer of the associates of paedophiles isn’t a fantastic way to begin your weekly bit of scrutiny at work. Is there some sort of special nonce-adjacent job centre where Sir Keir goes looking

Tim Shipman

‘Authority is like virginity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone’: Inside Keir Starmer’s downfall

Years ago, Peter Mandelson shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney. Reminiscing about his involvement in Labour’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the ‘spray-paint election’. The manifesto was a ‘beautiful technicolour’ document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of Old Labour remained, along with the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. ‘I spray-painted the old Ford Cortina,’ Mandelson told McSweeney, ‘but it was still a Cortina. Policy is at the heart of political communication.’ Only after the election – a second three-figure landslide defeat – did Labour launch a policy review, out of which New Labour emerged. Even then it took another decade to win power. Fast forward to

The Spectator

Keir Starmer can only delay the inevitable for so long

Wes Streeting is known to be a Spectator reader. Pinned on the Health Secretary’s office wall, as he revealed in an interview last Easter, is a leading article of ours asking whether he was ‘the Hamlet of the Health Service’. Streeting was ‘so riled’ by our suggestion of inactivity that he put it up to hold himself to account. It’s thus flattering, but unsurprising, that he also agrees with us about the holes at the heart of the government in which he serves. In WhatsApp conversations with Lord Mandelson, which he released helpfully early this week, Streeting lamented that the government has ‘no growth strategy’ and is not providing ‘a

Max Jeffery

Apart from Mandelson, who is Labour’s biggest freebie lover?

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven

Steerpike

Downing Street flail over dodgy peerage offence

Just stop Doyle! It was another bad Prime Ministers’ Questions this week for Keir Starmer today. Once again, one of those mysterious appointments for which the Prime Minister is never responsible came back to haunt him in public. After Peter Mandelson last week, this time it is Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s former comms chief who was ennobled last month. Talk about jobs for the boys… Unfortunately just four weeks after his ennoblement, Labour have already been forced to kick him out of their party in the House of Lords, after it emerged Doyle had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children. Party figures were warned about Doyle’s links before