Politics Archives

Tuesday

3 February 2026

Don’t give up on gold just yet

Anyone who thought that gold, the world’s oldest form of money, was a safe asset that they could tuck away and forget about has been through a rough few days. It has soared, then plunged, then soared again. Its price has been even more volatile than Bitcoin or one of the overhyped artificial intelligence stocks. Even so, amid all the noise, one point is surely clear: gold’s bull market is not over yet – and it is likely to recover very soon. It has been quite a ride. After surging to an all-time record of $5,580 (£4,085) an ounce last week, gold tumbled by 9 per cent on Friday. It

Joanna Williams

David Cameron is right: spiteful Labour is wrecking our schools

Agreeing with David Cameron was not on my bingo card, but politics in 2026 is a funny old game, and so here we are. The former prime minister has blasted the Labour government for taking ‘a spite-laden wrecking ball’ to school reforms that raised standards, improved education, and benefited children from the least well-off backgrounds. And he is right. Labour’s infantile crusade against elitism extended to cutting the state-school Latin Excellence Programme Since their very first days in office, Keir Starmer and his Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson have seemed intent on destroying Britain’s finest schools. The decision to add VAT to fees has led to the closure of more than

Patrick West

The British countryside isn’t racist

In the fevered imagination of those obsessed with implementing ever greater ‘diversity’, there is seemingly no object or aspect of life they won’t seek to change at all costs. Thus it’s no surprise to hear that the latest target of opprobrium is the British countryside itself. It epitomises the blundering ignorance of the global, Anywhere class who have been in charge for too long Following a Defra report in 2019 that revealed that some saw the countryside as ‘being for white people and middle-class people’, officials have spent the last few years working on changing that – by making the great outdoors more welcoming to ethnic minorities. National Landscapes, a

Alexander Horne

How to remove Peter Mandelson from the Lords

There was considerable pressure on Sir Keir Starmer this morning to indicate what action might be taken against his former US ambassador, Lord Mandelson. In addition to his ill-advised friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson has been accused of leaking confidential government information to the convicted paedophile. Despite his previous, improbable, resurrections it is impossible to imagine the Prince of Darkness bouncing back from this disgrace The matter has been referred to the Metropolitan Police, and it has been alleged that it could potentially mean Mandelson being prosecuted for misconduct in public office, a criminal offence which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. There is also the question of whether

Catherine Ellis

Colombia can't give Trump the cocaine crackdown he wants

When US president Donald Trump hurled abuse at Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro last month, branding him a ‘sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States’, it was strikingly audacious. Trump leant into bombastic provocation: there is no evidence to suggest Petro himself makes cocaine. And yet, Trump’s claim didn’t come as a shock – the two leaders have spent the past year locked in a volley of barbs with one another. Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, likes to fire back with ideological, often sermonising lectures on imperialism and US hypocrisy. But tangled up in the rancorous exchanges – many of them about drugs – is

Steerpike

Watch: Starmer's legal record called out

It’s been a pretty terrible start to the week for the government. Amid mounting revelations from the Epstein files, the police are now probing claims that the former British ambassador Lord Mandelson committed misconduct in public office. Despite Mandy’s links to the disgraced sexual predator being already well-known in late 2024, Keir Starmer nevertheless still chose to appoint him as ‘Our man in Washington’ – a decision he must now bitterly regret… The embattled PM rocked up in the House yesterday to give an update on his trip to China. But before he got a chance to speak, he had the joy of listening to a point of order about

Monday

2 February 2026

Madeline Grant

Does Keir Starmer know how preposterous he sounds?

It’s Groundhog Day, the theme of the film where Bill Murray is destined to repeat the same day over and over again. It was also a terrible day for Labour – of course that doesn’t narrow things down either – you could be reading this at any point over the next three years and it’ll still be true. Bill Murray woke up every day to ‘I Got You Babe’, we woke up to a remix of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung. There was a ghost in the room: the Paedo’s Pal, Captain Underpants himself, the Lord Mandelson! Still, even by the standards set in

Daniel Thorpe

Why Erdogan wants to help Iran

The Iranian regime remains firmly in the crosshairs of American bombers. As President Trump mulls whether to strike, Turkey is using every available channel to halt a military intervention. President Erdogan has personally offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington. At the same time, Turkish authorities have tightened their grip on exiled Iranian opposition figures. Turkey’s sudden support for Iran is not born of friendship. Over the past two decades, the two countries have repeatedly found themselves on opposing sides. In the Syrian civil war, Iran sent Shi’a proxies to prop up the dictator Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey armed and trained Sunni rebel groups. Ankara’s push for dialogue is driven

Eliot Wilson

Why is Starmer so desperate to tap into Europe's defence fund?

Keir Starmer has been seized by a dogged determination he does not always exhibit and has announced that he is seeking to revisit the UK’s participation in the European Union’s defence fund, SAFE. Established last May, Security Action for Europe (SAFE) is a fund designed to provide €150 billion (£130 billion) in competitively priced, long-maturity loans for urgent, large-scale defence procurement projects. It was primarily intended for the 27 EU member states, but the terms were drawn very carefully: the loans were also open to Norway, Ukraine and third-party countries which had agreed security pacts with the EU, and could be spent with companies meeting the same criteria. This meant,

Tim Shipman

What next for Peter Mandelson?

12 min listen

It is one of the staple headlines of British politics: Peter Mandelson has resigned. The so-called Prince of Darkness was sacked as US ambassador last September, yet that has done little to stem the flow of stories about the alleged nature of his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. This weekend saw the publication of a further three million emails, triggering another avalanche of claims about Peter Mandelson’s links to the dead sex offender. So what next for Mandelson? And which former political grandees have successfully managed the transition out of the Commons? Should he be taking notes from George Osborne? James Heale and Tim Shipman discuss. Produced by Megan McElroy

Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t the Green party use the word ‘Jews’?

Imagine talking about the Holocaust and not mentioning the Jews. It would be like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade without saying the word ‘African’. Amazingly, the Green Party did just that last week. They de-Jewed the Holocaust. They offered remembrance for the greatest crime in history without mentioning the people it was designed to destroy. That was it. No heart. No anger. No Jews I’ve been thinking about this for days. About what would drive someone to erase the Jews from the Shoah, to engage in such eerie Jewless mourning. All the parties mentioned the six million Jews vaporised by fascism in their social-media posts on Holocaust Memorial

Patrick West

Woke language obviously doesn't change the way we think

It’s been a cherished belief of progressives over the decades that you change the way we think, and in turn transform society, by changing the kind of language we use. This stretches back to a 1980s strand of feminism determined to jettison default masculine terms such as ‘chairman’ and ‘headmaster’ and replace them with gender-neutral equivalents. Then there are today’s hyper-liberals, who believe they can erase binary thinking on sex by introducing expressions such as ‘pregnant people’ or forgo ‘he’ and ‘she’ altogether and substitute everywhere with ‘they’. Many radicals have imagined that linguistic revolution is essential to actual revolution. Unfortunately for these idealists, new research suggests that their faith has

Steerpike

Peter Mandelson quits Labour

It is one of the staple headlines of British politics: Peter Mandelson has resigned. The ‘Prince of Darkness’ was sacked as US ambassador last September, but that has not stopped the flurry of stories about the alleged nature of his relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. A further three million emails were published this weekend, leading to another avalanche of claims about Mandelson’s links to the dead sex offender. Sounds like Mandy could do with his own Mandy… The latest batch of files released by the US Department of Justice included three apparent bank statements detailing three money transfers of $25,000 each from the paedophile financier in 2003 and 2004.

Steerpike

Watch: Zack Polanski's 45-second U-turn

Oh dear. It seems that Zack Polanski is not quite the smooth-talking mega-mind that some on the left thought he was. The Green leader has been out and about, desperately talking up his party’s chances in the Gorton and Denton by-election. But, having ducked the chance to stand himself, the native Mancunian seems to have come unstuck in an interview with Channel 4’s Ciaran Jenkins. When asked initially what the Greens’ plan on defence would be, Polanski declared that ‘the policy is to reform Nato from within.’ But barely 45 seconds, after arguing for an ‘alternative alliance’ of European and ‘Global South countries’, he then said ‘Let’s talk about if

Alexander Larman

There’s no way back for Peter Mandelson

When historians write the definitive biography of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the character of Peter Mandelson will prove a hard one to portray to those who were not around. Mandy, as he was semi-affectionately known, has undergone one of the most bizarre and humiliating journeys in British public life. Once, he was the all-powerful, Machiavellian ‘Prince of Darkness’ who served under both the Blair and Brown governments. Now, he is nothing more than a diminished, pitiful figure who has resigned from the Labour party that he did so much to rebuild electorally, as a result of his ill-advised and reputationally catastrophic association with Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson’s statement was

Druin Burch

Don’t bet on Elon Musk’s failure

Tesla’s last quarterly report revealed that deliveries had declined for the second year running and, for the first time, annual revenues had fallen. “It is starting to look as if Tesla is finished,” concluded a piece in The Spectator. To what extent Musk will succeed can’t be known, but his track record demands thoughtful uncertainty at the least If you felt you’d read about Tesla’s death before, you would have been right. Success in one arena guarantees nothing in another – brilliant men, such as Tesla’s boss Elon Musk, can be bafflingly stupid. Writing them off too soon, though, can become a bad habit. Having run up massive debts in America

Sam Leith

Lucy Letby’s parents have a point

The parents of Lucy Letby, the nurse currently serving a sentence after being convicted of child murder, have complained to Netflix after seeing the trailer for a new documentary about their daughter’s case. In the first statement they have made publicly since her 2023 conviction, they say that the footage front and centre in the trailer – previously unreleased police video of Letby being arrested in her pyjamas in her bedroom at home – is a “complete invasion of privacy”. These days, true crime is having a vogue not seen since the days of the Victorian penny blood “Why is [senior investigating officer] Paul Hughes, with whom we always co-operated fully, allowed to show the world what

Melanie McDonagh

The enigma of Melania Trump

To the question whether the Melania Trump documentary is as bad as the critics are saying, my answer would be: it depends what you’re looking for. My own view is that it’s pretty well what it is billed as: Melania’s take on Melania, with the lady herself in iron control over the direction. So, not a documentary in the normal sense, for better and worse. It’s her account of the 20 days up to and including her husband’s inauguration, with the emphasis exactly where she decides to put it. The benefit of this is that we see what she regards as important, not what other people do. She’s calling the

Sunday

1 February 2026

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Steve Reed says we 'need to hear from Peter Mandelson'

Steve Reed: ‘We need to hear from Peter Mandelson’ The latest tranche of Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice feature disturbing pictures of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor crouched over a woman lying on the floor, and also evidence of more links between Lord Mandelson and the disgraced financier. Jeffrey Epstein appears to have sent Mandelson $75,000 across three payments in 2003 and 2004, and more money to Mandelson’s husband in 2009 to pay for ‘osteo course expenses’. Keir Starmer has suggested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should testify before the US Congress. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips asked Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, if Mandelson should be stripped of his

Andrew Tettenborn

Juries from home would be more trouble than they're worth

Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem to have maintained roughly similar levels of concentration and enagagement whether deliberating remotely or in person. The current difficulty with jury trials is not so much inefficiency as the unsuitability of many of the cases subject to them You can hear the suggestions already: might this let the Government solve the jury conundrum without tinkering