Politics Archives

Friday

30 January 2026

Why won’t Britain just ban the IRGC?

The European Union has finally done what it long argued it could not. Yesterday, the bloc formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, placing it in the same legal category as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The decision was framed by Europe’s foreign ministers as a response to mass repression, extrajudicial killings and the systematic use of terror by the Iranian state against its own population. ‘Repression cannot go unanswered,’ said Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, announcing the move. It was not a symbolic flourish. The designation means the EU can now freeze assets, assign criminal liability and enforce travel bans. It signals, at least

Patrick West

Labour is the nasty party now

Labour has long prided itself on being the party of compassion. Indeed, ever since Thatcherism, personified in the minds of many by the fictional television character Alan B’Stard – and ever since Theresa May gave her 2002 speech admitting that the Conservatives were the ‘nasty party’ – being compassionate has been a trademark and a selling point of the Labour party. Labour politicians constantly bleat about how caring they are. Sometimes it seems that the only people they care about are themselves This is why those who lead it are always reluctant to cut welfare spending, and why those further to the left on its parliamentary backbenches are ideologically hostile

Sam Taylor

Scottish bonds are an expensive mistake

Humza Yousaf’s inglorious year as first minister will not be remembered for many lasting achievements. But he does, at least, have one legacy. In October 2023, Yousaf told the SNP party conference: ‘I can confirm that by the end of this parliament the SNP Government will – subject of course to due diligence and market testing – go directly to the international bond market for the first time in our own right.’ Yousaf did not hide the true motivation for the bond programme, adding: We will show the world not only that we are a country to invest in today. We will also demonstrate the credibility to international markets that

Michael Gove

Q&A: Why Rwanda failed – and were the Tories serious about migration?

28 min listen

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, visit spectator.com/quiteright. In this week’s Q&A: Michael and Maddie tackle Labour’s uneasy majority and ask why a government with a 174-seat majority already looks so skittish. Are backbench rebellions a sign of weakness – or a rational response from MPs who expect to be out in one term? Does Keir Starmer lack the political instincts needed to hold such a sprawling parliamentary party together? Also this week: could the Rwanda scheme ever have saved the Conservatives? Michael lifts the lid on why the plan stalled – from internal resistance within the state to the limits of last-minute delivery – and explains

Douglas Murray

Britain’s guilty men, Labour’s reset & do people care about ICE more than Iran?

43 min listen

Who really runs Britain: the government, foreign courts or international lawyers? This question is at the heart of Michael Gove’s cover piece for the Spectator this week, analysing the role of those at the centre of Labour’s foreign policy. Attorney general Lord Hermer, national security adviser Jonathan Powell and internationally renowned barrister Philippe Sands may seek to uphold international law but is this approach outdated as we enter an era of hard power? For Gove, they are the three ‘guilty men’ who are undermining Britain’s national interest at the expense of a liberal international law that never really existed. For this week’s Edition, host Lara Prendergast is joined by deputy editor

Thursday

29 January 2026

Dr Oliver Lewis

What the decline of my comprehensive school says about Britain

Magdalen College School in Brackley is providing an ‘inadequate’ quality of education. Behaviour and attitudes at the school are also ‘inadequate’. Personal development ‘requires improvement’, while leadership and management are ‘inadequate’. The school’s sixth form provision also ‘requires improvement’. So runs the latest damning Ofsted critique of standards – published last summer – at the comprehensive school I attended between 1998 and 2005. MCS is a typical British secondary school serving a rural area in Northamptonshire, with a genuinely comprehensive intake. Even in my GCSE year, 2003, a full half of all pupils left without five good GCSE passes at grade C or above. Combined with a secondary modern and

Tim Shipman

Is centrism dead? | with David Gauke, vice-chair of Prosper UK

22 min listen

Is centrism back? This week a group of former Tory heavyweights – including Ruth Davidson, Andy Street, Amber Rudd and David Gauke – have launched a new group aimed at reclaiming the centre ground and dispelling the myth that politics in 2026 is a straight shooting match between increasingly diffuse left/right poles. They say that there are seven million voters in the centre who feel ‘politically homeless’ and are looking for serious people to have serious conversations, rather than rabble-rousers with strong rhetoric. Are they totally misunderstanding the direction of modern politics? And should they all just join the Lib Dems? Tim Shipman speaks to David Gauke, former justice secretary

Is centrism dead? | with David Gauke, vice-chair of Prosper UK

Michael Simmons

The Waspis never deserved a payout

I want to congratulate the Department for Work and Pensions. They’ve made the excellent decision to – once again – refuse compensation to the Waspi women. The cohort of 3.6 million women born in the 1950s claim to have not been informed that their state pension age would rise – bringing it into line with the male retirement age. Their campaign group (Women Against State Pension Inequity) have led one of the most vocal but ridiculous campaigns in modern British history. Despite leaflets being individually written, information campaigns in doctors’ offices, and relentless TV and online adverts, the group claims that they were not adequately informed of the pension age change, and

Daniel Masters

The police are too tooled up for their – and our – good

In 1830, a pamphleteer expressed concern about the sudden appearance of ‘Raw Lobsters’ on the streets of London. These lobsters were, of course, not an alien invasion. Rather, they were Robert Peel’s New Police, established in London in 1829. The police had a blue uniform, the same colour as raw lobsters, but the pamphleteer worried that, when put under pressure, their uniforms would turn red like that of the red coat soldiers of their day. It was feared, as another petitioner put it that same year, that they might ‘crush the liberties of the people’. The use of Facial Recognition Cameras further distances officers from us and places the law

Theo Hobson

In praise of Nick Gibb, the schools minister you’ve never heard of

One of the most effective British politicians of recent years is a household name only in the most policy-wonkish of households. I mean Nick Gibb, the schools minister who worked alongside Michael Gove. Gibb kept a lower profile than Gove and so managed to stay in the Department for Education longer, bedding in the reforms that everyone except the odd Marxist lecturer deems highly successful. Let’s have a few more politicians like Gibb: limelight-shunning iconoclasts who leave off grandstanding and quietly fix stuff Gibb has co-written a book that will not do much to lift his obscurity. Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This was Achieved is

Wednesday

28 January 2026

Daniel DePetris

Has Iran called Trump’s bluff?

Over the last week, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, additional F-15 fighter planes and naval vessels carrying sea-launched cruise missiles have been making their way to the Middle East in what can only be described as a bid by President Trump to squeeze Iran into submission. In case anybody doubted this is what Trump was after, he took to Truth Social yesterday to send the Iranians a message: give me what I want or face bombing the likes of which you’ve never seen. ‘A massive Armada is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose,’ Trump wrote. ‘Hopefully Iran will quickly “Come to the

Tim Shipman

Breaking news: Lammy was good at PMQs

10 min listen

It is our solemn duty to inform listeners that David Lammy won deputy PMQs at a canter today. To be frank, it was a low-rent affair. Andrew Griffith was the Tory sent out to question David Lammy while Keir Starmer is in China, and the shadow business secretary didn’t do a particularly good job. Perhaps he had assumed that Lammy would have another disastrous session, like he did when a prisoner was accidentally released last autumn. There were a few decent jokes in there – mainly about football – but the overwhelming winners were Kemi and Keir, who by comparison look like Gladstone and Disraeli. James Heale speaks to Tim

Madeline Grant

Deputy PMQs made Starmer vs Badenoch look like Gladstone vs Disraeli

David Lammy’s last appearance at PMQs resembled a multi clown-car pile-up: both tragic and hilarious. Indeed, it was such a disaster that one wondered whether Lammy would ever be allowed near PMQs again. However, Sir Keir’s obvious contempt for being in the country even a second longer than he has to had got the better of him once more and, while he’s making sure that president Xi has the cleanest shoes of any despot, we were treated to another Lammy PMQs. It was a pretty lame effort all round. Neither man really asked, nor answered questions Opposite him was Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, who unfortunately has the demeanour of a

Tim Shipman

‘There’s an awful lot more bile now’: Jonathan Lynn on how politics has changed since Yes Minister

A few years ago, everyone in Westminster was obsessed by The West Wing, but a decade of chaos and populism has rendered Aaron Sorkin’s vision of idealists devoted to the public good obsolete. The madness of the last government left even The Thick of It a tame parody of reality. But listening to everyone from Dominic Cummings to Morgan McSweeney bemoan the state of the civil service shows that Yes Minister/Prime Minister, with their portrayal of hapless ministers in the spell of apex mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby, may be (somewhat surprisingly) the most enduring of television’s political classics. Sir Humphrey and his victim, Jim Hacker, were the creation of writing

Michael Gove

The guilty men: the ideologues who undermine Britain

When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime minister turned to his aides Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell and mused: ‘We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.’ Nearly 30 years later, Britain is shrinking further. Blair may offer advice to his successors in private – Campbell does so in public – but the only one of the trio exercising real power now is Jonathan Powell. He is the Starmer government’s national security adviser – the single most influential actor in British foreign policy. And he’s the

Tim Shipman

What is ‘Starmerism’?

If Keir Starmer didn’t already understand Harold Macmillan’s warning about ‘events, dear boy, events’, he got a lesson on Saturday. At 4.49 p.m. on Truth Social, Donald Trump ate humble pie about the -sacrifice of British troops in Afghanistan, having previously claimed Nato forces avoided the front line. ‘We enjoyed it for a few minutes,’ a close aide recalled. Eleven minutes, to be precise. At 5 p.m. on the dot, Andy Burnham announced that he wished to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. So began the latest psychodrama at the top of the party. This was an open challenge to Starmer’s authority and a test both of his remaining

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Burnham blocked, Braverman bails and Starmer clashes with Trump

Home Labour’s National Executive Committee refused permission for Andy Burnham, currently Mayor of Greater Manchester, to stand in a by-election at Gorton and Denton. The decision was made by ten people, including Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, with only Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, voting for Mr Burnham. Mr Burnham winning the seat had been seen by some as a route for him to become prime minister after Andrew Gwynne, its MP (who was suspended from the Labour party for bad jokes), left the Commons by applying for the office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. The by-election will be on 26 February. Fifty Labour

Isabel Hardman

For once, David Lammy had a good DPMQs

Today’s Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions was a particularly low-rent affair. Andrew Griffith was the Tory sent out to question David Lammy while Keir Starmer is in China. The shadow business secretary didn’t do a particularly good job: perhaps he had assumed that Lammy would have another disastrous session like he did when a prisoner was accidentally released last autumn. The Deputy Prime Minister was unflappable today though, and clearly enjoyed himself, while Griffith sounded like he was at a departmental questions session, not the set-piece political event of the week. Lammy ended up joking that ‘he’s not going to get this gig again’, and he was probably right. The Deputy

Stephen Daisley

The SNP is deluded about the 7 May elections

You’re the SNP. You’ve been in government in Scotland for 19 years on the trot. You have nothing to show for it besides ferries that can’t sail and blokes in women’s jails. Your leader has the personality of a gas bill and you go to the polls in May to ask for another five years. What do you? Apparently, you tell voters that they’re voting on whether to remove Keir Starmer from Downing Street. I’m not making that up. They are, but I’m not. The nationalists have unveiled their re-election campaign with a poster of Starmer and the words ‘Gone in 100 Days?’ 100? Amateurs! Andy Burnham will have found

The Spectator

A decade on, Brexit still means Brexit

It’s been almost a full decade since Britain voted to leave the European Union. Inside Labour, whatever words are muttered about accepting the referendum’s result, the consensus remains that Brexit was a mistake. Ministers compete to see who can flirt most openly with re-entry, despite their party manifesto pledges not to rejoin the single market or customs union, or to reintroduce freedom of movement. Keir Starmer has attacked the ‘wild promises’ of Brexit supporters and said Britain must ‘get closer’ to the single market. David Lammy and Wes Streeting have both lamented the ‘damage done by Brexit’ and called for a customs union with Brussels – a proposal that Peter