Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
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Freddy Gray is joined by Spectator World online editor Ben Clerkin to discuss the situation in Minnesota, where for a second time an ICE officer shot dead a protestor. Freddy and Ben discuss how Trump’s team are divided on the issue, why this time Trump has not been quick to defend the ICE officers and the significance of the freezing cold weather in keeping protestors at bay.
On Sunday night, the Green party booked out the famed gay London nightclub, Heaven, for what they said was going to be a ‘Green Party party.’ I paid the £16 ticket fee, donned my bright green Robin Hood outfit and trotted off to Embankment, where under a bridge the club resides. Zack Polanski was billed as the night’s headliner, and at 9:20 p.m. he arrived. He opened with typical Green party patter, asking the crowd whether they were ‘ready to take on power and wealth’, and then proudly reflected on his time working as a security guard for Heaven. When he appealed to the crowd to ‘big it up for
This afternoon, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a set of sweeping police reforms. These include increased police response times, the reduction of constabularies from 42 across the country to 12, a new licensing regime for officers and a new centralised agency, the National Police Service, created to deal with national challenges such as organised crime, terrorism and cyber fraud. A national centre for policing will also be created to centralise and rationalise training, equipment and IT. These proposals will require a huge amount of (mostly performative) change and a years-long transition to a new policing model that will likely outlast Mahmood’s tenure. Most people will agree that there is an urgent
The in-and-out movements of the Bravermans have been quite something to behold. This morning it was the turn of Suella to (finally) join Reform, with Nigel Farage confirming that he had been in on-and-off talks with her for a year. ‘I thought she’d already gone’, was the reaction from one Tory wag on the wet wing of the party who Mr S spoke to earlier. But Suella’s long and steady journey from the Tories to Reform is nothing as exciting as that of her husband Rael. He signed up to Farage’s party as early as December 2024 and thereafter spent months excitedly tweeting that every Tory MP deserved to lose
That sound you can hear is panic. In the past week, articles have appeared by leading Conservatives including Danny Finkelstein, Charles Moore and Michael Gove attacking Reform for a range of crimes, from backwardness, to policy weakness, to (in the case of Moore, scurrilously) anti-Semitism. The onslaught is getting heavier, and more bitter. Suella Braverman’s move to Reform today caused Conservative HQ to publicly question her ‘mental health’, before withdrawing the slur when someone more senior saw it. The Tory establishment is in the last ditch, and has now resorted to what soldiers call Final Protective Fire – a barrage of artillery aimed at the very edge of its own
According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have been banned and troops and officers have been confined to
The Tory defections to Reform are continuing to mount up, with former home secretary Suella Braverman the latest to cross the floor this morning. Braverman’s defection has been hailed as a coup by Nigel Farage, who pointed out she is ‘somebody who’s reached high office in the cabinet.’ But there is an important question the Reform leader keeps avoiding: why aren’t these ex-Tories holding by-elections? Nigel Farage’s superpower is the impression that he’s not like any other politician. That he sticks to his guns, tells it like it is, and acts on principle. And yet on this issue, he is being nakedly hypocritical As Ukip leader in 2014, Farage rightly
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It’s psychodrama all round on Coffee House Shots today. Between Andy Burnham – who over the weekend was denied the opportunity to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election – and Suella Braverman – who has just announced that she’s defecting to Reform (shock horror) – it seems like the main parties are competing to see who can appear the most split. After high-profile Labour MPs gave their support for Burnham’s return, what impact will this have on Labour party unity? And with this latest defection of a former Tory, can Nigel Farage dodge accusations that Reform is becoming the Tory party 2.0? Isabel Hardman speaks to Tim Shipman and
‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ Skim through the headlines of today’s American papers and you’ll struggle to find much that’s positive. Coverage of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday might make you think the United States is on the brink of widespread civil disorder, but the truth is that the country is set to have its safest year since 1900. Last week, a report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) examining 40 cities across the US found that homicides in the fell by an astounding 21 per cent in 2025. The Trump government, of course, was quick to take credit. ‘Deporting criminal illegal alien murderers reduces murders,’ tweeted US Immigration and
There’s a reason why centrists keep failing: their formula of triangulating between two sides of a debate in order to appear balanced, or to hedge against being wrong, won’t win over voters. It suggests a lack of leadership that should have no place in politics, especially when Britain faces such clearly identifiable problems. The centrists are the real populists because they are chasing what they think the electorate wants to hear And yet, the centrists never learn. A new ‘movement’ – aimed at reclaiming the centre ground for the Tories – is being launched today by former Scottish Conservative leader Baroness Davidson and ex-West Midlands Conservative Mayor Sir Andy Street.
A doe-eyed Andy Burnham has appeared looking sad across media outlets, hurt that he has been politically outmanoeuvred by Sir Keir Starmer. Burnham has positioned himself both as the wronged victim of Starmer’s Stalinist instincts and the only hope for a foundering party to find its popularity again. A cross between Bonnie Prince Charlie and Bambi’s Mother. ‘To decide is to divide’, Mr Alexander said. We were in deep Blairite doublespeak territory now Appropriately, for what seems to resemble a community theatre production of Macbeth, the government wheeled out a Scottish MP for the media round. Clearly Douglas Alexander – a veteran of past Labour administrations where there were fifteen demonstrations
Another one bites the dust. Suella Braverman this morning was unveiled as the latest defector to Reform UK. The former home secretary told 600 attendees at the launch of ‘Veterans for Reform’ that she finally felt she had ‘come home’ by switching parties. Beaming on stage, she declared passionately that, ‘I believe with my heart and soul that a better future is possible for us, I am joining Reform UK.’ It certainly is striking how so many of the Tory right who bedevilled the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s government can now be found in Nigel Farage’s self-proclaimed ‘people’s army’ She then gave a 20-minute speech in which she declared
Death arrives on a day just like any other, often rudely unheralded. We all know that, but it never ceases to shock. So it was with news that David Abulafia had died on Saturday night. Notwithstanding his lifelong fascination with the Mediterranean, David was a Brexiteer in 2016 Readers of The Spectator will know him as one of the shockingly small number of professional historians who care enough about the historical truth – and the public’s perception of it – to risk woke ire in exposing ideologically fabricated history for the corrupting trash it is. So, last June here he was, in these pages, debunking yet another attempt to make
A patient, an old woman with white hair, stripped of speech by dementia, followed us each shift, staying an inch behind, wanting nothing more than human presence. We let her into the staff room, where she hovered behind whoever was nearest, her tattooed number visible on her forearm. They found a young girl, Doris, who could speak some English. Malnutrition had left her mouth and face gangrenous I am aware of only one other patient, these past thirty years, who had survived the Nazi death camps. Normally sane and sensible, dusk brought confusion, dragging him backwards in time. Each sundown he began screaming and we could not console him; he
Did a Border Patrol officer kill Alex Pretti in self defence after being alerted that he was carrying a gun in a chaotic scramble to arrest him? Or did he execute the anti-ICE protester in cold blood after he was disarmed? The truth is that it is difficult to know. Facts, unlike opinions, are hard to come by in Minnesota. Endless replays, as in the case of Renee Good who was shot dead in the city by an ICE officer she drove towards, aren’t helping to draw a consensus Endless replays, as in the case of Renee Good who was shot dead in the city by an ICE officer she
Andy Burnham’s bid to stand as an MP – and Keir Starmer’s decision to block him from doing just that, means this has been an exciting weekend for news about blokes in glasses. Only yesterday, one bloke in glasses (Starmer) stood accused of doing the dirty on another bloke in glasses (Burnham), because he suspected the second bloke in glasses of planning to do the dirty on him. On the face of it, though, these blokes in glasses are both very much on the same team, and want only the best for one another. As well as the glasses and the nondescript air, both these blokes in glasses have the same selling point Let me
In broad daylight, two monuments were smashed in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens last week. One of them was an 1871 memorial to the city’s earliest British settlers; the other commemorated Victoria’s separation from New South Wales in 1850. These monuments not only were sledgehammered, but daubed with the ugly words ‘death to Australia’ and the provocative, hateful triangle symbol of Hamas. It wouldn’t be Australia’s national day without such acts of vandalism It wouldn’t be Australia’s national day without such acts of vandalism, meant to deface the anniversary of the day a British convict settlement was proclaimed at Sydney. Last year, it was statues of James Cook, the man who, until
Keir Starmer used to be our MP and I have always had a soft spot for the blinking dafty ever since I wrote to him at the height of the antisemitic triumphalism of the Corbyn era. I warned him of the strength of feeling in our corner of north London, and suggested he be careful if he planned to come canvassing down our mews. Our elderly Jewish neighbour, like Starmer a keen Arsenal man, had put me on standby to run any Labour activists up the hill to Royal Free A&E should they take their chances by knocking on his front-door. Pretty much everything is going the way of Labour’s new
As an outside observer sitting in Warsaw, there is a peculiarly persistent oddity in the culture wars of Britain. For anyone outside the cycle of outrage that provides the fuel for the culture wars, they are increasingly difficult to follow. The level of apocalyptic seriousness is high – the stakes are always life or death – but the subject matter itself is often remarkably parochial. Britain appears to be having a fierce conversation with itself. Britain would benefit from turning down the volume and stepping away from the machinery of endless argument Only weeks ago, a museum in Brighton managed to ignite a small national row by suggesting that Father
Over the past week, government ministers and police chiefs have been ‘rolling the pitch’ for what the Home Office is billing as the biggest overhaul of policing since the service was founded two centuries ago. A carefully co-ordinated communications campaign, involving set-piece interviews, newspaper op eds and filming opportunities, has been constructed by the department ahead of the long-awaited White Paper on police reform: ‘From local to national: a new model for policing’. It’s expected to be published today, six months after it was initially scheduled to be unveiled. Under Mahmood’s proposals, a small number of mega-sized forces will specialise in tackling serious and organised crime The centrepiece of the
