Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Kristina Murkett

Screen time is rotting the brains of Britain's toddlers

As I try to wrestle my 15-month-old son into a nappy, or stop him from throwing himself down an escalator, or teach him not to spear himself with a fork, I remember that slightly lesser-known Winston Churchill quote: ‘I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.’ It appears, however, that children are increasingly not ready to learn, and parents increasingly dislike doing the teaching. The results of the annual survey of primary school teachers are not just mildly depressing reading on a rainy January day: they are a stark and shameful indictment of the failures of so many parents. Teachers claim that 37 per cent

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky got little to show for his trip to Davos

Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t want to go to Davos. Why bother showing up at the World Economic Forum to watch world leaders swarm around Donald Trump and his obsession with Danish-controlled Greenland? The Arctic spectacle has stolen the spotlight from the war in Ukraine, and Zelensky could not bear the thought of returning empty-handed while his country struggled to survive the freezing winter. ‘I choose Ukraine in this case, rather than the economic forum,’ Zelensky said on Tuesday after another Russian attack deepened the country’s energy crisis. That was until Trump announced he wanted to talk to the Ukrainian President one-on-one.  Their one-hour meeting yesterday ended with little to show for

Mark Galeotti

Who is the spook leading Russia's negotiations with Ukraine?

At the trilateral talks being held in Abu Dhabi, both Kyiv and Moscow are being led by military intelligence officers. These are the newly appointed presidential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, formerly the head of HUR – Ukrainian military intelligence, and Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of Russia’s GU – the Main Directorate of the General Staff. On one level, this should not be a surprise. Quiet negotiations between HUR and GU (still widely known by its old acronym, GRU) have been behind a number of practical agreements throughout the conflict, such as the swaps of prisoners and the bodies of the fallen. Just as in the past Mossad was behind

James Heale

Does British politics reward traitors or faithfuls?

22 min listen

With the Conservatives on watch for further defectors, academic Richard Johnson and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein join James Heale to discuss whether British politics rewards traitors or faithfuls. Richard points out that often personal success is dependent on whether the party goes on to be a major or minor player in British politics; Winston Churchill and Shaun Woodward fared better, while Shirley Williams and Mark Reckless had less success. Danny – whose political career began with the SDP in the 1980s – also takes us through his personal experience and the challenges of defecting, from ideology and demography to the perception of betrayal. How fundamental is the shift taking place

Eliot Wilson

What Trump gets wrong about Afghanistan

Long before he was president of the United States, Donald Trump was a caricature. Producer Mark Burnett approached him to be the lynchpin of The Apprentice precisely because he was a cartoonishly bombastic, ‘greed is good’ era figure addicted to displays of gold-plated opulence. Since occupying the White House, Trump has also frequently acted as a stereotypical American who sees everything as an achievement of the US of A, salvator mundi. And he has been doing it again with the war in Afghanistan. ‘We will always be there for Nato, even if they won’t be there for us,’ he blurted on his Truth Social platform earlier this month. It was manifest nonsense of course, given

Richard Ekins

How Trump could block the Chagos deal

Can Donald Trump veto the UK’s cession of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius? And if he can, does he want to? On Tuesday, he termed it an act of ‘great stupidity’, which certainly seems to imply opposition. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, followed up to say that the UK was ‘letting down’ the US by handing over the Islands to Mauritius. But Sir Keir Starmer was unmoved during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, claiming that in denouncing the Chagos deal Trump was simply trying to put pressure on the UK to abandon Denmark and Greenland, which Starmer of course rightly refused to do. The implication, which may be correct, is that Trump does not really

Liam Deacon

The inside story of Reform’s business charm offensive

Nigel Farage didn’t need the help of corporate Britain to build Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform UK into national forces. He didn’t need open letters from big business to help win the EU referendum. And he didn’t need big brands to take GB News off their advertising blacklists for his show to succeed. This time, though – as Reform’s leader strives to become Britain’s next prime minister – things are different: Farage needs businesses, and businesses know that they soon might need Farage. As ties grow stronger with the corporate world, Reform must tread carefully to avoid losing the attribute that draws many of its supporters Some have already

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The US plan for Gaza is absurd

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show: a piece of political meta-theatre featuring Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff,

Ed West

A short history of the New York Times being wrong about everything

The ‘nothing ever happens’ people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow. Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious examples. The art of ‘superforecasting’ came about because US foreign policy experts

Brendan O’Neill

Gender ideology has been a disaster for working-class women

There have been two huge victories for workers’ rights over the past week. And yet the left is schtum. No champagne corks are popping. No raised fist emojis have appeared on lefty social media. I bet no Labour-backing luvvie has plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people. No Labour-backing luvvie plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people We all know why. It’s because the victors are women, and more importantly they’re women who demanded that most scandalous right – the right to their own spaces, the right to undress away from men. The left is saying nowt –

Michael Gove

Debate: is Britain really broken?

34 min listen

On this week’s Q&A: Michael and Maddie ask the question dividing the British right: is Britain really broken? As ‘Broken Britain’ rhetoric surges on the right, they debate whether it clarifies the country’s problems or corrodes national confidence. Should we trust those who stand to benefit from a declinist narrative? And is Nigel Farage too much of an English nationalist and nostalgist? Also this week: from national decline to family drama. Why has the Brooklyn Beckham fallout gripped the country, and what does it reveal about celebrity, commodified family life and the price of fame? Is this a modern King Lear – or just an overgrown child who needs to

William Moore

Trump's Arctic madness, political treachery & banning social media

45 min listen

Another week, another foreign policy crisis – this time over Greenland. America’s European allies watched as Trump increased the tension over the Arctic territory, only to announce he ‘won’t use force’ in a set-piece speech in Davos. For the Spectator‘s cover this week, Paul Wood examines the strategic role of the Arctic, both against Russia and China and from nuclear energy to the space race. With a deal supposedly done between Denmark and the US, is there method in Trump’s madness? For this week’s Edition, host William Moore is joined by deputy editor Freddy Gray, online commissioning editor Lara Brown and broadcaster Miriam Cates. Saying she feels sorry for Keir

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham is back in the game – and Robert Jenrick reveals all

17 min listen

Three big stories for James Heale and Tim Shipman to pick over today: Andy Burnham’s return, the Donald Trump that refuses to go away, and the continued fallout of Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform. This afternoon we found out that former Labour minister Andrew Gwynne is on the brink of standing down as an MP, after losing the whip during last year’s WhatsApp group scandal. A by-election is therefore on the cards in Gwynne’s Manchester seat, potentially paving the way for the ever-ambitious local mayor Andy Burnham to return to the Commons and make a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer. Would he be able to mobilise enough support? Also today,

Andy Burnham is back in the game – and Robert Jenrick reveals all
Steerpike

Will Andy Burnham come back?

The Phoney War is no more. Former Labour minister Andrew Gwynne is on the brink of standing down as an MP, after losing the whip during last year’s WhatsApp group scandal. A by-election is therefore on the cards in Gwynne’s Manchester seat, potentially paving the way for the ever-ambitious local mayor Andy Burnham to return to the Commons and make a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer. Let’s hope the Westminster Tesco gets the extra popcorn in… Gwynne has been hanging around SW1 for almost a year, waiting to reach agreement on his gold-plated MPs’ pension. A deal is understood to have been done, paving the way for him to disappear

Ross Clark

Trump is right: denying ourselves North Sea oil makes no sense

Donald Trump’s tendency to exaggerate and make up figures as he goes along is for some people a symptom of the ‘post-truth society’. But for the president himself it is a useful rhetorical tool which helps draws attention to things which might otherwise get less of an airing. Yes, it is a gross exaggeration to say, as Trump did in his speech at Davos yesterday, that Britain has ‘500 years’ worth of oil in the North Sea. The trouble for his critics, though, is that the essential point he was making – which is that Britain is denying itself valuable energy resources in the shorter term, to the detriment of the

James Heale and Tim Shipman

Revealed: inside the Tories’ ‘60 seat’ election strategy

In his interview in this week’s magazine, Robert Jenrick claims one of the reasons he defected to Reform is that the Conservative party is aiming for a ‘60 seat strategy’ which will leave the Tories grubbing around for votes in the ‘posh’ parts of Southern England – and even then only in the seats where the Lib Dems aren’t hoovering up anti-Labour protest votes. Now, leaked accounts of the strategy circulating among Tory MPs have been passed to The Spectator detailing exactly how it would work. Three core groups of voters have been identified by the party’s strategists, led by Stephen Gilbert. These are described as ‘Potential Conservatives’, ‘persuasion voters’ and ‘tactical

Lois McLatchie Miller

Surrogacy isn’t something to celebrate

Pop star Meghan Trainor posted a photograph this week skin-to-skin with her newborn daughter, ‘Mikey Moon’, who was still slick with fluids from the birth canal. The image was tender and maternal. What changed the dynamic was the caption. Trainor revealed she had not actually delivered her daughter, but had her gestated by another woman via a surrogacy arrangement. The online reaction was deeply uneasy and critical. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Meghan Trainor (@meghantrainor) This would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Surrogacy used to be framed as glamorous, progressive, even beautiful. Magazine spreads showed radiant celebrities cradling babies ‘made possible’ by another woman’s womb. The story was celebratory: science plus money equals miracles. Everyone wins.

Sir David Hempleman-Adams & Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

Owning Greenland won’t make America safer

The world is in a dangerously volatile state, with multiple fires burning simultaneously. At precisely the moment when calm leadership and strategic coherence are required, one individual appears determined not to extinguish the flames but to pour petrol upon them. The most baffling and potentially destabilising of these fires is Donald Trump’s expressed desire to ‘own’ Greenland, ostensibly to protect America from Russian and Chinese threats. This proposition is comprehensively illogical. Greenland is already protected. It is a de facto Nato territory, and the Nato alliance exists precisely to defend the North Atlantic. The clue, as ever, is in the name. Greenland sits squarely within the alliance’s defensive umbrella, and

board of peace
Jonathan Sacerdoti

What good will Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ do?

The Middle East has entered a phase where events no longer necessarily resolve into outcomes. They pause, harden, and then reappear elsewhere. Ceasefires freeze wars without settling them. New councils are announced before their purpose is fully explored or revealed. Violence recedes in one arena and resurfaces in another. What looks like diplomacy is often just deferral or distraction. Europe remained vocally engaged on Gaza, conspicuously restrained on Iran, strategically vague on Syria, and angrily petulant on Greenland Gaza is the clearest illustration. The ceasefire ended active fighting while leaving the logic of the war intact. Today, reconstruction has been elevated to first principle, with demilitarisation apparently postponed, treated as

Matthew Bowles

What do London’s overpaid deputy mayors actually do?

Walk through central London with your phone out, and it might not be yours for much longer. Theft in the capital has surged in recent years. So has shoplifting, with almost 90,000 incidents recorded in London last year, up roughly 54 per cent from the previous period. Meanwhile, fare dodging on London’s transport network has soared. The joke is on law-abiding Londoners who bother to buy a ticket. Over 2,200 TfL employees earn more than £100,000 The sums of money lost to crime in London are far from trivial: the £190 million cost of fare dodging would pay the annual salaries of 3,000 frontline police officers. But it’s not just