Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Eliot Wilson

Robert Jenrick may come to regret his ECHR killing claim

We have all found ourselves making a point and seeing the argument run away from us unexpectedly. Perhaps that was Robert Jenrick’s feeling when he was challenged on a claim that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was giving British soldiers no option but to murder terrorist suspects. ‘Our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they’re caught, the European court will set them free,’ he claimed. When asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to provide evidence for this allegation, he temporised somewhat, pointing to claims former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace had made in an interview with the Daily

Steerpike

Badenoch’s feud with Farage continues

The Tory leadership race is ramping up — and so is Kemi Badenoch’s anti-Reform rhetoric. The contender for the top job hasn’t held back on her views of Nigel Farage this week, and the back and forth looks set to continue… The Reform leader has been rather uncomplimentary about Badenoch of late — tweeting furiously on the eve of the Conservative Party conference: Kemi Badenoch has spent weeks positioning herself as tough on immigration. But in 2018 she campaigned in parliament to increase legal migration, and was the biggest champion for students bringing in dependents. I don’t believe a word that she says on anything. Ouch.  In retaliation, during her

Steerpike

Jenrick reveals daughter’s middle name is Thatcher

It’s the second day of the big Tory leadership interviews at party conference and Robert Jenrick is on the main stage. Making his case for why he should be elected leader of the Conservative party, the former minister slammed the state of the Home Office as being ‘in ashes’, promised he would ‘re-enact’ a version of the Rwanda scheme if he were to become Prime Minister and said he ‘would like’ to cut the top rate of tax. How interesting… But it wasn’t just domestic policy that the Tory leadership contender discussed this afternoon. In a rather, er, amusing announcement, Jenrick revealed that his daughter’s middle name is ‘Thatcher’ –

Brendan O’Neill

Robert Jenrick’s critics must calm down about his Star of David idea

Is Robert Jenrick plotting to surrender our sovereignty to the Israelis? Is the Tory leadership frontrunner engaged in some nefarious scheme to plaster our ports with the flag of the Jewish State? You could be forgiven for thinking so following the swirling hysteria that greeted his comments about having the Star of David at Britain’s entry points. ‘He wants to make us an outpost of Israel!’, every time-rich radical with the Palestine flag in his social-media bio wailed online. It’s poppycock, of course. The Jenrick-bashers essentially told on themselves Jenrick made his remarks at a gathering of the Conservative Friends of Israel at the Tory conference in Birmingham. Sporting a

Fraser Nelson

Coffee House Shots live: the struggle for the future of conservatism

39 min listen

The mood at Conservative conference has been surprisingly jubilant considering the turmoil that the party finds itself in. Labour’s misfortunes may have contributed to this, but there seems to be a genuine optimism around the four candidates vying for the leadership of the party. What’s the latest? Have Kemi Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay impacted her position with the members?  Also on the podcast, this evening will see the Vance vs Walz vice presidential debate. They go head to head in an increasingly tight election. What does Trump vs Harris say about the state of American politics? And can any of these candidates – on either side of the pond

Iain Macwhirter

It’s a tough time to be Scottish

Hard-working Scots could be forgiven for resorting to a stiff drink tonight as they contemplate an extraordinary triple attack on their living standards. The minimum unit price of alcohol has risen by 30 per cent, peak-time rail tickets have nearly doubled, and the energy price cap has just gone up by 10 per cent or £149. Oh, and many pensioners have also lost their winter fuel payments thanks to Rachel Reeves, ‘the pensioner freezer’, as the Labour chancellor is being called, even by some in the Scottish Labour party. But that hike in the minimum unit price of alcohol, which adds insult to injury, is entirely down to the Scottish

Cristina Odone

Labour’s childcare confusion has gone on for too long

For parents with young children, it’s been a game of grandmother’s footsteps. First they heard from the new Labour government that they will open 300 new state nurseries in England to cater for the 30 hours of free childcare that families with children aged nine months and upwards are eligible for. Now they hear Naomi Eberstadt, high priestess of New Labour’s early years programme Sure Start, proclaim the home, not the nursery, as the best place for a child under one.   The ‘yes but no but yes’ approach of policy makers risks further confusing working parents. The 30 hours of free childcare was the previous Conservative government’s response to

Steerpike

Rees-Mogg takes aim at Badenoch over Reform remarks

It’s day three of the Conservative party conference, and so far the blue-on-blue has been kept to a minimum — not least thanks to the ‘yellow card’ threat, Mr S is sure. But one Tory grandee and former MP isn’t holding back on his thoughts on the future of his party following a disastrous election result — and Jacob Rees-Mogg had some firm words for Kemi Badenoch in particular…  In conversation with the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast this morning, Rees-Mogg first criticised the four leadership contenders for not focusing enough on issues like net zero or the economy, before slamming his party’s ’appalling failure’ on immigration over the last 14

Freddy Gray

Will America go to war with Iran?

42 min listen

Israel has launched what it has described as “limited, localised and targeted ground raids” in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s deputy leader says they’re ready for a ground offensive. It comes as more than 1000 people have been killed in the past two weeks in Lebanon. Could they be heading for all-out war? Is it possible that Iran and the US will be sucked into the conflict too? With tensions between Israel and the US on the rise, what will the next few weeks look like – and is there a chance Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah open the way to strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Professor John Mearsheimer joins The Spectator’s deputy

Patrick O’Flynn

What Cleverly gets wrong about Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’

Back in the 1980s, the American business guru Tom Peters came up with the advice to companies to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’. The idea behind it was that there was an asymmetry in customer responses to service standards which depended on what they had been guaranteed. A long delivery time could, for example, be perfectly acceptable to them unless they had been promised the purchased item sooner, in which case the reputation of the company involved would be badly harmed. The very best outcome for a company’s reputation was often when it set seemingly modest goals for itself in public but then outperformed them. The government’s failure to sustain any progress on

Terry Barnes

A Tasmanian court has widened Australia’s gender divide

It’s hard to make head or tail of where Australia stands on the gender debate that has divided the West. The issue boils down to a simple question: should men be allowed in women’s spaces? But the answer is far from simple. And a court ruling by a Tasmanian court ruling may have just added to the confusion. Tasmania’s avant garde Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) is not everyone’s cup of artistic tea. Its curator, American-born artist and wife of Mona’s very wealthy founder, David Walsh, Kirsha Kaechele, is certainly no stranger to controversy. ‘The men are a little hysterical, I’m a bit concerned’, Kaechele said In July,

Steerpike

Sunak’s government more popular than Labour, poll reveals

As the Tory leadership hustings continue, there’s a bit of good news for outgoing boss Rishi Sunak. It now transpires that more people prefer Sunak’s government to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot, according to polling by More in Common. In yet another blow for Starmer, the survey found the new government was less popular than Sunak’s by two points, with the current Prime Minister not yet being three months into the job. It’s hardly the best start… More in Common quizzed 2,080 people on their thoughts on the governments of late. 31 per cent preferred Sunak’s boys in blue, with 29 per cent logging their support for Sir Keir. It

Katy Balls

Robert Jenrick is closing the gap on Kemi Badenoch

Can Kemi Badenoch reach the final two of the Tory leadership contest? So far this has been the key question at Conservative party conference. Of the leadership candidates, Badenoch has had the bumpiest conference so far, with criticism of her comments on maternity pay and business regulation more generally. The argument from the Badenoch camp is that she is the clear favourite with the membership so it would be wrong to block her from reaching the final stage of the contest, where the grassroots get to pick their favourite out of two candidates. However, adding to Badenoch’s difficulties is a new poll of the membership. A YouGov poll suggests that

Alexander Horne

Has the UK Supreme Court been a success?

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the UK Supreme Court. When it opened its doors in 2009, it was argued that separating the country’s top judges from their historical home in parliament was a defining moment in the constitutional history of the UK. Fifteen years later, it’s hard to see whether anything significant has really changed. The Supreme Court was proposed by the Blair Government in 2003, as part of a botched set of reforms to abolish the role of Lord Chancellor and reform judicial appointments. It came as a surprise, not only to the then-Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine (who was replaced by Blair’s former flatmate, Charlie Falconer), but also to

Gareth Roberts

How doom scrolling changed TV for ever

Are you one of the growing number of ‘second screen’ television viewers? For all too many of us, it seems that watching one screen just isn’t enough; modern technology and, in particular, our obsession with looking at our phones has so addled our brains that plenty of us fiddle with our mobiles while ostensibly ‘watching’ TV. Two thirds of people watching TV now do so while browsing their mobile phones, according to a study in the United States. Being glued to our phones certainly ruins the magic of television It’s tempting to react to this news with Olympian disdain; what has happened to people that they need two screens to

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Does Kemi cause problems for Kemi?

Kemi Badenoch is being followed around the Tory party conference by her own comments about maternity pay. She had to explain what she was on about again when she had her main stage interview in the Birmingham hall this afternoon, telling Chris Hope that ‘I think maternity pay is quite important’, and that she was ‘answering a different question’ about business regulation. She then compared the row to the way Margaret Thatcher’s Women’s Own magazine comments about ‘there is no such thing as society’ were ‘cut down into a soundbite that was used to attack her’. She added: When you are a leader, when you are a conservative, when you

Natasha Feroze

Have the Tory leadership candidates got a Truss problem?

Jeremy Hunt is one of the few Tories at Conservative Party Conference willing to take the fight to Labour. In the second day, he sat down for an on-stage interview where the former Chancellor spoke about the winter fuel allowance, freebies, but also made some polite suggestions about where the Conservative party shouldn’t go, and dropped a few hints about the former Prime Minister, Liz Truss. Natasha Feroze speaks to Kate Andrews and Isabel Hardman about Hunt’s speech and some of the best bits from Liz Truss’s own interview at conference. 

Jawad Iqbal

Simon Case’s departure is an opportunity for Starmer

Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, has finally put an end to Whitehall’s worst-kept secret by formally announcing that he will quit at the end of the year. It means the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer can finally appoint his own man or woman in the role of the country’s most senior civil servant. Case is leaving his £200,000-a-year job on health grounds, telling colleagues: ‘Whilst the spirit remains willing, the body is not’. He added: ‘It’s been an honour to serve two sovereigns, four prime ministers and over 120 cabinet ministers in this role.’ Case has been in the job since September 2020, when he replaced Sir Mark Sedwill. His

Isabel Hardman

Did you know Tom Tugendhat was in the military?

Tom Tugendhat may have the most interesting merchandise in this Tory leadership contest (including fake tan, for reasons no-one has yet explained), but he is not, as things stand, the frontrunner. He is also the least experienced of the contenders in government terms, though he decided today to compensate for that in his on-stage interview in the conference hall by talking about being a soldier. Just in case anyone there hadn’t picked up that Tugendhat has served his country, he made sure he slipped it into to any answer that was vaguely relevant, including that ‘I’m not going to hold against anybody their inexperience in combat or their inexperience in

Steerpike

Simon Case hands in resignation letter

While the Conservative party conference is in full swing in Birmingham, back in Whitehall there have been some major developments. Cabinet Secretary Simon Case has now formally handed in his resignation letter, with the senior civil servant circulating his departure letter to his underlings today. His announcement that he will stand down at the end of the year follows weeks of whisperings that Case didn’t quite see eye to eye with Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray – with reports that, after the recent host of bad briefings against the PM’s staffer, efforts to speed up Case’s resignation date were deployed. How very curious… The top mandarin has