Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

The trouble with Minnesota

In its haste to acquire Greenland, the White House neglects to consider whether the interests of the United States might be better served by contracting rather than expanding the nation’s territory. Minnesota governor Tim Walz has said the state’s National Guard stands ready to protect citizens if necessary, adding ominously: ‘We’ve never been at war with our federal government.’ Mayor Jacob Frey has told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal law enforcement agency, to ‘get the fuck out of Minneapolis’. Their remarks come after the fatal shooting of a US citizen by an ICE agent during an immigration raid. The circumstances are contested, with some believing the woman was

Tim Shipman

How Reform plans to govern

18 min listen

2025 was the easy part for Reform. If they win the election, however, how do they actually govern? In The Spectator this week, Tim Shipman writes about the party’s plans to tackle Whitehall bloat, bypass the Lords and restore the authority of the Prime Minister over the various institutions of state. The man tasked with working this out is Danny Kruger, who is working up plans to push change through using Orders in Council – a device in the Privy Council – as well as statutory instruments and ministerial guidance to avoid the need for primary legislation. But the party is only in the foothills, and one source warns that

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump won’t back down after the Minnesota shooting

So much for ‘Minnesota nice’, the phrase that Midwesterners like to use to describe their calm dispositions. Three gunshots – fired point-blank in the gelid snows of Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer at Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old white woman and American citizen – have plunged the North Star State into renewed political turmoil. The fatal shooting took place only a few blocks from where George Floyd was killed in May 2020. In responding to the tragedy, President Trump proceeded on his favourite premise – the best defence is a good offence. On social media, he declared that the need for the imposition of law and order by immigration

Gavin Mortimer

France’s revolting farmers could bring down Macron

Paris has been invaded this morning by more than 100 tractors driven by furious farmers. Just before dawn, a tree was felled by the protestors in the west of the capital close to the Roland Garros tennis stadium. The farmers have warned more will follow. ‘They want to slaughter our cows, so we’re going to slaughter their trees,’ one farmer told reporters. This is the France that the Paris elite despises: the France that loves its traditions, that works hard, pays its taxes and despairs at the country’s chronic mismanagement There have been other acts of rebellion in the country. Access to the southern city of Rodez has been blocked

Sam Olsen

What Bazball tells us about Britain’s decline

As many predicted, England has yet again lost the Ashes in Australia. But listen closely to the criticism of the defeat and a curious vocabulary emerges. The problem, we are told, was not simply misjudgement but recklessness; not failure but irresponsibility. England did not merely lose – they behaved wrongly. This is striking language to attach to a sporting approach. It suggests that something more than tactics or results is at stake: a sense that England should not play like this at all, even if it sometimes works. That British instinct – to recoil from assertiveness when it produces visible risk – runs far beyond cricket. Australia’s series win has

Niko Vorobyov

Colombia is the obvious next target for Trump’s narco war

Why exactly Donald Trump ordered that another head-of-state should be kidnapped is up for debate. The official reason for the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolás Madurowas is drug trafficking: Maduro is the alleged mastermind of the Cartel of the Suns, a drug-dealing branch of the Venezuelan government, and a narco-terrorist. But the US Justice Department has now tacitly conceded that the Cartel of the Suns doesn’t actually exist. Moreover, Trump’s claim of fighting drugs looks peculiar after his pardoning of two narco heavyweights: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road online drugs bazaar; and Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who once bragged about up shoving cocaine right up the gringos’

Brendan O’Neill

The Birmingham Maccabi scandal proves multiculturalism has failed

Imagine if a UK police force had information suggesting white supremacists were planning to attack black football fans from overseas. Imagine they suppressed that information. Worse, imagine if their solution to this sickening threat was to ban the black fans from coming here, effectively giving the menacing supremacists exactly what they wanted: a ‘black-free’ zone. The Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal grows larger and more alarming every day It would be one of the great scandals of our time. Leftists would be swarming the streets. The front pages of the press would fizzle with furious condemnation. There would be calls for an inquiry. Heads would roll. Well, the moral equivalent of

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

The SNP is up to its old referendum tricks

There will not be another referendum on Scottish independence if the SNP wins a majority in May’s devolved elections. We can be certain of this because John Swinney has said there will be one and, as my old granny used to say, I wouldn’t believe a word he says if the Pope had just heard his confession. Keir Starmer will simply do what his predecessors did: tell the SNP to bog off The SNP leader was questioned on his independence strategy by ITV Border’s Kieran Andrews, who asked him to ‘guarantee 100 per cent’ his campaign rhetoric about a parliamentary majority for the Nationalists leading to another vote on breaking

Peter Mandelson

Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolas Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this

mandelson
Madeline Grant

Starmer brings the spirit of Dry January to PMQs

‘New year, new you’. One can imagine the Prime Minister repeating this most hollow of secular mantras in front of a full length mirror in Downing Street. As the embodiment of vapid and valueless 21st century Britain, the PM probably loves New Year’s resolutions. He is the walking embodiment of Dry January after all. Yet, if he did vow to turn over a new leaf as the calendars changed there was little evidence of it at the first Prime Minister’s Questions since the recess. Mrs Badenoch focussed on two areas, not unrelated: foreign policy and the PM’s constant refusal to be scrutinised about it or any other matter. Specifically, she

Joanna Williams

Stonewall’s collapse can’t come soon enough

At last, some good news: Stonewall, the charity behind so much of the gender insanity that has gripped Britain in recent years, is going broke. Accounts seen by the Daily Telegraph suggest the organisation reported a net deficit of more than £906,000 at the end of the last financial year. A fall of over £2 million in income on the previous year, alongside spending of £5.6 million, means Stonewall now has a meagre £92,000 left in reserve. Unless there’s a dramatic change of fortune, it seems the charity really could be one legal case or redundancy payout away from bankruptcy. 2026 is beginning to look up! The financial problems Stonewall

Oscar Edmondson

Why is Keir Starmer so irritable?

16 min listen

It is the first Prime Minister’s Questions of the new year – and Keir Starmer returns to the Commons already under pressure. With major international crises unfolding, Kemi Badenoch used PMQs to question whether the Prime Minister is present, engaged or in control. In response, Starmer just seemed narky. As the exchange descended into rows over Ukraine, Venezuela and the role of government lawyers, the issue of the armed forces – how they are supported and resourced – came up once again. With global events dominating the news agenda, are British forces prepared to be deployed – and does the Labour party really grasp the political danger of that debate?

Isabel Hardman

Nigel Farage was the winner of PMQs – and he wasn't even there

‘He has got no choice but to be here for Prime Minister’s Questions! That’s why he’s here. If he could skip this, he would!’ That accusation from Kemi Badenoch would apply to any week, but it was striking that at this first session of the New Year, Keir Starmer looked like he wanted to skip a session dominated by his comfort zone of international diplomacy. The Prime Minister did not have a good session, and had Badenoch continued to be strong throughout her six questions, then his delicately worded statements about Donald Trump might have started to disintegrate as well. Nigel Farage chose to listen to PMQs on the radio

Tim Shipman

‘We will use the power of democracy to blow you away’: Reform plots a path to No. 10

As he made his way to lunch on Monday, Danny Kruger, the former Tory MP who defected to Reform last year, could be seen clutching a well-thumbed copy of John Campbell’s biography of Lord Haldane, one of the forgotten heroes of British politics. Most British politicians in search of heroes look to Churchill or Attlee for inspiration. But as a reforming secretary of state for war and lord chancellor in the Liberal government before the first world war, Haldane ‘basically modernised the British state’, says Kruger. ‘He created the War Office and the Imperial Defence Committee, the Admiralty, the modern navy, the LSE and the RAF.’ Add to that the

James Heale

Labour’s next rebellion

When Bridget Phillipson arrived at the Department for Education, she knew which issue would define her tenure. Within days, she was facing dozens of new Labour MPs grilling her about how she planned to overhaul the system for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). ‘From the outset we have gone out there to speak to the parliamentary Labour party,’ says an ally. ‘We know that this is a key postbag issue.’ Over the past ten years, the number of claims for special needs has exploded. A fifth of all children in England are now reported to have SEND; in Scotland, 43 per cent of pupils have some sort of additional

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: US strikes Venezuela, China taxes contraceptives and happy anniversary to the Birmingham bin-strikers

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said Britain was not involved ‘in any way’ in the US strikes on Venezuela. But he tweeted: ‘We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his regime.’ Earlier that day, Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, had said: ‘Nobody will shed tears over him no longer being in power.’ RAF Typhoon jets joined French aircraft in a strike on an underground arms cache in Syria thought to have been used by the Islamic State group. Britain should consider ‘even closer alignment’ with the EU single market, Sir Keir said. All young children will be

Justin Marozzi

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with him during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chavez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad

Freddy Gray

Disrupt the world, deport the world – the ‘Donroe doctrine’ is about immigration

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: ‘Bomb them over there and indulge them over here.’ Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has

James Snell

A crackdown on dangerous elderly drivers is overdue

Drivers over the age of 70 will soon need to have their eyes checked every three years in order to keep their licence. This is elementary common sense. For want of a kinder word, older motorists in Britain are a menace. Elderly drivers are responsible for a large number of accidents and fatalities. Almost one in four (24 per cent) of drivers killed on Britain’s roads were aged 70 or older. To make Britain’s roads safer, a crackdown on old, dangerous drivers is long overdue. Older drivers who cannot see properly stay on the roads in denial Casualties from accidents involving older drivers increased by 12 per cent, while those caused

Druin Burch

Labour’s drink-driving law won’t cut road deaths

‘We will tread more lightly on your lives,’ promised Keir Starmer in his first speech as Prime Minister. Yet his government has not lifted the weight of the state in their 18 months of power but made it more intrusive. Today, as part of a new road safety strategy, Labour is proposing cutting the drink-drive limit from 80 to 50 milligrams per hundred millilitres of blood, matching the stricter Scottish limits. I’m not convinced this crackdown will save lives. I have not had to peel the remains of mangled children and adults from cars and pavements, as many police officers and paramedics have. But as an A&E doctor I have