Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

The UK labour market is beginning to cool

Slowly but surely, the labour market in the UK appears to be cooling down. Data from the Office for National Statistics this morning shows the number of job vacancies across the economy fell by another 58,000 between July to September, taking the total figure to an estimated 957,000. This is still far above pre-pandemic levels, but the number has been dropping constantly, and is down again for a sixteenth consecutive period. Meanwhile, both the UK’s unemployment figure and inactivity figure have remained ‘largely unchanged on the quarter’: sitting at 4.2 and 20.9 per cent, respectively. This bodes well for an economy that is trying to dodge the dreaded label of ‘stagflation’. The UK

Mark Galeotti

Putin isn’t afraid of Cameron

Considering the obsession Russia has with Britain as the source of all its woes, it is perhaps surprising how David Cameron’s return to politics is being taken. Or rather, how little Moscow thinks it matters. After all, there is a flatteringly pervasive sense that while the United States is the main threat to Russia, Britain is more than just its sidekick. Instead, if Washington has the resources, London has the low cunning. Time and again, the Kremlin claims to see MI6 or the Foreign Office or some other arm of Perfidious Albion behind its reversals. Even the recent allegations that a Ukrainian officer masterminded the bombing of its Nord Stream

Steerpike

Watch: Corbyn refuses 15 times to call Hamas a ‘terror group’

Should Hamas stay in power following the 7 October atrocity on Israel? Should the group’s fighters be called terrorists? Two questions that are simple to answer but not, it seems, for Jeremy Corbyn. The former Labour leader refused 15 times to label Hamas a ‘terror group’ in a testy interview last night with Piers Morgan. While Corbyn said of Hamas ‘everyone knows what they are’, he refused repeatedly to use the ‘t’ word to describe the group that murdered 1,400 Israelis:

Nigel Jones

Nigel Farage’s ‘I’m A Celebrity’ appearance could haunt him

After days of speculation, Nigel Farage has finally confirmed that he has accepted ITV’s invitation to go into the jungle and join Ant and Dec and eleven fellow contestants on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!. It’s a decision he may come to regret. Farage says he has been stoutly resisting offers to appear on the show since 2016, but has at last succumbed to their blandishments, chiefly because of the huge fee offered – reported to be up to £1.5 million. But this isn’t just about money: like many politicians, Farage is a showman and he says the show will give him a chance to ‘connect’ with the

Sasha Lensky

Why Putin doesn’t want to negotiate

Discussion of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia has until recently, among most Western governments, been considered something of a no-go area and a sign of wilting faith. Yet with hopes vanishing that any counter offensive will bring a decisive change in the war, and another, headline-monopolising conflict breaking out in Gaza, this taboo in the West looks set to be broken. During a recent prank call to which she fell victim, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni probably spoke for many when she said there was ‘a lot of fatigue’ over Ukraine and that she herself had some ideas for finding ‘a way out’. Perhaps less remarkably, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban

Jawad Iqbal

David Cameron’s welcome return

British politics is a brutal and unsentimental place when it comes to departing prime ministers. After a few valedictory remarks at the despatch box and the odd tearful farewell, the PM heads off to Buckingham Palace to tender their formal resignation to the monarch. And that’s that – apart from the customary arrival of the Downing Street removal vans to clear away their belongings. It is an unspoken rule that no one, most of all their successors in Downing Street, is particularly keen to welcome a former prime minister back to frontline politics. That is why David Cameron’s return to government as Foreign Secretary is such a shock. It is

Ross Clark

Liz Truss lives on: a look at her Growth Commission’s ideas

Liz Truss may be long gone, but one fragment of her premiership still remains: the Growth Commission she set up to advise on her policy for ‘growth, growth, growth’. The think tank, made up of British, US and Japanese economists and not to be confused with a body of the same name set up by the World Bank, today delivers its ‘growth budget’ – which it claims would boost GDP by a cumulative 23 per cent over the next decade, putting an extra £11,000 in our pockets (or £26,000 per household) by 2043. Economic modelling is best taken with a Siberian mine’s worth of salt – the only certainty is

Kristina Murkett

The many problems with Andrea Jenkyns’s letter to Rishi Sunak

Dear the parents/guardians of Andrea Jenkyns (age 49 years and 5 months), I am concerned that Andrea’s most recent piece – her no-confidence letter to the Prime Minister – does not reflect her true abilities, and given her experience as both Secretary of State for Skills and Secretary of State for Education, I suspect Andrea may not be trying her best here. Andrea’s letter starts well: I enjoyed her use of repetition in the short simple sentence, ‘Enough is enough.’ However, I’m afraid this is not enough in itself. In the next sentence she writes, ‘we have a party leader that’ when it really should be ‘we have a party

Monday

Oscar Edmondson

Tory Twitter had a great reshuffle

Outside of Westminster, cabinet reshuffles can be stale affairs. The who’s in and who’s out has a predictable rhythm, as half familiar faces trudge up and down Downing Street. So spare a thought for the social media editor running the Tories’ Twitter account, who has to drum up excitement for even the greyest of ministerial appointments. Today they succeeded in doing just that: by announcing incoming cabinet members as if they were football transfers. ‘NEW: Esther McVey signs for Cabinet. Done deal and starts today,’ screamed the Conservatives Twitter account. ‘AGREEMENT REACHED: Laura Trott takes up a position in the Treasury as Chief Secretary.’ Whoever is in charge seems to

Steerpike

Will Sunak face more no confidence letters?

And so the backlash begins. On Monday evening Andrea Jenkyns MP submitted a letter of no confidence in her ‘Machiavellian’ Prime Minister. It comes at the end of Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle, which saw then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman sacked and, startlingly, former Prime Minister David Cameron return to government. Will the drama never end? Jenkyns’s letter slammed Sunak for sacking Braverman, with Boris Johnson’s former education minister raging that ‘enough is enough’. The MP continued in a rather, er, rambling fashion:  If it wasn’t bad enough that we have a party leader that the party members rejected, the polls demonstrate that the public reject him, and I am in full agreement.

Steerpike

Cameron dodges the question on Greensill

Well, well, well. It may have been seven years since David Cameron was last involved in frontline politics, but he’s certainly not forgotten the skill of a political interview. Quizzed this evening by BBC political editor Chris Mason, Cameron managed to, er, dodge just about every question he was asked when it came to the Greensill scandal. Two years ago, Cameron made approximately £8.2 million promoting finance business Greensill Capital, which later collapsed as criminal inquiries into its alleged fraud began. Prior to the company’s collapse, Cameron had intensively lobbied civil servants in 2020 to allow Greensill to lend up to £10 billion in emergency Covid loans. But when quizzed

Stephen Daisley

David Cameron? Seriously?

All political careers end in failure but few return to prove it a second time. David Cameron, forced to resign after his defeat in the EU referendum, has been brought back, given a peerage and appointed foreign secretary. His appointment followed the sacking of Suella Braverman as home secretary and James Cleverly’s sidewards move to replace her.  Expect Rishi Sunak’s stenographers in the press to gush over this masterstroke. A heavy-hitter in the cabinet. An experienced pair of hands at the Foreign Office. A return to serious, grown-up politics. Labour will be rattled now! Any such talk will be guff. This is not genius, it’s desperation. The Prime Minister wanted

Steerpike

Scottish nationalists hail Cameron’s return

Out with the old and in with the even older. With Lord Cameron today making his return to government as Foreign Secretary, Mr S was intrigued to glean the reaction north of the border. It mustn’t be forgotten, after all, that Cameron is the only UK Prime Minister to have allowed the Nats their hallowed independence referendum, gambling the fate of the union… As Tory politicians murmur about their, er, mixed reaction to Cameron’s return, some Scottish nationalists have been far more effusive. Speaking exclusively to Steerpike, former first minister Alex Salmond admitted that Cameron’s return to government ‘now provides an opportunity for the independence movement’. The current Alba party

James Kirkup

In defence of David Cameron’s comeback

David Cameron is back. This will make some people unhappy, because they dislike the man. Common reasons for disliking Dave include Brexit and austerity. But there’s also the Greensill lobbying and just the general, all-pervading shiny-faced smugness of a man who, one suspects, never really gave a toss about any of it and was just playing at politics to show how clever he is. You might infer from the words above that I am one of those who dislike Cameron. I certainly have reasons to do so, and reasons that are a little more personal than the ones I’ve listed above. My feelings about David Cameron have informed a great many

Steerpike

Is Lord Cameron a ‘useful idiot’ for the CCP?

Let the great kow-tow begin – again. David Cameron, the new Foreign Secretary, is well-known for his attempt to create a ‘golden era’ in Anglo-China relations when prime minister. This essentially meant turning a blind eye to Chinese misdeeds and espionage on the condition that Beijing kept pumping money into the British economy.  But it’s his China-related activities out of office that invite even more scrutiny, especially now that he’s back in government.  Just a few weeks ago, in September, the former prime minister flew to Sri Lanka to speak in support of Colombo Port City project, a controversial venture that is meant to establish Colombo as a Chinese-funded rival to Singapore

Sam Leith

The dying days of Rishi Sunak’s black hole government

In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on itself (am I getting this right, Carlo?) … and then keeps collapsing, over and over again, until it becomes infinitely tiny and inside-out and even the rules of physics cease to apply. This applies to supermassive celestial bodies, but also to supermassive shambles, such as we are to observe through our telescopes when we point them in the direction of the Conservative Party. Every zeptosecond brings a further wrinkle in political spacetime, and every zeptosecond sees the governing party, like a black hole, sucking harder than Newtonian physics ever thought possible.

Steerpike

Six questions David Cameron can now answer

David Cameron left 10 Downing Street with indecent haste. Britain had voted for Brexit and we were about to discover a scandal: he had instructed the civil service not to do any preparatory work in the event of a Yes vote. This led to a crushed timetable that destabilised his successors as he ran for the door. Cameron then further broke the normal conventions of public service by resigning and forcing his constituents into a by-election rather than serving them for a full term as he promised. (Nadine Dorries is the only other MP in recent years to have bolted when her career headed south).  Cameron’s hiding from the public

Damian Thompson

How light filled the first Roman Churches: a conversation with Dr Elizabeth Lev

15 min listen

When I was in Rome last month, I watched the ‘synod on synodality’ fizzle out while the Marko Rupnik sex scandal took another sinister turn (and various Catholic journalists shamefully tried to suppress the story). But don’t worry: this episode of Holy Smoke is devoted to more uplifting matters. I visited the ancient little church of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the edge of the Forum, which incorporates the remains of a pagan temple and a secular Roman basilica or meeting place. The contrast between the darkness of one and the light of the other had powerful theological significance for those Roman Christians who were encouraged to build their first

James Heale

Sunak’s reshuffle: refresh or rewind?

15 min listen

It’s reshuffle day in Westminster. Suella Braverman is out as Home Secretary, replaced by James Cleverly, with former prime minister David Cameron making a shock return to parliament in the vacant Foreign Secretary slot. It’s the first time since 1974 that a former PM has been appointed to the cabinet. Can Rishi Sunak really still claim to be the candidate to end the ‘thirty year status quo’? Will he regret bringing Cameron back? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.