Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Covid Inquiry costs soar to £56 million

It would be easy to get the impression that the Covid Inquiry – with its relentless focus on bad language and offensive WhatsApp messages – has so far been a waste of time. But that’s not quite true: it’s been a massive waste of money too. Today the Inquiry released its accounts for up to September 2023, which show that the cost of the lumbering investigation has already ballooned to £56 million, even though public hearings only began in June. As you’d expect, the largest expenses so far have been on lawyers, with the Inquiry shelling out £19.6 million to keep 62 barristers (including 12 KCs) and a team of solicitors on

Stephen Daisley

Suella Braverman is right for once

There can be few sins in politics graver than giving Suella Braverman a point. Yet that is exactly what the Home Secretary has in her Times op-ed when she writes: Unfortunately, there is a perception that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protesters. During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matter demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee? She’s not wrong, is she? Some progressives are arguing that she is because, they contend, Boris Johnson ‘essentially authorised’ the BLM protests when he said in an 8 June

Steerpike

SNP minister runs up £11,000 iPad bill

The SNP’s finances are back at the top of the news agenda. Michael Matheson, Holyrood’s hopeless health secretary has somehow managed to rack up an £11,000 bill on his parliamentary iPad. It appears that when the government minister was holidaying in Morocco with his family, he forgot to switch on his WiFi. But instead of admitting to the foolishness of his blunder and paying up, Matheson has begrudgingly made a ‘donation’ of £3,000 from his publicly funded office allowances. ‘Shameless’ doesn’t quite cut it… Holyrood insiders told the Telegraph that the former net zero secretary refused to pay the remaining £7,935.74 from his own purse, deferring it instead to the Scottish parliament.

Lucy Dunn

NHS waiting list reaches record high – again

Rishi Sunak pledged in January that his government would cut waiting lists by 2024 — but the latest stats show the PM is failing to meet his target: the NHS waiting list has hit a record high of 7.8 million waits, according to figures released this morning. 6.5 million patients are languishing on lists, with around 15 per cent waiting for more than one thing. The bad news for patients – and for the Prime Minister – is that things are likely to get worse before they get better. October has been the busiest month for A&E attendance so far this year with over 2.2 million people showing up at emergency departments

Andrew McQuillan

Suella Braverman has a point about Northern Ireland

Suella Braverman’s description of pro-Palestinian protests as being ‘disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster’ has given the Province’s political class yet another reason – not that they need one – to chunter on at length.  The professionally po-faced, from SDLP leader Colum Eastwood to Stephen Farry of the Alliance Party, dutifully trod the path to X/ Twitter, or whichever broadcasting studio would take them, to intone about how off piste the Home Secretary had gone. They said Braverman’s remarks showed how ignorant about the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland she was.  For all the claims the Home Secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about when it comes to Northern Ireland, she

Max Jeffery

What is Suella Braverman up to?

10 min listen

Suella Braverman has again dominated conversation with her controversial rhetoric, this time comparing the pro-Palestinian marches to the Orange Marches of Northern Ireland in a punchy op-ed for the Times. Has she finally gone too far for this government? Max Jeffery talks to Katy Balls and James Heale. Produced by Max Jeffery and Cindy Yu.

Patrick O’Flynn

Sacking Suella could sink Sunak

If prizes were dished out for saying what the unwashed and un-woke are thinking then Suella Braverman would be garlanded in medals and have a mantelpiece groaning with trophies. The Home Secretary scored bullseye of the year when she said that multiculturalism had failed. A couple of weeks later groups of people waving Palestinian flags and dressed in the garb of the Middle East could be seen dancing in the streets of London as news broke of the 7 October pogrom by Hamas: No further questions, your honour. Since then, she has made utterances that have shot to the top of the news agenda several times more. Demonstrations taking place

Isabel Hardman

Is Suella Braverman trying to get sacked?

Tory MPs are in an even more fractious mood than usual following Suella Braverman’s article in the Times. No. 10 has now clarified that while Rishi Sunak has full confidence in Braverman, the article was not cleared by Downing Street. As Katy Balls explains here, the Home Secretary does seem to be pushing the limits of what Downing Street will accept. There is also considerable impatience among MPs with No 10. I’ve been shown WhatsApp messages from the Home Office group this morning where MPs have been demanding clarity from Braverman’s special advisers and Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPSs) on whether the piece was indeed cleared by No 10. Kit Malthouse in

Steerpike

Nadine Dorries’s bizarre Today interview

In these difficult times, at least we can all count on Nadine Dorries to give us a good laugh. The former Culture Secretary was up early on the Today programme to mark publication day of her book on the supposed ‘plot’ to bring down Boris Johnson. Her thesis, she told a bemused Nick Robinson, was that five Tory leaders in quick succession have been brought down by a cabal of insiders known only as ‘The Movement.’ One of them, Dorries intoned sinisterly, was Dougie Smith, the longtime Tory operative, who, she says, ‘decides who becomes an MP, who becomes a minister, who becomes a Prime Minister and remains as Prime Minister and party

Katy Balls

What is Suella Braverman up to?

Another day, another row involving Suella Braverman. The Home Secretary has penned a comment piece for the Times in which she accuses police officers of employing a ‘double standard’ on protests whereby they take a softer approach to left wing groups than they do right-wing protests. Braverman accused the Metropolitan police of ‘playing favourites’, likening the pro-Palestinian marches to the sectarian rallies held in Northern Ireland during the troubles. She once again referred to those attending the rallies as ‘hate marchers’. Her piece comes after Sunak warned Mark Rowley – the head of the Met – that he would be ‘held accountable’ if pro-Palestine marches impact this weekend’s Remembrance events.

Richard Ekins and Conor Casey 

The trouble with the Human Rights Act

The Human Rights Act (HRA), which is twenty-five years old today, has always been controversial. It unsettles the balance of the constitution, enabling judges, and lawyers, to attack policy and legislation in a way that is anathema to our constitutional tradition.  Introduced under Tony Blair in 1998, the HRA was intended to help guarantee basic human rights. This was a noble objective, but it does not follow that the Act was a good idea. While securing the rights of others is a fundamental object of government, the act’s main problem is that it disables parliamentarians, and the public, from responsible action, putting parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in doubt.

Steerpike

Watch: Douglas Murray takes on Piers Morgan from Israel-Gaza border

Douglas Murray popped up on Talk TV last night live from the Gaza border – and his head-to-head with Piers Morgan soon turned fiery. Morgan argued that Murray was wrong to suggest that all those taking to the streets of London to show their solidarity with Palestinians ‘are pro-Hamas’. ‘You don’t honestly think they’re all pro-Hamas, these people?,’ he asked Murray. Murray shot back, ‘Well I think that anyone who, for instance, chants things like “from the river to the sea” is in fact what you describe or is criminally ignorant.’ Morgan insisted that not all protestors have been chanting such phrases. Then Murray pulled out his trump card: ‘Okay,

Kristina Murkett

The Tory crackdown addiction

If there’s one thing this government is addicted to, it’s crackdowns. Rishi Sunak loves to talk tough on how he is going to ‘crack down’ on small boats, climate protestors, Mickey Mouse degrees, banks blacklisting, anti-social behaviour. Just last week Home Secretary Suella Braverman vowed to crack down on homeless people living in tents as a ‘lifestyle’ choice, as if the destitute choose to sleep outside because they like stargazing, rather than because they are crippled by poverty, addiction and mental health issues. As the government chases ever more intense crackdown highs, it gets its hits from banning things. American Bully XLs. Smoking. Laughing gas. Drip pricing. Noisy protests. Leaseholds

Wednesday

Steerpike

Did hapless Humza mislead parliament?

The Holyrood WhatsApp drama can now be upgraded from ‘mystery’ to ‘scandal’. As if not handing over important messages wasn’t bad enough, the First Minister and his deputy have today been accused of misleading the Scottish parliament on the UK Covid Inquiry. It seems pantomime season starts early north of the border… Yousaf and deputy first minister Shona Robison told the Chamber last week that the Scottish government had only been asked for Covid WhatsApp messages in September. It now turns out this isn’t quite the case. After the Covid Inquiry requested the Scottish government set out the timeline of events in full, it became clear that it had first

Isabel Hardman

Will Mark Rowley ban the pro-Palestine protests?

13 min listen

Rishi Sunak met with Met Commissioner Mark Rowley today to discuss the Palestine protests planned for the Remembrance weekend. Sunak has called the marches ‘disrespectful’, and said he would hold Rowley ‘accountable’ for not banning them. Will the Commissioner change his mind? Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and Danny Shaw, former home affairs correspondent for the BBC. 

Euan McColm

The ugly truth about the SNP’s white roses

Anyone paying close attention to television coverage of the King’s Speech on Tuesday may have noticed that SNP MPs in attendance looked as if their next appointment was a wedding reception, with white roses on their lapels. In fact, the Nats wear the rose in honour of poet Hugh MacDiarmid, a founder of the National Party of Scotland which merged with the Scottish party in 1934, creating the SNP. The nationalists’ boutonnière references MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Little White Rose’, a drab little celebration of the sort of insularism the SNP insists doesn’t exist within its brand of nationalism. If you think my critique harsh, judge for yourself: ‘The rose of

Ben Lazarus

Is Keir Starmer in trouble?

Unless something extraordinary happens, Sir Keir Starmer will be the next prime minister. All the polls show Labour on course to win a large majority in next year’s general election. Yet it’s being widely reported that Starmer faces the gravest test of his leadership, all over a conflict more than 2,000 miles away.  Imran Hussain has become the first member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet to quit over the war in Gaza. In an open-letter published on X last night, the Bradford MP said he wanted to ‘strongly advocate for a ceasefire’ and his views differed ‘substantially’ from Starmer’s. Others could follow the former shadow minister for the New Deal for

Michael Simmons

Why was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown?

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? Only later did No. 10’s head of data find out that this false graph had been shown on national

Katy Balls

Rishi and Suella’s fates hinge on the Rwanda ruling

The first King’s Speech for more than 70 years was a festival of the expected: the royal reading of a No. 10 press release. Some dividing lines were drawn between the Tories and Labour and some loose ends tied up – but there was no real change in political direction. ‘It’s a continuance of the direction and path we are on,’ explained a senior government figure. ‘The most inspiring thing Rishi has done is refusing to endorse Braverman’s comments’ But if current polls are any indicator, to continue in the same direction means a landslide Labour victory and a Tory defeat of historic proportions at the next election. ‘It won’t

Charles Moore

Will Artificial Intelligence create Artificial Stupidity?

At a time when almost everything gets worse, it is nice to recount that this State Opening of Parliament was better than the last one. Last year, there was a wintry sense of fin de régime, as the Prince of Wales stood in for his ailing mother. Now that Prince is King. Everyone wanted it to go well for him, so it did. There was a feeling of excitement, and perhaps relief that the chilly hand of rationalisation has not used the new reign to tighten its grip. The ceremony was, in a way, grander than under Elizabeth II, because we now have both a King and a Queen. For