Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The Pope, gay blessings and the Rupnik scandal

13 min listen

Pope Francis’s much-hyped ‘synod on synodality’ began in Rome this week and to say that it has got off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. On Monday, five leading conservative cardinals bounced Francis into making a highly ambiguous statement apparently opening the door to gay blessings. Meanwhile, and this subject is being played down by certain media outlets, allegations of sexual abuse surrounds one of the Pope’s friends. The world-renowned mosaic artist Fr Marko Rupnik has been expelled from the Jesuits after women claimed he sexually abused them – but he remains a priest and for some reason Pope Francis has yet to allow him to be prosecuted canonically. In this episode of Holy

James Heale

What’s behind the PM’s plan to axe A-levels?

16 min listen

One of the announcements made in Rishi Sunak’s conference speech was to scrap A-levels in favour of a new qualification which includes compulsory English and Maths. With several problems in the education system, and years of disruption for students, what was behind the PM’s decision to radically overhaul the system? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and David Laws, former education minister who now chairs the Education Policy Institute. 

Steerpike

Watch: Burley asks if Rishi breached Equality Act

The papers might have welcomed Sunak’s conference speech but others aren’t so accommodating. First, the pro-independence Alba party reported the Prime Minister to the police for contempt of court after making fun of Nicola Sturgeon’s legal woes. And this morning, Sky presenter Kay Burley floated the idea that Sunak could have beached equalities legislation after telling the Tory faithful that ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that’s just common sense.’ Burley told Transport Secretary Mark Harper that: ‘I’ve taken the opportunity to look at the Equality Act 2010 this morning which says that people who are going through a gender reassignment should not be discriminated

Mark Galeotti

Why a gangster’s death in Central Asia matters

Such is the globalisation of the modern underworld, that the fate of a gangster you may never have heard of, in a country of which you may know little, may actually matter to you. I’d suggest this is true of the Kyrgyz godfather Kamchy Kolbayev, who was killed on Wednesday by a bullet in the head, during a police operation to arrest him in the capital, Bishkek. Kolbaev was widely recognised as the most powerful gangster in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. Born in 1974, he took fullest advantage of the political and economic disruption that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to establish a

Melanie McDonagh

There’s nothing conservative about Sunak’s smoking ban

Is Rishi Sunak the least Tory Tory PM ever? He’s fundamentally Californian at heart: witness his terrible policy to ban cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 which was announced to great fanfare at conference.  That’s what contemporary Conservatism has come to: compulsory clean living Fortunately, I belong to the lucky generation that can still kill itself with tobacco, though I write as a failed smoker. Try as I might, I can’t get the hang of it, and the times I tried left me with little doubt that it’s not good for you. I gave up the effort some time ago. But the thing about being grown up is that you

Ed West

Can post-liberalism save the Conservative party?

‘We – conservatives of left and right, all those who believe in the old way – need to win this battle, to restore the conservative normative as the proper basis for our culture and society, with a restored “covenantal” understanding at the heart of families, neighbourhoods and the nation.’ So the MP Danny Kruger writes in his recently published Covenant, where he also states that ‘To strengthen family life and restore the oikos we need good housing in the right places, jobs that sustain the home, and a decent system of care for children and dependent adults.’ Kruger was recently described in the New Statesman as being ‘at the heart of an influential strain of Tory thinking:

Steerpike

Rishi Sunak reported to the police over Sturgeon joke

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech yesterday, in which he sought to claim the mantle of change, has received a reasonably welcome reception in the papers this morning. The Times front page says this ‘son of a pharmacist’ is casting himself as Thatcher’s heir, while the Telegraph focused on the PM’s ‘huge decisions to change Britain’. It appears that not everyone enjoyed the speech though, particularly up in Scotland. After the speech, it was reported that Chris McEleny, the general secretary of the pro-independence Alba party led by Alex Salmond, has reported the PM to Police Scotland alleging contempt of court. He did so after Sunak made the following jibe at Nicola

Wednesday

Winston Marshall

‘It can be done!’: David Goodhart on how to stop illegal immigration

58 min listen

This week Winston speaks to David Goodhart, author of The British Dream: Successes And Failures Of Post-War Immigration, which celebrates its 10 year anniversary this year. On the podcast they discuss the state of immigration in the UK. Is home secretary Suella Braverman right to suggest that immigration an existential threat to the West? Has multiculturalism failed?

Lloyd Evans

Rishi the revolutionary? Come off it

It was preposterous. A prime minister at the head of a party that’s been running the country for 13 years posed as a revolutionary today. Rishi Sunak presented himself to the Tory conference as a dashing anarchist, an upstart rebel, a fearless saviour who wants to wrest power from an authoritarian clique and hand it back to the people. ‘Our mission is to fundamentally change our country’, he cried. Evidently he’d forgotten that the Tories have been in office for the last decade-and-a-bit. To the surprise of no one, he announced that HS2 will be scrapped. The Birmingham-to-Manchester leg is no more, he declared. ‘The right thing to do when

Kristina Murkett

Rishi Sunak’s exam shake-up doesn’t add up

After 13 years in power, the Conservatives have decided to rebrand themselves as the ‘party of change’. Today, Rishi Sunak announced that the Tories will ban smoking for the next generation, scrap a significant portion of HS2, and abolish A-levels and T-levels in favour of new ‘Advanced British Standards’. Rishi Sunak is no longer ‘Inaction Man’, but ‘Over-reaction Man’ While it is encouraging to see the government finally being proactive rather than reactive on education policy, the government will have to put its money where its mouth is if it wants to prove that this is more than a headline-grabbing pre-election gimmick. A British Baccalaureate is not a new idea; dozens

The Spectator

Is now really the time to scrap A-levels?

The history of education reform is a graveyard of acronyms: TVEIs, GNVQs and so on. There have been many well-meaning initiatives that made sense at the time but struggled to gain acceptance. Rishi Sunak needs to proceed with caution before he launches into yet another reform of school qualifications, especially if it means the end of the only one that has stood the test of time: the A-level. The Prime Minister’s concern – shared by many educationalists – is that A-levels are too narrow and specialised and lead to too many people entering adult life lacking adequate literacy and numeracy skills. In the Survey of Adult Skills conducted by the OECD,

Christopher Snowdon

The many flaws in Sunak’s smoking wheeze

In the run-up to the Conservative party conference, Rishi Sunak was promoting himself as a serious politician who wanted workable policies that respect consumer choice. No more war on motorists! No more pie-in-the-sky net zero promises! Here was a practical man in tune with the concerns of ordinary people. Having teed himself up as a pragmatic, back-to-basics Conservative, it was all the more puzzling when, in his keynote speech, he announced a preposterous anti-smoking gimmick borrowed from Jacinda Ardern that no one was asking for. New Zealand is the only country to have taken seriously the idea of increasing the age at which people can buy cigarettes by one year

Fraser Nelson

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech gamble

17 min listen

After spending most of his conference refusing to say much at all, Rishi Sunak used his speech to make three big policy announcements on HS2, smoking and A-levels. Will these gambles pay off?  Fraser Nelson speaks to Katy Balls, Isabel Hardman, Kate Andrews and John Connolly.

Steerpike

GB News sack Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson

It’s been a mixed fortnight of fortunes for GB News. Their party at Tory conference attracted a galaxy of right-wing stars, with Liz Truss and Priti Patel among those toasting the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Channel.’ But as the Manchester meet-up draws to a close, the thorny question of the Ava Evans scandal has reared its head once again. Two of the three not-so-wise men at the heart of it have today been sacked: presenters Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson were unceremoniously axed, while Dan Wootton remains suspended. In a statement the upstart channel said blandly that: Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson were both suspended last week pending internal investigations that have

Kate Andrews

Is Mitt Romney behind Akshata Murthy’s appearance?

Is Akshata Murthy using the Ann Romney playbook? Rishi Sunak’s wife made an unexpected appearance on the main stage at Conservative party conference, delivering a speech that she insisted was even a surprise for the Prime Minister. This wasn’t just an introduction to her husband’s speech. It was ten minutes of glowing remarks about Sunak, dating back to when they met as students in California, noting the ‘aspiration’ he had ‘to build for a better country’ at the age of 24. Murthy’s remarks were the kind that are usually given by a presidential candidate’s partner at the Republican or Democratic Convention, where it is the job of the spouse to

Katy Balls

Battle begins: inside Rishi Sunak’s plan to take on Labour

When David Laws moved in as chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010, he found a note from his predecessor Liam Byrne saying: ‘I’m afraid there is no money.’ It was the most famous parting gift in British political history. What was meant as a joke (Byrne had thought his friend Philip Hammond would get the job) quickly became the coalition government’s most effective weapon against the opposition: proof that Labour could not be trusted with the public finances. Today, Labour wants to level the same accusation against the Conservatives. ‘On the first day [in power], we need to land the message very quickly that the finances are in a

Coffee House

Full text: Rishi Sunak’s Tory conference speech

Thank you, Akshata, for that introduction, and thank you for always being there for me. My wife: truly the best long-term decision for a brighter future, I ever made. I have been blessed in my life. I have a wonderful wife and two daughters who make me proud every single day. And I was also lucky enough to grow up in the most loving of homes. My Dad was a GP and my Mum a pharmacist… you did need a smaller mention than last summer I know. In so many ways, I wouldn’t be standing here before you today without them. They were – and are – my inspiration. Thank

Fraser Nelson

Can Sunak really cast himself as the enemy of the status quo?

Rishi Sunak today revealed a new enemy that he’s defining himself against: ‘the 30-year status quo’. Why this period? Because it includes Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Boris. Sunak wants to lump them together as a melange that includes Starmer. This was the crux of his speech today: to cast himself as the candidate of change and Keir Starmer as the custodian of the ‘old consensus’. This is plausible and has lots more potential: after his net zero and HS2 announcements, today was the chance to follow-up. All told, it was a decent speech but one in which the ghost of Jacinda Ardern loomed larger than that of Thatcher In

Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech gamble

After spending most of his conference refusing to say much at all, Rishi Sunak used his speech to make three big policy announcements as he seeks to pitch himself as the change candidate. The first was HS2, with Sunak confirming that the government will axe the planned Manchester leg. Sunak said he would spend the £36 billion saved to fund other rail, road and bus projects across the country – so all areas either receive as much in funding as they would have done or more. When announcing this, the Prime Minister mentioned the West Midlands mayor Andy Street several times, saying that he looked forward to working with Street

Isabel Hardman

Rishi Sunak vows to end the ‘30-year status quo’ in Tory conference speech

Rishi Sunak pitched himself as the change candidate at the next election in his speech to Conservative party conference this afternoon. It was a bold move after 13 years, to argue that ‘if this country is to change, it can only be us who do it’, and to complain that ‘politics doesn’t work the way it should’. He didn’t go so far as to repudiate his predecessors: in fact, he said he didn’t want to ‘waste time’ going over the past and the ‘difficult circumstances’ in which he came into office. But he did refer to a ‘30-year status quo I am here to end’ – at that point in