Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

Germans fork out €55,000 for Merkel’s hair and make-up

Move over Nicola Sturgeon, there’s a new sheriff in town. The former SNP leader has faced criticism this week, after it emerged that her government splurged just under £10,000 on VIP airport services for her and her staff – despite foreign affairs being a reserved power. When it comes to taking the mickey out of taxpayers though, it’s clear that the Germans really are doing it better. According to Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Tagesspiegel newspaper, German taxpayers have had to fork out €55,000 on former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hair and make-up since she left office in 2021. In this year alone, Merkel has already managed to rack up

Katy Balls

‘Get the boats done’ – could there be a referendum on the ECHR?

It’s ‘stop the boats’ week in 10 Downing Street as part of government plans to avoid a news vacuum over the summer recess. There have been a range of announcements – from new measures against businesses that knowingly employ illegal migrants, along with plans to crackdown on ‘lefty lawyers’. However, Rishi Sunak’s problem can be summed up by his deputy chairman Lee Anderson – who declared on Tuesday that the government has ‘failed’ to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. While this is not the official line from the government, it does reflect concerns that Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats’ could end in failure. ‘It’s either stop the boats or

Wednesday

Steerpike

Diane Abbott deletes foul-mouthed migrant tweet

Is Diane Abbott OK? A day after the independent MP hit out at Tory party deputy chairman Lee Anderson for his foul-mouthed comment about migrants, Abbott has again waded into the subject. This time, however, it is Abbott who is guilty of using a rude word: Abbott subsequently deleted the tweet, which was a reference to 41 migrants tragically losing their lives in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. This isn’t the first time that Abbott appears to have failed to think carefully before she wrote something. The MP was suspended by Labour back in April after she suggested Jewish people had never been ‘subject to racism’. In a

Steerpike

Tory deputy chair: Tories have failed on migration

Oh dear. It’s ‘Stop the Boats’ week in 10 Downing Street as the government tries to set the news agenda over the long summer recess. There were early signs of success as Suella Braverman’s pledge to target ‘crooked‘ immigration lawyers ran across various news outlets along with plans to crackdown on migrant traffickers in Turkey. However, the party is now in the news on boats for a reason that was not in the No. 10 media grid. On Tuesday evening, deputy party chairman Lee Anderson discussed the topic with Nigel Farage on his GB News show. However, rather than adopt the government line of talking up the plan to stop

Oscar Edmondson

Tories split over stopping the boats

12 min listen

This morning the UK’s electoral watchdog The Electoral Commission said that it had been the victim of a ‘complex cyber attack’ by ‘hostile actors’. What do we know about the attack? The cyberattack has been a distraction from what was meant to be the government’s small boats week. We’ve had migrants refusing to board the Bibby Stockholm barge, Lee Anderson’s comments splitting the party, the Home Office floating the idea of a holding centre on the Ascension Island and a new deal with Turkey. What’s the latest on Rishi’s plan to stop the boats? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Matt Dathan, Home Affairs Editor at the Times.  Produced by

Kate Andrews

Britain could lose five years of economic growth

It’s no great secret that the events of the past few years have delivered a serious economic blow to the UK. But just how many years has the country been set back? This morning the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has published its updated ‘Economic Outlook’ which digs into some of these figures, erring on the pessimistic side of the forecast spectrum. According to the NIESR’s new report, the UK economy is still a year off reaching its pre-pandemic levels. In the last quarterly update, the country’s GDP still sat 0.5 per cent below its level in the last quarter of 2019 – a figure that the Bank of England thinks

William Moore

The covert campaign against field sports

If a general election is held, as is rumoured, in November next year, Labour could return to power exactly 20 years after the Hunting Act was passed, and there is the very real possibility of field sports being finished off altogether. Then, the government’s assault on hunting was a long, bloody, open conflict. Today, the campaign against countryside pursuits is more covert – a gradual process of lawfare. Over the past two decades, more and more regulation has crept in. Field sports and the rural economy that surrounds them are suffering. The groups set up to protect rural England often now work against the interests of both gamekeepers and farmers,

Katy Balls

Corbyn’s plan to cause trouble for Sir Keir

Earlier this summer, a hundred or so Londoners gathered around a solar-powered stage truck at Highbury Fields to celebrate 40 years of Jeremy Corbyn in parliament. There was music, magic tricks and merriment. Attendees were encouraged to party like it was 2017. The opening act sang: ‘Jezza and me, we agree, we’re all for peace and justice and anti-austerity. We’re voting Jeremy Corbyn, JC for MP for me.’ Left-wing voters, tired of Starmer’s move to the right, might vote Green, independent or not vote at all For those in the Labour party watching from afar, this wasn’t just a celebration – it was the soft launch of Corbyn’s campaign to

Mark Galeotti

Was Putin behind the Electoral Commission hack?

The hacking of the Electoral Commission’s databases highlights the way that in the interconnected modern world, ‘warfare’ can be as much about undermining faith in a country’s institutions and disrupting its political processes as anything else. The Electoral Commission has admitted that ‘hostile actors’ penetrated their systems in August 2021, in a ‘complex cyberattack’ that was only detected in October 2022. In those 14 months, the hackers accessed the details (most, admittedly, openly available) of up to 40 million voters, as well as the commission’s email system. One former Russian spook from the SVR once admitted to me that ‘MI6, CIA and the rest are the opposition: it’s the FSB

David Shipley

Why Britain’s prisons will only get more violent

Prison and probation staffing is approaching dangerously low levels’ said the Ministry of Justice in a document they published by mistake this week. It’s hardly surprising to those of us who know about our failing prison system. In June, the Justice Select Committee published the results of a detailed survey of prison staff showing that half of frontline staff don’t feel safe at work. Frontline staff are ‘band 3-5’; the officers, senior officers and custodial managers who spend their days working with prisoners. Their responses make grim reading. Over 80 per cent said morale was poor in their prison. More than 60 per cent of those officers said their mental health wasn’t

Lloyd Evans

Alex Salmond teases a reconciliation with Sturgeon

Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival. Dale invited them both to comment on George Galloway’s suggestion that Sturgeon is ‘Mrs Thatcher in a kilt.’ Salmond flatly rejected this caricature. (Evidently he knows that criticising her in public will do him no favours.) Davis also dismissed the comparison. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s favourite pastime was arguing with people. Nicola wasn’t like that,’ he said, recalling the meetings he held with her during his term as Brexit secretary. ‘Nicola was very passive, very difficult to engage with. She adopted the image of a stern, domineering woman – which a lot

Patrick O’Flynn

Suella Braverman’s Turkey deal won’t stop the boats

It hardly takes a genius to work out that whoever is in charge of the government’s media grid over the summer parliamentary recess has designated this as ‘illegals week’. Not only has Home Office floated the eye-catching idea of building a holding centre on Ascension Island, but the Bibby Stockholm has finally seen its first residents march up the gang plank. Yet another new crackdown on employers hiring illegal immigrant staff has been heralded by the Prime Minister, while Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has suggested that migrants who turn their noses up at being housed on barges should ‘f*** off back to France’. And it’s only Wednesday. After half

Gavin Mortimer

Macron can’t escape blame for France’s failures in Africa

Emmanuel Macron was the recipient of a letter on Monday from nearly 100 senators from across France’s political spectrum. The signatories lamented the ‘failures and setbacks’ of the Republic’s policy in Africa in recent years and called on the president to rethink French strategy on the continent. Listing some of these failures – the rejection of France by Mali, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso and, most recently, Niger – the cross-party group warned that there could be more trouble in store in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, where anti-French sentiment is growing.  Then there is North Africa, where relations with Morocco and Tunisia aren’t what they were and, in

Lionel Shriver

How the West plays up to Putin’s caricature

In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a full month, and hats off to the veteran journalist for risking a shared cell with the Wall Street Journal ‘spy’ Evan Gershkovich. Cohen explains that Vladimir Putin is successfully flogging his war in Ukraine to the Russian people as a battle against the whole spiritually depraved West, no longer the home of ruthless capitalism but of ‘sex changes, the rampages of drag queens, barbaric gender debates and an LGBTQ takeover’. In a tirade last November, Putin lambasted the US and ‘other unfriendly foreign states’ for ‘selfishness, permissiveness, immorality, the denial

Douglas Murray

Hell is the Ulez hotline

‘Only boring people get bored’ is what we were all told as children. What we were not warned about was that boring things can also make you boring. Boringness is infectious. Or so I have come to believe. Due to the backlash against the extension of Ulez, the Mayor has come up with a fresh brilliant idea Thanks to my own low tolerance for boring things, I didn’t race to find out about the Ulez scheme. These soul-destroying acronyms often arrive at the peripheries of my vision, where I hope they will remain. Yet they make their remorseless push forward. So this week, with boring inevitability, I had to call

Steerpike

Why is Scotland’s government spending money on play doh and laser tag?

Another day, another ridiculous revelation emerges about the Scottish government. This time, it’s civil servants who are in hot water for splashing taxpayers’ cash on laser tag, Swingers (no, not that kind) crazy golf and a trip to Edinburgh Zoo. Public cash was also used to foot a £375 bill at Brewhemia, dubbed Scotland’s ‘beer palace’. The embarrassing details emerged a day after it was reported that £55,000 of taxpayers’ money was used by the SNP to build a library collection – including the purchase of 22 copies of ‘How To Run A Government’. But while these books could have made useful reading for Nicola Sturgeon, Mr Steerpike finds it hard

Brendan O’Neill

The truth about ‘gender-affirming care’

‘My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.’ Every word of destransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to the US Congress was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just 15 years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of the bodily integrity of a teenage girl should rankle the conscience of modern America. ‘Before I was able to legally drive’, she said, they ‘amputated’ my breasts. They were ‘perfectly healthy’, she told a panel of shocked politicians, but still they were cut off and burned, like trash: ‘I had a huge part of my

Steerpike

Number of civil servants on £100k almost doubles

It looks like trimming the fat isn’t going too well at the civil service, despite the government’s middling efforts. Between 2016 and 2018 the government capped pay rises for mandarins – and froze salaries entirely in 2021 to bring down the costs of the bloated public sector. New analysis from the TaxPayers’ Alliance though shows that this hasn’t been entirely successful. In fact, the number of civil servants earning more than £100,000 has increased by 88 per cent since 2016. Now 2,050 officials earn more than £100k, up from 1,090 seven years ago. There are now also 195 mandarins earning more than £150,000. Readers may be wondering how it is that

Gareth Roberts

Why aren’t we more afraid of China?

Electric cars made in China could be turned off remotely, immobilising them instantly and crippling the West. That terrifying prospect was highlighted by Professor Jim Saker, president of the Institute of the Motor Industry. ‘The car manufacturer may be in Shanghai and could stop 100,000 to 300,000 cars across Europe thus paralysing a country,’ Saker warned. Yet few people seem bothered. Nor was there much reaction to Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith’s claim on LBC this week that Beijing may have used a hidden device in Rishi Sunak’s car to track the PM’s movements. If this allegation involved another country it would likely have lead the headlines for days. But, because

Andrew Hussey

Talk of a civil war in France is overblown – for now

Is France at war? Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most popular and respected – if controversial – intellectuals in France, appears to think so. Finkielkraut recently made further enemies by joining a growing set of French intellectuals, writers and politicians who say that France is in the midst of a desperate battle. To Finkielkraut, the rioting and looting that ripped across France earlier this summer was part of an ongoing conflict between two groups: those who respect Republican values and those who hate the French Republic.  What Finkielkraut fears above all is that the French Republic might buckle under the strain of this fight. What has been happening in France,