Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Who’s to blame for rising mortgage costs?

Mortgage costs have reached a 15-year high today, with the average two-year fixed deal hitting 6.66 per cent – the highest level since the summer of the 2008 financial crash. But today’s mortgage news is being pegged to far more recent history, as average deals just topped their peak from last autumn, when Liz Truss’s mini-Budget sent interest rate expectations soaring, and mortgage offers along with them. Truss’s premiership came to an end because so many numbers were spiralling upward, including the cost of government borrowing, mortgage repayments, and the number of Tory MPs who – amid all the chaos – were simply not going to take instructions from her

Isabel Hardman

Tories fight over Illegal Migration Bill

The Illegal Migration Bill is back this afternoon for ‘ping pong’ – the final stage of its legislative passage where MPs and peers bat amendments between their respective chambers until a compromise is found. There were 20 such amendments for the government to deal with and there is still a chance that some key Conservatives might rebel tonight. Ministers want to overturn 15 changes. Two of the loudest critics are, inconveniently, former home secretaries Two of the loudest critics are, inconveniently, former home secretaries. Theresa May has criticised the Bill throughout its passage and it is still not clear whether she will vote with the government or rebel tonight. She

Oscar Edmondson

What does Starmer’s Labour stand for?

15 min listen

It has been a mixed start to the week for Labour. Rachel Reeves has been criticised for ‘following the same tram lines’ as the Tories on spending. Meanwhile, Starmer has been boosted by the decision taken by Unite – one of the UK’s biggest unions – to retain close ties with the Labour Party. Do they have a raft of transformative policies that will deliver change? Is the relationship between Labour and the unions as rosy as the Unite vote suggests?  Also today, the Nato summit in Vilnius is underway and the mood seems optimistic after Erdogan agreed to support Sweden’s membership bid. What can we expect from the summit? Oscar Edmondson

Gareth Roberts

Why are we so obsessed with TV presenters?

The mucky allegations about a ‘household name’ BBC star – who is said to have paid thousands of pounds to a teenager for sexually explicit pictures – has exposed our obsession with TV presenters. We invite these people into our homes every day. Stars we never meet become familiar, a part of our lives and daily routines. Now, for one of these presenters, their world has come crashing down, and we can’t get enough of it. There are plenty of questions hanging over this story: we still don’t know the identity of the presenter concerned, even if social media is awash with a list of suspects. And we don’t know

Steerpike

Flashback: Sunak mocks Truss over mortgage rates

It’s a red letter day for Rishi Sunak. No, he hasn’t succeeded in fulfilling any of his five priorities. Instead, the average two-year fixed-rate mortgage has today passed the peak seen in the wake of the Truss government’s mini-budget. Mortgage rates have soared in recent months, following the Bank of England’s interest rate hikes to try to tackle rampant inflation. Two-year fixed deals have now reached 6.66 per cent on average – a level not seen since August 2008. That rate is of course higher than the 6.65 per cent reached on 20 October last year, when Tory MPs were in full meltdown. Back then some Sunak allies were crowing that they had

Katy Balls

Urgency drives the day at the Vilnius Nato summit

Rishi Sunak heads to Lithuania today for the Nato leaders’ summit (which means he will be missing another Prime Minister’s Questions). The trip comes after Sunak met one-on-one with president Biden at 10 Downing Street – a visit which is being heralded in government as a success after the pair avoided amplifying a lingering disagreement over the US government’s transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine. While Sunak was critical of the use of the weapons ahead of the visit (a legal obligation of the UK government as a result of its membership of the Convention on Cluster Munitions) he chose not to bring it up and reprimand Biden on the

Sasha Lensky

Ukraine’s Nato limbo is set to continue

As the Nato summit on international security opens this week in Vilnius, one obvious issue will be the success or otherwise of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Apart from the liberation of a few villages, where are the victories earlier forecast by figures like head of military intelligence Kirill Budanov, who predicted the Ukrainian army would be in Crimea by the end of spring? Hopes of a quick push to the Azov sea, inspired by the retaking of Kharkhiv last September, have hit a sandbar this time round: denser Russian defence lines and widespread use of landmines. Come autumn, the weather will be against the Ukrainians too, the muddy season making a counter-offensive more

Kate Andrews

Wages are up – but the Bank won’t be happy about it

The labour market continues to show signs of becoming less tight – but this won’t be fast enough for the Bank of England’s liking. The UK unemployment rate rose to 4 per cent – up 0.2 per cent on the quarter. But this relatively small change is indicative of more people moving off the economic inactivity list, which fell by 0.4 per cent between March and May: a change that the Office for National Statistics largely attributes to men in this latest update.  Meanwhile the number of job vacancies in Britain fell for the twelfth time in a row: down 85,000, but still sitting at 1,034,000. Vacancies are now significantly

Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP defends Harriet Harman

Boris Johnson might have shuffled off the parliamentary stage but there was still one last drama to play out last night. The House of Commons met to debate the ‘special report’ prepared by the Privileges Committee into the MPs who criticised their integrity when they probed the former Prime Minister. Amid the usual partisan taking points, Mr S was struck by a speech by one of the more thoughtful members of the 2019 intake, Laura Farris. With tears forming in her eyes, the Newbury MP spoke out in defence of the committee’s chairman Harriet Harman who was unanimously elected to the post in June 2022: To contextualise the appointment of

Matthew Scott

The police haven’t learned from the Carl Beech fiasco

It has been announced that ‘Opertion Soteria’ is to be extended from five pilot areas to every police force in the country. Operation Soteria is the name given to a supposedly new method of investigating rape and other serious sexual allegations. A report into the results of the Soteria pilots, written by the academics who were largely responsible for devising Operation Soteria in the first place, concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had been a great success. The Soteria approach may indeed increase the rape conviction rate, but it will do so by convicting more innocent people In Hellenistic religions, a soteria was a ‘sacrifice or series of sacrifices performed in expectation of… deliverance from a crisis.’ The crisis from which Operation Soteria is supposed to deliver us is an epidemic of rape. Whether

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s allies defend their attacks on the Privileges Committee

The House of Commons often rises early these days, with little in the way of legislation to keep MPs busy. Ministers spend more of their time answering repetitive urgent questions than they do piloting bills through the Commons. So it was an odd sensation to see MPs debating something at length, with detailed speeches and an extensive debate. Ah, of course – they were talking about themselves: what else? Yesterday afternoon’s debate was on the Privileges Committee special report on the ‘campaign’ against that Committee by supporters of Boris Johnson. The debate had a motion laid by Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt which said ‘where the House has agreed

David Shipley

The hopeless cycle of addiction – and drug running – behind bars

It’s my seventh night in HMP Wandsworth at the start of my 45-month sentence for fraud. I live on A Wing now, with a new cellmate, John, a heroin addict. He’s an older guy, short, very slight, sores all over his face, neck and hands. Prison is full of men like John: addicts who get sentenced to a few weeks, or months, in prison. Some are regulars, welcomed back by guards and prisoners. One man completes three sentences while I am imprisoned there. What good does it do banging men like this up? John is 52 and the best part of his life – which he has spent mostly in

Monday

Ross Clark

Is Jeremy Hunt following in Gordon Brown’s footsteps?

Anyone fancy having a flutter with 5 per cent of their pension fund on unlisted start-ups? It is not necessarily a bad idea – it is only 5 per cent, after all. As part of a portfolio which is balanced by more bread and butter investments it need not be reckless. At best, you might just pick a future Microsoft or Google – and at worst, well, the other 95 per cent of your investments could smother your losses. But it seems that we are not really going to have the choice – at least not those of us who have defined contribution pension funds. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, used

Steerpike

Claims about BBC presenter ‘rubbish’ says young person’s lawyer

Allegations about a BBC presenter paying £35,000 for sexually explicit photos are ‘rubbish’ according to the lawyer of the young person involved. In a legal statement released tonight they claim that the child’s mother has made inaccurate statements to the Sun newspaper about the nature of the relationship between the unknown Corporation star and their client. The statement says that the young person sent a denial to the Sun on Friday evening saying there was ‘no truth to it’. However, the ‘inappropriate article’ was still published, the lawyer says. In their letter, they write that: ‘For the avoidance of doubt, nothing inappropriate or unlawful has taken place between our client

James Heale

Are Biden and Sunak really ‘rock solid’?

10 min listen

Joe Biden was in London today to meet with Rishi Sunak. The pair had discussions in No. 10, and Biden described US-UK relations as ‘rock solid’. But the pair have recently had disagreements about who the next Nato secretary general should be, and about whether the West should send cluster munitions to Ukraine – so is the relationship really so rosy? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Freddy Gray. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Stephen Daisley

Who’s to blame for Scottish drug deaths?

Scotland is the drug deaths capital of Europe and changing that is going to take something radical. The Scottish government thinks it’s found that something: the decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use. Humza Yousaf’s administration has issued a call for ‘a caring, compassionate and human rights informed drugs policy, with public health and the reduction of harm as its underlying principles’.  Between 2000 and 2021, 14,426 Scots died a drug-related death. For perspective, that is more than four times the death toll in the Troubles from 1969 to 2001 Yousaf proposes decriminalisation with a wider review of drug laws, calls on the UK government to legislate this and other changes or devolve the

Dalibor Rohac

Nato would be wrong to reject Ukraine’s membership plea

US president Joe Biden has been busy curbing expectations about Nato’s looming decision over Ukraine’s future membership. Starting the accession process at the summit in Lithuania this week would be ‘premature’, Biden said. Ukraine still needs to meet other qualifications for membership, ‘including democratisation’, the president added. Biden’s hesitation is misplaced. The Vilnius summit offers an opportunity for Nato to redress the historic mistake of the 2008 meeting in Bucharest. Back then, Nato failed to offer membership action plans to Ukraine and Georgia and thus invited Russian aggression – including the current war.  The wise, prudent choice for Nato is to bring Ukraine to the fold, not give it the cold shoulder This latest summit is an opportunity to bring the

Ross Clark

Is Joe Biden really a close friend of Britain?

According to Joe Biden on the steps of Downing Street, by travelling to the UK he ‘couldn’t be meeting with a closer friend and greater ally. Our relationship is rock solid’. Really? In that case, will Biden be using his time in London to start talks for a US-UK trade deal? Will he be changing his mind and back Ben Wallace, rather than Ursula von der Leyen – who was an embarrassing failure as German defence minister – as the next secretary-general of Nato? Will he be taking notice of Britain’s objections to sending cluster bombs to Ukraine? The answer to the above questions, of course, is ‘no’, ‘no’ and

Steerpike

GB News investigated… again

Another day, another investigation into GB News. This time though it’s not Ofcom probing the self-proclaimed ‘people’s channel’, but rather the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Daniel Greenberg KC today opened a probe into one of its hosts, Lee Anderson, over claims that he has breached the MPs’ code of conduct. It comes after the Conservative party deputy chairman filmed a promotional video for his television show on the roof terrace in parliament. According to House of Commons rules, ‘members must ensure that the use of facilities and services provided to them by Parliament, including an office, is in support of their parliamentary activities.’ Whoops! This is just the latest in

Iain Gibson

Why it’s not over yet for Humza Yousaf

There’s a moment in Bob Woodward’s gripping book Peril, the account of the buildup to and aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, when Democrat fixer Anita Dunn tells Joe Biden, languishing in his party’s primary race, where his strength as a campaigner lies. Most candidates, Dunn mused, struggle with their message. Biden’s route to power, ultimately successful, lay in the fact that he was the message. As Humza Yousaf passes the 100-day mark as first minister of Scotland, and new polling out today reveals that half of Scots believe he is doing a bad job, we can reasonably reflect that not only is he not the message, but that he is