Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Saturday

Ross Clark

Aukus is looking like a Nato for the Pacific

How big a deal is it that Australia has chosen a British design for its nuclear submarines rather than the US one that it could have chosen? Does it really justify Rishi Sunak ‘bouncing on the balls of his feet’, as described by one minister? True, the machines aren’t actually going to be built in Britain, but in Adelaide. But it isn’t going to do the UK defence industry any harm to be supplying the know-how. For once, the government can celebrate selling arms to a country which can be trusted not to abuse its military kit, and which is not stringing up dissidents by the dozen.

James Heale

Should Sunak block Boris Johnson’s honours list?

12 min listen

Boris Johnson is reportedly cutting the number of names on his honours list from 100 to 60 (still much higher than the average honours list for former prime ministers). This is a Tory sleaze scandal in the making, so should Rishi Sunak think about blocking it? Or could the reminder of Johnson's flaws actually help the Sunak premiership? James Heale discusses with Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson. Produced by Cindy Yu and Kevin Swartwood.

James Heale

James Heale, Cosmo Landesman and Miranda Morrison

18 min listen

This week: James Heale asks whether the cabinet secretary Simon Case can carry on (01:00), Cosmo Landesman tells the story of when a man – and his axe – came to visit his home in London (05:03), and Miranda Morrison warns against the damaging obsession with STEM in secondary schools (11:10).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Gavin Mortimer

Sunak needs more than Macron’s help to crack the Channel crisis

There was more than a whiff of ‘bromance’ between Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron when they met at the Anglo-French summit in the city of love. The weather in Paris was grey and cold, but there was no denying the warmth of the greeting that Macron extended to Sunak as the PM arrived at the Elysee yesterday. This is hardly a surprise: after Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the president was just pleased to be hosting a PM who knows how to mind his Ps and Qs.   Sunak said he was ‘fortunate’ and ‘excited’ to have the opportunity to work with Macron, whom he described in French as ‘mon ami’. Macron looked genuinely touched to be addressed in such heartfelt terms.

Kate Andrews

What the right gets wrong on illegal immigration

The government’s plans for the Illegal Migration Bill – which would see virtually all people arriving outside formal, legal channels deported – has raised many uncomfortable questions. Is a trafficked Romanian girl sold into sex slavery in Britain really exempt from protection under the Modern Slavery Act? Would an Iranian gay man, afraid for his life, showing up in a UK airport with forged papers really be sent back out again? The government’s blanket approach to all ‘illegal’ migrants has, curiously enough, completely obscured how the UK will respond to genuine human rights abuses. Or perhaps it hasn’t: as the details come out, we may discover that these victims are being forced down the priority list in pursuit of a short-term political agenda.

Friday

Cindy Yu

Will Sunak’s charm offensive with Macron work?

10 min listen

Rishi Sunak was in Paris today meeting with President Emmanuel Macron. The pair unveiled a new deal to stop the Channel crossings as part of the first Franco-British summit for five years. Will the new measures work?  Cindy Yu speaks to Fraser Nelson and Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.

Steerpike

The BBC’s nightmare hat-trick of blunders

Oh dear. It seems that the BBC press office has had a nightmare 24 hours, with not one but three blunders in rapid succession involving three of their biggest stars – Fiona Bruce, David Attenborough and Gary Lineker. The Lineker row has been dominating the headlines but it's not the only row consuming the Beeb. On Thursday night, Bruce fronted an episode of Question Time in which the mooted knighthood for Stanley Johnson was referenced. Journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown described him as 'a wife beater' prompting her host to explain to the audience that: Stanley Johnson’s wife spoke to a journalist, Tom Bower, and she said Stanley Johnson had broken her nose and she had ended up in hospital as a result. Stanley Johnson has not commented publicly on that.

Michael Simmons

Sweden, Covid and ‘excess deaths’: a look at the data

Pandemics kill people in two ways, said Chris Whitty at the start of the Covid outbreak: directly and indirectly, via disruption. He was making the case for caution amidst strong public demand for lockdown, stressing the tradeoffs. While Covid deaths were counted daily, the longer-term effects would take years to come through. The only real way of counting this would be to look at ‘excess deaths’, i.e. how many more people die every month (or year) compared to normal. That data is now coming through.  Using the most common methodology, Sweden is at the bottom – below Australia and New Zealand, which had plenty of lockdowns but very few Covid deaths. Here are the graphs that we have just published on The Spectator data hub.

Steerpike

Gary Lineker taken off Match of the Day

Talk about an own goal. It seems that Gary Lineker's increasingly aggressive anti-Tory tweets have got the multimillionaire into hot water with nervy BBC managers. Earlier this week, Lineker compared the language used by the government over its plan to tackle Channel crossings to 'that used by Germany in the 30s'. Today it has been announced that the former England star has been asked to step back from presenting Match of the Day until an agreement reached has been reached on social media use. You might be waiting some time Gary... In a statement, a spokesman for the BBC said: The BBC has been in extensive discussions with Gary and his team in recent days. We have said that we consider his recent social media activity to be a breach of our guidelines.

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine can sympathise with Georgia’s pro-EU movement

Protests that broke out in Tbilisi against adopting a controversial Russian-style law have turned into a pro-European movement with political demands. The law could have seen media and non-government groups which take funding from abroad classed as ‘foreign agents’. Although the Georgian government has released all arrested protesters and dropped the proposed law, which copied repressive Russian legislation and threatened to ban NGOs and independent media from operating in the country, the opposition is now demanding the resignation of the current Georgian government – along with early elections.  Looking at the EU flags raised by upset Georgians, Ukrainians are comparing the rallies in Tbilisi with the 2014 Maidan revolution in Kyiv.

James Heale

Will Sunak’s charm offensive with Macron yield results?

Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron held a press conference together at the Élysée Palace today to mark their new deal on stopping the Channel crossings. It is part of the first Franco-British summit for five years and a chance for Sunak to demonstrate his commitment to breaking with the factitious post-Brexit era in UK-France relations. ‘The jury’s still out’ said Liz Truss when asked seven months on whether Emmanuel Macron was a ‘friend or foe.’ ‘Merci, mon ami’ was how Sunak preferred to conclude his charm offensive today. The message was clear: charm is back – and offensive is out. Sunak referred to the ‘shared challenge’ of stopping these boats; Macron said the nations, bound by history and geography, were determined to ‘make progress in lockstep’.

Fraser Nelson

What Matt Hancock should have learnt from Ben Wallace

As Andrew Roberts argues in this week’s issue of The Spectator, it’s quite something for any journalist or historian to have access to so rich a resource as the Lockdown Files. Like the transcript of the Nixon tapes, the WhatsApp messages let you be a fly on the wall, listening to what leaders say when they think that no one will ever listen. I argue in my Daily Telegraph column today that the WhatsApp messages offer a fascinating psychological profile of a group of men who quickly became accustomed to ordering millions of people around like pieces on a chess board. A case study in mistakes made, which cannot be allowed to be made again. Wallace knew the danger of kicking away the normal safeguards of government But there are heroes, as well as villains.

Steerpike

Welsh Labour’s double disaster in 24 hours

Given the ongoing leadership race, it's easy to forget that the current SNP government isn't the only devolved administration which is seemingly hell-bent on embarrassing itself. Over at Cardiff Bay, Welsh Labour are still merrily fiddling while its public services burn – as two incidents within the space of 24 hours have neatly demonstrated. First, there was the farce of a vote in the Senedd in which Labour politicians voted for a parliamentary motion criticising, er, their own roads review which has recommended that the bulk of upcoming roads projects be scrapped. In a debate in parliament on Wednesday evening, successive members of the Senedd stood up to detail the impact of cancelled projects on their constituents.

Lucy Dunn

What would the SNP leadership candidates actually do if they win?

Have the SNP leadership candidates learned from the mistakes of their first televised debate? Kate Forbes, Humza Yousaf and Ash Regan competed to trash the SNP's legacy when they went head-to-head earlier this week. Last night's Channel 4 clash was tamer: the trio were at pains to defend their party's record in government. But while the atmosphere was more civil, viewers didn't learn a huge amount more about the candidates' plans for Scotland. Kate Forbes was quick to plaster over Tuesday’s wounds, saying that it has been a ‘privilege to serve alongside Humza Yousaf in government and to serve under Nicola Sturgeon’ – though she did not apologise to Yousaf, when prodded by host Krishnan Guru-Murthy, for her attacks two days previously.

Ines Wittke

Why Britain isn’t ready to rejoin the EU – yet

Is Brexit starting to unfold? Some Remain supporters think so. Poor economic performance, supply chain issues, and our inability as a country to fill jobs in sectors that were traditionally performed by cheap EU labour continue to dominate the headlines. But, despite the hopes of some Remainers, this doesn't mean Britain is ready to rejoin the EU.  It is true that a large percentage of the public seems to have shifted from thinking the country would benefit economically from Brexit, to thinking we are now worse off. According to polling by Public First on attitudes to Brexit, this shift is even present among Leavers: 64 per cent said they thought the economy would be stronger outside the EU at the time of the referendum; now just 19 per cent think this today.

Mark Galeotti

How Russia is dodging sanctions

They might not be the quick knock-out blow their champions misleadingly claimed they’d be, but sanctions are having a serious effect on the long-term viability of the Russian economy. However, we should never underestimate the Russians' capacity to find rough and ready workarounds. Back in Soviet times, I was regaled with stories of Lada cars being fixed with sticky tape and cast-off hosiery. Likewise, people would find ways around onerous bureaucracy and uncaring officialdom, whether turning to the black market or stealing from the state (as one told me, ‘only a fool buys a light bulb if he works in an office and can steal one’).

Katy Balls

The problem with Boris’s honours list

There are plenty of Boris Johnson hangovers to give Rishi Sunak a headache these days. The privileges committee investigation into whether the former prime minister misled parliament will soon be in full swing. This doesn’t just mean that 'partygate' will be back in the news. If the committee finds Johnson guilty then Sunak could face the unappetising prospect of deciding whether to whip his party to vote either way in relation to any recommended punishment (such as a suspension) and what to do himself. For now though, it's another Johnson legacy issue in the news: his resignation honours list. As I first reported in January, those privy to the full honours list – including peerages, knighthoods, OBEs and MBEs – say it has more than 100 names.

Ross Clark

Ministers can’t blame Putin for the disaster that is HS2

And I thought the SNP were destined to win the award for this year’s most pathetic excuse – after Scottish transport minister Jenny Gilruth blamed the party’s failure to dual the A9 on Putin’s war in Ukraine. Then UK transport secretary Mark Harper turns up and tries to use the very same excuse for HS2’s soaring costs. The Birmingham to Manchester section of the high-speed line will be delayed for two years, he said yesterday, because ‘Putin’s war in Ukraine has hiked up inflation, sending supply chain costs rocketing.’ HS2 has turned out to be an extremely expensive turkey because it was misconceived from the start Much as I despise Vladimir Putin, I’m sorry this just won’t wash.

Kate Andrews

GDP grows by 0.3% – but the UK economy remains stagnant

This morning’s release from the Office for National Statistics shows the UK economy grew by 0.3 per cent in January – an improvement on December 2022 figures, which saw the economy contract by 0.5 per cent. There are no revisions to the last update: the UK still avoids the technical definition of recession, and January’s growth was higher than expected (the consensus was that it would be 0.1 per cent). But overall, the economy remains stagnant: the three months to January produced precisely zero growth. What really sticks out in today’s release is just how dependent the UK economy is these days on one-off interruptions.

Steerpike

Boris haunts Rishi at Macron summit

It's Rishi Sunak's big moment today as he tries to cut a new deal with the French to stop the small boats crisis. The Prime Minister will meet with President Emmanuel Macron later today at the Elysee Palace alongside senior ministers in the first Anglo-French summit for five years. Such shindigs never happened under Sunak's predecessor Boris Johnson – the man whose tenure created so many of the problems still occupying ministers' time. And that impression of Sunak being haunted by the past won't be dispelled by his latest social media gaffe. The Prime Minister took to Twitter this morning to eulogise the 'deep' partnership between the UK and France, replete with an image of the two smiling leaders striding forward together. Unfortunately no-one in the over-manned No.