Politics Archives

Monday

6 March 2023

Cyclists have been given a licence to ride on the pavement

Let me confess: when I learned that a woman pedestrian had been sent to prison for causing the death of a cyclist she had forced off the pavement, only my second thought turned to the horror experienced by the victim and sympathy for her family. My first, entirely selfish, thought was: there but for the grace of God go I. For I, too, have shouted at cyclists who occupy pavement space when I think they should be cycling on the road (though school ma-am rather than swearing is more my register). I, too, have a tendency to put my hand out to keep an intruding cyclist at bay. I have even been known, by standing my ground, to force a cyclist to dismount at the barriers designed to stop them slaloming through narrow pedestrian passageways.

Sam Leith

Starmer will regret appointing Sue Gray

Keir Starmer has thrived, over the past few years, by being a bit boring. Every day, I fancy, he wakes up in the morning, and after he has finished sanding his face and arranging his hair with Araldite, solemnly addresses the mirror and promises himself: no unforced errors. He probably has a list of don’ts: don’t in a moment of absentmindedness call for a national strike; don’t demand the eradication of the state of Israel; don’t promise to tax the rich till the pips squeak; don’t appear in the same hemisphere, let alone same photograph as anyone with a grey beard. Geese routinely walk unstartled across his path.

Steerpike

Did Sue Gray break the civil service code?

Who watches the watchmen? That's the question Whitehall is asking after chief panjandrum and sleazebuster extraordinaire Sue Gray's was offered the job of Keir Starmer's chief of staff. The revelation that Gray might not necessarily be quite the bastion of perfect probity has sent shock waves through SW1 – not least in the upper ranks of the senior civil service. Susan Acland-Hood, the permanent secretary at the Department of Education, was so concerned by news of Gray's appointment on Thursday that she reportedly raised concerns in an online Zoom call with colleagues.

Steerpike

Watch: Hancock’s supposed lawyer in GB News bust-up

A bizarre late-night row occurred on GB News yesterday. The channel were delighted to welcome lawyer Jonathan Coad on to discuss the lockdown files, with host Steve N Allen welcoming him by saying he was 'actually recently asked to act for Matt Hancock.' But Coad bristled at that introduction, insisting that 'I made it absolutely clear to your programme, I asked them not to disclose that. That is very, very poor journalism.' He continued thus: When your own television station has engaged in correspondence with me where I explained that I’m in a position to be able to comment on this and mentioned I’d been approached by Matt Hancock – I asked you not to mention that and you mentioned it.

Sunday

5 March 2023

Fraser Nelson

Matt Hancock and the politics of fear

‘When do we deploy the variant’, asks Matt Hancock after talking of the need to ‘frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain’. The messages yet again remind us of the mindset, at this stage in the pandemic, of the small group of men who had given themselves complete power during lockdown. The tone of these messages matters. The idea of giving ‘marching orders’ to police, to arrest members of the public for going about normal life, did not seem to make them at all uncomfortable. We see Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, laughing at how they will lock up people who come off flights and saying he wishes he could see the faces of those about to be incarcerated.

Steerpike

Watch: Osborne grilled about Hancock texts

Will anyone ever text Matt Hancock again? It’s day five of the lockdown files today and it seems there’s still more revelations to come from the former health secretary’s WhatsApp messages, handed over to Isabel Oakeshott because he wanted a ghostwritten book to commemorate his triumph. Talk about the grift that keeps on giving… One of those unlucky politicians who’ve found their messages splashed across the Telegraph is George Osborne. Mr S rather enjoyed reading the former chancellor’s pithy form of texting style, with gems such as ‘no one thinks testing is going well Matt’. Still, Osborne wasn’t always so acerbic, at one stage promising Hancock that he would guarantee him the front page of the Evening Standard if he gave some exclusive quotes on Covid testing.

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak haunted by ghosts of governments past

Covid and partygate still haunt Sunak Rishi Sunak will have wanted to use this week to sell his new Brexit deal. The ghosts of governments past had other ideas. Fresh evidence suggesting Boris Johnson might have misled parliament over partygate, and the embarrassing leak of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, have led to some uncomfortable questions. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Chris Heaton-Harris told Laura Kuenssberg he believed Johnson was an honest man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Jane Stannus

Did China influence the Canadian elections for Trudeau?

It’s been a sticky couple of weeks for Canada’s natural governing party, as the Liberals like to call themselves. Anonymous sources from CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, leaked information to two major Canadian media outlets, The Globe and Mail and Global News. The reports say China interfered in Canada’s two most recent federal elections, and that CSIS alerted the government, but that despite warnings the Liberals – who won both elections with a minority government – did nothing. It's simultaneously a crisis for the Liberals and a bit of a yawn. Canadians already knew Justin Trudeau was soft on China’s ‘basic dictatorship’.

Steerpike

Poll: public confused on Starmer and Sunak’s five goals

An awkward one for the strategists in Southwark and Westminster. Mr S has commissioned some polling and it's official – the public, it seems, are having a tough time telling the Labour and Tory policies apart. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have recently made major speeches, respectively setting out their 'five pledges' and 'five missions.' But a survey of 1,500 voters this week by Redfield and Wilton found that by 40 per cent to 26 per cent, Britons wrongly identified the goal of securing the highest sustained economic growth in the G7 as Sunak's goal – rather than Starmer's.

Katy Balls

Sunak’s plan to stop the boats

Another weekend, another set of stories on the chances of a Boris Johnson return. Allies of the former prime minister are on the attack over the privileges committee's partygate inquiry following the disclosure that Sue Gray - who led the report at the time - has been hired as Keir Starmer's new chief of staff. It's still up in the air when Gray will be allowed to take on the role as Acoba - the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments - could take three months to come up with the terms for the appointment. Gray will need to disclose at what point her conversations with the Labour leader began. However, the most important development this weekend relates to a different issue: small boats.

Kit Wilson

Who’s afraid of organoid intelligence?

For fans of bioethical nightmares, it’s been a real stonker of a month. First, we had the suggestion that we use comatose women’s wombs to house surrogate pregnancies. Now, it appears we might have a snazzy idea for what to do with their brains, too: to turn them into hyper-efficient biological computers. Lately, you see, techies have been worrying about the natural, physical limits of conventional, silicon-based computing. Recent developments in ‘machine learning’, in particular, have required exponentially greater amounts of energy – and corporations are concerned that further technological progress will soon become environmentally unsustainable.

Steerpike

Hancock wanted to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant and ‘frighten the pants off everyone’

Day 5 of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and the most startling stories yet. Here’s what’s new: Matt Hancock asked when he could ‘deploy the variant’ When the more contagious Alpha (then ‘Kent’) variant started spreading in December 2020, many were scared. Good, thought Hancock. The former health secretary told his adviser that ‘we [can] frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain’ on 13 December, and wondered when ‘do we deploy the new variant’. Five days later, Boris Johnson cancelled Christmas. 2. Simon Case saw the benefit in fear-mongering At least Sir Humphrey was subtle.

Saturday

4 March 2023

Steerpike

Hancock and Gove’s cringeworthy Covid love-in

Last night it seemed as if the Matt Hancock WhatsApp messages released by the Telegraph couldn’t get any worse, after the paper published texts showing Hancock’s realtime reaction to his rule-breaking affair being exposed. Yet somehow new depths have been plumbed in Hancock’s correspondence today. For the paper has published texts between Matt Hancock and Michael Gove. Despite some friction between the pair – with Hancock at one point fearing Gove was gunning for his job – the published messages show that the two had a remarkably (some might say pathologically) close relationship. In one exchange from 2021, Hancock texts Gove before a meeting asking what they were trying to achieve.

John Keiger

Is Macron really saying the France-Afrique is finished?

On 2 March in Gabon, West Africa, President Macron declared that ‘the days of France-Afrique are over’. Since the early nineteenth century the African continent has emblazoned France’s aspiration to international power status. Like any empire it provided natural resources. It also provided manpower. Unlike other imperial powers with surplus domestic populations to deploy, France’s demography was stagnant at 40 million from the 1840s until the 1940s. Africa provided troops for her armies (tirailleurs sénégalais) to compete with Germany’s demography and growing forces. Even after the troubled decolonisation in the 1960s Africa continued to provide cheap labour to a thriving French domestic industry.

Theo Zenou

The spy movie that set Putin on the path to the KGB

Leningrad, summer 1968. Volodya is 15-year-old. With his mates, he goes to the cinema to catch The Shield and the Sword, the new movie everyone in the USSR is buzzing about. It’s a big-budget production about a Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazis during World War II. Volodya is blown away. ‘I am going to be a spy,’ he decides right there and then. He’s so determined he pays a visit to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad, a bleak office building known to everyone in town as the Big House. He walks up to an officer on duty and says, ‘I want to get a job with you.’ ‘That’s terrific, but there are several problems,’ replies the officer. ‘First, we don’t take people who come to us on their own initiative.

Steerpike

Seven things we learned from the juiciest lockdown files yet

Day four of the lockdown files and it’s the juiciest so far. Here’s what the Telegraph released last night: 1. Matt Hancock thought kissing report wasn’t that bad While cursing ‘that f——g CCTV camera’, the indefatigable Hancock said ‘that [the Sun’s] write up is very gentle’, after the paper released pictures of him and Gina Coladangelo in a rule-breaking embrace. Hancock then set up a WhatsApp group called ‘Crisis Management’ with his media adviser Damon Poole and his lover Coladangelo. He said that he ‘need[ed] to find a clinician’ to say that he broke guidance, not guidelines. ‘PLEASE STAND THIS UP’, he wailed to his advisers.

Max Jeffery

Max Jeffery, Emily Rhodes and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

This week: Max Jeffery reads his letter from Abu Dhabi where he visited the International Defence Exhibition (00:56), Emily Rhodes discusses the tyranny of World Book Day (05:59), and Daisy Dunn tells us about the mysterious world of the Minoans (10:22). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Michael Simmons

Coffee House Scots – what did we learn from this week’s hustings?

14 min listen

It's been an interesting week in the race for the leadership of the SNP. Kate Forbes's campaign has been plunged into fresh doubt by the news that her husband attended a private Tory hustings, whilst Douglas Ross has been forced to apologise after swearing during First Minister's Questions. We also had the first televised hustings, but who came out on top? Michael Simmons speaks to Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Stephen Daisley. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Friday

3 March 2023

Lisa Haseldine

What Belarus gets out of its friendship with China

What has Alexander Lukashenko been up to in China? The purpose of the Belarusian President’s three-day visit, according to state media outlet BelTA, was to continue ‘the long-term course of building friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation’ between the two countries. But the truth is somewhat murkier. Lukashenko is Vladimir Putin’s closest ally. He allowed Russian troops to launch the northern flank of the invasion from Belarus back in February last year. Since then, he has given Russia free rein to consistently transport troops, weapons and supplies through the country. So, could he have travelled to China as a de facto Russian emissary?

Steerpike

Matt Hancock’s Covid social media frenzy

Another day, another painful set of WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock. Yet again the Daily Telegraph have released another batch of texts involving the former health secretary, this time about his burgeoning public profile in the wake of the pandemic. The paper reports that as Covid arrived on Britain’s shores, Hancock shared with his special advisor a memo written by a ‘wise friend’, that suggested that Hancock’s career could be propelled ‘into the next league’ by the Covid pandemic. Hancock certainly comes across as image conscious in the texts. The Telegraph suggests that over the course of the pandemic, he exchanged more than 22,000 messages with his staff about social media posts.