Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

The great villain of Covid is China. Not Matt Hancock

The Telegraph has a hell of a scoop with its lockdown files, aka Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps. It’s a major public interest story. We see with increasing clarity now how our government flapped and flailed and obfuscated as ministers and senior officials desperately tried to figure out the deadliness of Covid and what to do about it. There’ll be more recriminations in the coming days and rightly so.But if we really want to be angry at something, and we do, shouldn’t we also direct our indignation at another government? One which, US intelligent agencies believe, probably let the Covid-19 virus escape from one of its laboratories, covered the crisis up and let the virus spread across the world, then lied about it for years? I’m talking about China, obviously.

Katy Balls

Rishi’s new momentum

When Rishi Sunak appeared in the House of Commons to outline the details of his new agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, one politician was conspicuous by his absence. Over the past few weeks, Boris Johnson had been warning that Sunak was making a mistake in his dealings with Brussels. His words were taken by MPs and journalists as evidence that he was preparing to lead the rebellion against a deal. But on the day, the would-be rebel leader was nowhere to be found. ‘It’s very Boris to march an army up a hill and then be missing in action,’ says a minister. Johnson’s retreat reflects the changing power balance in the party. A new Brexit deal had been viewed as a moment of peril for Sunak and an opportunity for Johnson.

Isabel Hardman

Starmer did a bad job of interrogating Sunak at PMQs

Rishi Sunak bowled up to Prime Minister's Questions in an excellent mood, clearly still on a high from his Windsor Framework. The PM was greeted by a huge cheer from Tory backbenchers on arrival, but then had six eclectic and not-particularly-effective questions from Keir Starmer to wade through. The most important of those questions came at the end when the Labour leader asked about the Daily Telegraph story on Matt Hancock and care home testing. 'We don't know the truth of what happened yet' because there were 'too many messages', Starmer said, before adding: 'For families across the country will look at this, at the sight of politicians writing books, portraying themselves as heroes or selectively leaking messages, it will be an insulting and ghoulish spectacle for them.

Rod Liddle

Unmasking the truth about Covid

You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned out to have had considerable substance It’s an actual fact that nobody who lives north of Stamford, Lincs, has ever knowingly eaten cucumber. I watch the northerners sometimes in the Tesco at Chester-le-Street, shuffling hurriedly past the vegetable section, eyes averted, nervous lest a pak choi reach out and grab them.

Gareth Roberts

The decline and fall of Matt Hancock

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence. Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing demeanour; he looked cocky and guilty at the same time.

Toby Young

Hancock’s lockdown files show there was no Covid ‘plandemic’

For those of us who were cynical about the government’s pandemic response as it was unfolding in real time – as I was – the Daily Telegraph’s ‘lockdown files’ confirm our worst suspicions. Judging from the revelations in the 100,000+ WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone that Isabel Oakeshott has handed to the newspaper, the then-Health Secretary’s decisions were driven as much by a desire to shore up his own political reputation as they were by medical considerations. To be fair to Hancock, the medical advice often changed from one moment to the next and wasn’t always consistent, as these messages reveal.

Gavin Mortimer

Elly Schlein shouldn’t be a problem for Georgia Meloni

There is much excitement among western Europe’s chattering classes after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be ‘a problem’ for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative PM.  On the contrary. Schlein’s elevation to party leader is an electoral gift for Meloni, whose sex is the only thing she has in common with her new foe. Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists Meloni was raised by a single mum in a working-class district of Rome and supported herself working as a bartender and a nanny in her youth.

Katy Balls

How Labour can win: Bridget Phillipson on childcare, Brexit and faith

On 12 April last year, Boris Johnson’s fixed penalty notice was dominating the news. Few noticed another, perhaps equally seismic political story in Bournemouth: a member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet was being booed by the unions. Speaking at the National Education Union’s annual conference, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson faced a revolt. She had reneged on a Corbyn-era pledge to abolish the schools inspectorate, Ofsted. ‘It began with heckling and then it became louder and there was a mass walkout. They continued the demonstration outside the conference hall,’ Phillipson says nonchalantly. Was she put off? ‘I was taken aback by the degree of hostility. If they are not prepared to listen then that’s rather disrespectful – but that’s on them.

Mark Galeotti

Ukraine’s drone war on Russia could backfire

Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential threat and reassuring distance: the Russian president portrays the conflict as a struggle to preserve the nation from a hostile West and its Ukrainian proxy, but one fought safely outside its borders. Increasingly, Kyiv seems to want to bring the war to Russia, though, in a gamble which could go either way. A drone identified as a Ukrainian-made Ukrjet UJ-22 Airborne, capable of carrying up to 20kg of explosives, crashed close to a gas distribution station 60 miles southeast of Moscow yesterday. This is more than 300 miles from the closest Ukrainian territory – and too close to comfort for Putin.

Fraser Nelson

The importance of exposing Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages

For a while now, I’ve been buried deep in a vault in the Daily Telegraph going through the Matt Hancock files. Like the MPs expenses expose, it is a project that was carried out in secrecy and with astonishing thoroughness and resources. Several journalists, including some of the newspaper’s very best, have been working non-stop on this for weeks, going over some 2.3 million words of messages. That’s four times as large as War & Peace. The hunt isn’t just for the stories, but for context; every published exchange is carefully monitored to make sure nothing is left out.

Isabel Hardman

The horrifying cost of Hancock’s Covid testing targets

The Telegraph's splash of leaked WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock and care home testing is a devastating reminder of the cost of those early decisions taken in Covid. The plight of care homes in lockdown is one of the worst aspects of the pandemic. The sheer scale of the deaths among this vulnerable population and the way the homes were forced to shut the doors to relatives for months has left tens of thousands of people traumatised. The cost of missing a target remains far lower than the cost to care homes of a pandemic they were never really protected in Any insight into why certain big – disastrous – decisions were taken is important. Any suggestion these decisions were taken to help the government meet arbitrary testing targets is horrifying, if not entirely surprising.

Steerpike

Five things we’ve learned from Hancock’s lockdown files

It’s not just the spectre of Brexit that is haunting Westminster. Overnight the Telegraph has released a smorgasbord of stories based on a cache of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps during the Covid pandemic. Some 100,000 messages were handed to the newspaper by the co-author of his diaries Isabel Oakeshott. Below are some of the stand out news lines on day one of the ‘lockdown files’… Hancock rejected Whitty’s advice on care home tests So blares the Telegraph splash headline today. The paper reports that the then-Health Secretary did not follow advice from Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty to test all residents going into English care homes for the coronavirus.

James Kirkup

There’s still a hint of life in the Tory party

Westminster is a place of consensus, orthodoxy and prevailing wisdom. At any given moment, there is the Narrative, the story that everyone – or close to everyone – believes, or pretends to. The Narrative can ignore objective facts, but also change quickly when finally confronted with realities too big to overlook.  I reckon the last big shift in the Narrative happened sometime on the Monday of Tory conference in October. In a few hours, it dawned on a lot of people that not only was the Liz Truss premiership doomed, but the Tories were very likely to lose the next election.  Since then, journalists, lobbyists, civil servants and even unworldly think-tankers have been treating Labour as a government-in-waiting.

Tuesday

Iain Macwhirter

The Windsor Framework isn’t the blessing Scottish nationalists think it is

Is the Windsor Framework a get-out-of-jail card for Scottish nationalists? The excitement expressed in SNP circles at Rishi Sunak’s Protocol breakthrough yesterday was palpable. For if remaining in the EU single market while staying in the UK is good for Northern Ireland, surely this could be the case too for an independent Scotland? Isn’t this the ‘best of both worlds’ scenario that Nicola Sturgeon always asked for: borderless trade with the UK after Scotland joins the EU single market? A bonanza for Scottish businesses, who would be able to access markets in Europe free from Brexit red tape? Perhaps even a ‘Holyrood Brake’ to ensure that the Scottish Parliament can axe EU laws it doesn’t like? Unfortunately, it does not work quite like that.

Lucy Dunn

Will Kate Forbes scrap Sturgeon’s National Care Service?

Kate Forbes has finally managed to shake off questions about equal marriage. The SNP leadership contender has been busy instead talking about Scotland's crumbling health service – and how she'd fix it. It's looking like Forbes, if successful, will scrap the Sturgeon-Yousaf National Care Service, back an independent inquiry into Scotland’s healthcare system and enter into considerations about the long-term future of the NHS. Will any of this help turn around a failing health service? Forbes said today during her speech at Reform Scotland's event, a health service inquiry would be an 'excellent idea'.

Steven Barrett

Is Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal all it’s cracked up to be?

Rishi Sunak’s ‘deal’ on the Northern Ireland Protocol is finally out. My first impression is that it is no ‘deal’ at all: the version of the text published by the government is a document with no legal effect that is possible to enforce. It’s a wish list of vague commitments. The document is patronising in places: it refers to 'saving money on a pint of beer, buying Cumberland sausages in a supermarket or visiting a garden centre for seeds and plants'. But there are also deeper concerns.

Steerpike

Has the BBC misgendered Isla Bryson?

Is even the BBC starting to accept reality on questions of sex and gender? The Corporation has often been woker than woke, not least thanks to militant internal staff groups seemingly ready to persecute colleagues who don’t adhere to doctrine on trans matters. But the case of the Scottish double rapist Isla Bryson/Adam Graham has loosened the grip of trans orthodoxy on many previous believers. Several politicians, including candidates to replace Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader, have said they accept that Bryson is not a transgender woman but is actually a man who claims he is trans. Bryson was today sentenced to eight years for two rapes.

Joanna Williams

Labour’s ‘menopause action plan’ is an insult to women

Only once have I been asked if I would like to be photographed with my head sticking out of a giant bleeding vagina, but the memory has stuck with me. It was at a book festival in Gothenburg and I was there to promote a Swedish translation of my book, Women Versus Feminism. Despite the language barrier, I was pretty certain the six-foot stand-in vulva was intended to promote period awareness. As a middle-aged woman, I felt I was already quite period-aware and so I politely declined the selfie. Unfortunately, the vagina’s handlers were reluctant to accept this excuse. Not the middle-aged bit – that was self-evident. It was the ‘woman’ part of my lived experience they found troubling.

Steerpike

SNP’s solution to infighting: ban the journalists

Those cunning geniuses at SNP HQ have done it again. Fed up with Forbes, Yousaf and Regan committing news at every turn, the spin doctors at Gordon Lamb House have come up with an ingenious plan to stop their candidates' gaffes, attacks and infighting being reported. Their solution? Ban the journalists. Brilliant! This latest wheeze was announced today following yet another Ash Regan attack on the SNP government, this time over the A9 dualling failure. A party spokesman confirmed that the media will not be allowed to attend the party's nine leadership hustings events. They argued that: It is the members who will be voting for the next leader of the party, so the SNP NEC has designed the party hustings as a safe space. They're also, er, choosing Scotland's next First Minister.

Michael Gove

How the Tories should address Britain’s future

Michael Gove gave a speech at the thinktank Onward for the launch of its Future of Conservatism project today. Here is the text of his speech in full: The essence of Tory modernisation is to be true to the core principle of Conservatism – to deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. Conservative modernisation means applying enduring Conservative principles to our changing times and adapting policy to an altered world. The problems faced by Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson – and indeed George Osborne and David Cameron – are different from the crises and challenges we face today. Today I want to outline four key challenges that I know the Onward team will wish to rise to. First, the world economy has changed.