Politics Archives

Monday

9 January 2023

ITV’s interview with Prince Harry was a missed opportunity

For days now, there has been great excitement about Prince Harry's first UK television interview. Here, at long last, was a chance for a member of the great British press corps to ask the tough questions of the dilettante Duke of Sussex. Not for them, the soft-soaping, credulous quasi-therapy of an Oprah Winfrey light entertainment host. This would be probing, incisive, hard-hitting and accountable journalism at its finest. So it was something of a disappointment then that Tom Bradby, ITV's chosen man for the task, failed to live up to the hype. To be fair to Bradby, he had a tricky challenge. A longtime friend of the Prince, he was always going to face criticism for being too close to his subject.

Sunday

8 January 2023

Steerpike

Corbyn’s £200k in defence funds

It's a tough gig politics. One minute you're leader of HM Loyal Opposition, the next you're an independent backbencher likely to lose your seat come polling day. For Jeremy Corbyn, the witless, whip-less Member for Islington North, it's been a tough few years. He lost the election in December 2019, lost the Labour leadership in April 2020 and then lost the party whip in October 2020 after claiming that antisemitism in the party had been overstated for political reasons. Luckily for Corbyn though, one group has come to his aid in these tough times. After having the whip withdrawn, backers of the ex-leader set up a company to fund his defence in legal battles connected with the antisemitism furore.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak – my healthcare arrangements are ‘a distraction’

Rishi Sunak – The NHS ‘is under pressure’ Laura Kuenssberg kicked off her first show of the new year with an interview with the Prime Minister, who now has a maximum of just two years to turn his party’s ailing poll numbers around. The National Health Service has always posed its fair share of political problems, but with the system now suffering from industrial action, alongside what some are calling a ‘twindemic’ of Covid and flu cases, Kuenssberg asked Rishi Sunak if the NHS was in crisis: My healthcare arrangements are ‘a distraction’ Kuenssberg inquired as to whether Sunak used the NHS himself.

Isabel Hardman

Sunak’s NHS position is on life support

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to say that the NHS is ‘in crisis’. He’s held meetings on ‘NHS recovery’ this weekend, and will have been told in no uncertain terms by healthcare leaders that this is a crisis, probably the worst one the health service has faced in its history. He told Laura Kuenssberg in an interview broadcast this morning that ‘the NHS is under pressure’, and there were ‘unacceptable delays’ in emergency care, but would not accept the ‘crisis’ word. This is because, as I’ve said before, it is hard for the Tories to blame anyone else for said crisis at this stage of the political cycle. The line that is making the headlines is Sunak’s refusal to answer questions on whether he has a private GP for his family.

Steerpike

The Observer’s embarrassing John Stonehouse blunder

Oh dear. In their endless Tory-bashing quest, it seems that the Observer has blundered again. The release of a new ITV show on a dodgy 1970s politician with a propensity for scandal prompted columnist Catherine Bennett to write how he ‘paved the way for today’s sleazy Tory MPs.’ In an article that appears in today's newspaper, she mused how this politician’s ‘rackety life and faked death… seems almost quaint compared with the brazenness of members of his party today.’ There’s just one problem of course – the new ITV series is about John Stonehouse, a Labour MP. You might have thought that, while watching the series, claims about Soviet contacts and prostitutes in Czechoslovakia might have given Bennett and her Observer colleagues pause for thought.

Steerpike

Watch: Starmer grilled on Lammy second job hypocrisy

It's the first Sunday broadcast round of 2023. Ahead of Rishi Sunak's big grilling on the BBC, Sir Keir Starmer was up on Sky News, keen to depict Labour as the party of change. So it was jolly bad timing then that Sky chose this week to unveil their 'Westminster Accounts' project with Tortoise Media: a huge dossier on politicans' outside earnings based in part on their declarations in the register of MPs' interests. And while most of the top ten MPs with outside earnings are Conservative, one Labour member has been coining it in since the 2019 election. David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary and a key player in Starmer's top team, has taken home more than £200,000 in outside earnings – as Steerpike has previously noted.

Patrick O’Flynn

The chart that will decide Rishi Sunak’s fate

After his five key pledges speech this week, one can only conclude that Rishi Sunak must have been shown the chart. The chart in question crops up in a regular update that polling firm YouGov puts out on the key political issues, as seen by various segments of the electorate. It measures the priorities of those who voted Conservative in 2019 and therefore have it within their collective power – and potential inclination – to grant the party yet another term in office. And it has told a consistent story for the past two years. The three biggest issues for voters – miles ahead of anything else – are the state of the economy, immigration and asylum, and healthcare.

Saturday

7 January 2023

Steerpike

‘Apartheid’ posters appear in Starmer’s seat

Away from the gun-toting, field-romping antics of the dilettante Duke of Sussex, normal politics carries on as usual. And this weekend will see the first in-person Jewish Labour conference since 2018. Much has changed since then, when the party's antisemitism crisis was at its height. Chair Mike Katz reflected in Jewish News how, back then, the group was 'marginalised and ostracised by the Labour establishment under Jeremy Corbyn' but that 'the difference in our experience under Labour leader Keir Starmer is like night and day... he has acted to demonstrate zero tolerance of antisemitism.' Indeed, Sir Keir has been vocal on the issue, apologising to the Jewish Chronicle for the harm caused to Jews while he was a member of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet.

John Armstrong

It’s not just social science that could do with more mathematics

The physics department at King’s College London offers a module called ‘Gender Action’. Students studying this module go into schools and nurseries to work on projects related to the elimination of gender stereotypes. The course is run in association with a charity, also called Gender Action, who explain on their website that the problem with phrases such as ‘boys will be boys’ is that they imply ‘a person’s biological sex is fixed.’ A study which is required reading for one week of the course explains how ‘the most propitious means for dismantling patriarchal language’ is to modify discourse ‘to consider sexual difference as contiguous, rather than hierarchical.

Gabriel Gavin

Russia’s military disaster could lead to famine in the Caucasus

Two years ago, 13-year-old singer Maléna was rehearsing for Eurovision Junior when war broke out. While her rivals battled in Warsaw on stage, she stayed home in Armenia. Young men picked up AK-47s to fight against their Azerbaijani neighbours in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 4,000 never returned. A year later, Maléna re-entered Eurovision Junior and won, giving her country the right to host Eurovision Junior in December 2022. Armenian authorities staged celebrations in the capital, Yerevan. Crowds huddled around outdoor televisions in the central square to watch the show. A group of young musicians from Nagorno-Karabakh joined the party in Yerevan, coming into the capital on the only road that links the capital to the breakaway region.

Matthew Lynn

The UK has finally chalked up a Brexit win

We haven’t lowered tariffs on food. We haven’t done many new trade deals, and certainly not one with the United States. Hardly any rules and regulations have been repealed, and if anyone thought it was going to help fix the NHS then the winter crisis will have disappointed them. Six years since we voted to leave, and two years after we finally severed our ties with the European Union, Brexit wins have been noticeable mainly by their absence. But hold on. We may finally have one – a partnership with the drugs developer BioNTech to pioneer cancer treatments.

Stuart Ritchie

Stuart Ritchie, Mary Wakefield and Toby Young

This week: Stuart Ritchie asks whether we should worry about declining sperm counts (0:29). Mary Wakefield wants to end the term ‘making memories’. (9:00), and Toby Young shares his disastrous Airbnb winter break (15:10). Produced and presented by Natasha Feroze.

Cindy Yu

Is Trussonomics really dead?

16 min listen

Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Heale about the former prime minister's lunch with her loyalists at Ma La Sichuan, and whether her ideas might be mounting a comeback.

Isabel Hardman

How long before Rishi Sunak goes off his own pledges?

When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful for a bunch of cash-strapped students as we could effectively decide which Tuesday the food would spoil by, rather than throwing it out. I thought of that lettuce this week when Downing Street decided to make one of Rishi Sunak’s five ‘immediate priorities’ – to have NHS waiting lists falling – impossible to meet. The release accompanying the Prime Minister's speech said ‘by March, NHS waiting lists will fall’. Which March?

Steerpike

Five times Harry invaded other people’s privacy

'It never needed to be this way,' sighs Prince Harry in the trailer for his forthcoming ITV interview: 'the leaking and the planting... I want a family not an institution.' The Duke has long-despised the meddling machinations of Fleet Street's finest, telling Andrew Marr in 2016 that: Everyone has a right to privacy. Sadly that line between public and private life is almost non-existent any more. We will continue to do our best to ensure that there is the line... Everyone has a right to their privacy, and a lot of the members of the public get it, but sadly in some areas there is this incessant need to find out every little bit of detail about what goes on behind the scenes. It's unnecessary.

Ross Clark

Why Rishi Sunak doesn’t need to fear the unions

The calendar for January is already pock-marked with strike dates for railway workers, ambulance staff, postal workers and others. But does the current situation really deserve to be compared with the Winter of Discontent in 1979, when the rubbish piled high in Leicester Square and dead went unburied (as the gravediggers went on strike)? The answer is surely no – or at least not yet. So long as the government holds firm against wage demands, Rishi Sunak should have no fear of being humiliated as Jim Callaghan was then. As was the case 44 years ago, the unions are engaged in a raw exercise of power. Yet they are struggling a lot more now to bring the government to the table.

Brendan O’Neill

Prince Harry has done something unforgivable

I’m just going to say it: I’m Team William. In that scrap that Prince Harry says happened at Nottingham Cottage, where Prince William allegedly lost his rag and pushed Harry to the floor, I’m cheering Will. Everyone who has a brother — I have five — knows they sometimes need a clip round the lughole. And I trust Will made the right decision when he physically reprimanded his little bro. There are many reasons I’m in the Cambridge camp. The Sussexes are just saps, aren’t they? I’m far more shocked that Harry called his therapist after William allegedly attacked him than I am by the incident itself. After having an altercation with his brother? Harry really went from killing radical Islamists in Afghanistan to phoning his life coach because his brother broke his necklace?

Friday

6 January 2023

Fraser Nelson

Why did Facebook reject The Spectator’s Joe Biden cover?

Earlier this week, I was asked to list the three biggest threats to the media. Aside from the general sales decline of newspapers, I said, the threat of bot censorship – and the lack of accountability from the firms who apply it. We at The Spectator have just come across a classic example of this, when Facebook refused to publish this week’s cover satirising Joe Biden when we submitted it as an advert. The cover asked if Biden would serve for six more years, but the illustration had him holding up five fingers. A nice joke, but hardly a cruel one. So we appealed. An email came back saying: You asked for another review of your rejected ads. After another review, it's been determined that they still don’t comply with our Advertising Policies. So that was it.

Freddy Gray

What’s the matter with Kevin McCarthy?

23 min listen

Kevin McCarthy's hopes to be voted House Speaker reaches day four still without a resolution. How much will he have to concede in order to win over the Republican rebels? Freddy Gray speaks to Amber Athey, The Spectator's Washington Editor.

Robin Ashenden

The Russian conscription adverts that show Putin is losing the plot

‘War is the realm of uncertainty’, said the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, and this would seem to apply very well to affairs in Russia at the moment. Following September’s shock ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours have swirled around since of another mass-mobilisation due imminently. Having got Russian New Year (the country’s main December celebration) out of the way, there were fears that Putin might announce the conscription of several hundred thousand more men. This assumption was based on several factors, not least Putin’s original refusal to limit the mobilisation and the predictions of Ukrainian intelligence – who said 5 January was earmarked for a second wave.