Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Patrick O’Flynn

The remarkable transformation of Keir Starmer

Amid all the frenetic changes of leadership in the Conservative party, something important has been overlooked about the Labour party: it also has a new leader. Outwardly nothing has changed. Keir Starmer – he of the slicked-back hair and strangulated vowels – still stands at the despatch box at PMQs each week. But he has been given an electoral personality transplant. It is not that Starmer has become intrinsically more fluent or exciting (though one cannot fail to notice he has grown somewhat in confidence lately). Rather, it is his entire political persona that has been changed.

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti

Russia will be sweating over its withdrawal from Kherson

Almost everyone has known that the city of Kherson, stranded on the right bank of the Dnipro River, was all but indefensible. Now it looks as if the one man who, like Canute was setting himself against the tide, has finally acknowledged that: Vladimir Putin has let his generals withdraw. This could conceivably be some cunning ruse, but the odds on this are lengthening. Putin, though always willing to let his henchmen hurl themselves on grenades in his name, was happy not to be visibly connected with the decision.

Svitlana Morenets

Why Russia pulled out of Kherson

In one of the biggest developments of the Ukraine war, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has just announced the evacuation of his troops from Kherson. The city, located on the western bank of the Dnipro river, is the capital of one of the 'oblasts' (or regions) that Vladimir Putin recently declared to be part of Russia. Kherson is also the only major Ukrainian city that Russian forces have captured intact. Ukraine’s troops have been closing in for months on the city, making sustained Russian occupation impossible. The city has now been surrendered without a fight – assuming, that is, the retreat is not a bluff. The question is whether Russia intends to bomb Kherson when Ukrainian troops move in.

Lloyd Evans

Who will be next week’s ministerial exit?

For the past fortnight, it was Suella Braverman. Now it’s Sir Gavin Williamson. The media aims to destroy two careers a month, on average, and the present quest to topple Sir Gavin has already produced a result. He’s gone. But that’s not enough. It never is. The new clamour is for the nasty knight to be stripped of his title and reduced to plain old Mr Williamson. At PMQs, the resignation was problematic for Sir Keir because he had to argue over a dead parrot. He quoted Sir Gavin’s unhelpful suggestion to a colleague that he should ‘slit his own throat.’ It might have served Sir Keir better to conceal the phrase and to describe it as too shocking and violent to bear repetition. Once he’d quoted the words, his attack lost oomph.

Cindy Yu

How much has the Williamson row damaged Rishi Sunak?

11 min listen

Though Gavin Williamson has now resigned, Rishi Sunak still had to fend off a number of questions on the disgraced minister at today's Prime Minister's Questions. How much damage has the row done to the Prime Minister? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Christopher Caldwell

Trump’s bumpy road back to the White House

Washington, D.C My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down – say, in a cinema, church, school or office – and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire.

James Kirkup

What the Gavin Williamson saga says about British politics

I wonder if the fall of Gavin Williamson is the latest evidence that British political parties are becoming harder to govern. It seems quite possible that his resignation is part of a story that will see Rishi Sunak struggle to command Conservative MPs to accept difficult choices on tax and spending. Any upset could even bother the bond market. Additionally, this story carries a warning for Keir Starmer.  Contrary to some of the media narratives visible today, the end of Williamson is more complicated than ‘Bad man who did bad things quits – Hoorah’.

The Spectator

The new era of austerity

It’s the Chancellor who will deliver next week’s Autumn Statement, but every-one knows it will have been ghost-written by Rishi Sunak. When Jeremy Hunt ran for party leader, his own proposal was to take corporation tax from 19 per cent to 15 per cent. Now, he wishes to raise it to 25 per cent. When Hunt speaks next week, we should imagine Sunak’s voice. Liz Truss spooked the markets by combining unexpected tax cuts with a spending splurge bigger than Sunak’s furlough scheme: a £10 billion-a-month subsidy on energy prices, going even to the richest. This was a shock, sprung on markets at a time when interest rates were rising globally. About two-thirds of the interest rate rises that emerged under Truss would probably have happened anyway, but politically this is irrelevant.

Freddy Gray

Midterm madness: the only clear winner is paranoia

Election night, folks – America decides! Except, it doesn’t. On 8 November 2022, as on 3 November 2020, the polls closed, the votes came in and, er, nobody appeared to have won. Everybody now looks nervously again to the state of Georgia, which is probably too close to call and will be decided in a run-off in four weeks’ time.  The people have spoken but once again nobody knows quite what they’ve said. Americans have spent decades arguing that Washington doesn’t work and their political system is broken. Well, they’re right. America is indeed polarised and terribly divided, as this week’s results show. It’s not just the politics, though: it’s the elections, stupid. The most powerful and sophisticated democracy in the world can’t get the basics right.

Lionel Shriver

Kamala’s blagging it

We throw around pejoratives such as ‘Idiot!’ a bit too carelessly, because then when we need to flag up genuinely subpar intelligence, the slag doesn’t land. I sometimes resort to the distinction ‘medically stupid’. As in, ‘Kamala Harris is medically stupid’. As I write this, next year’s Congressional balance of power is uncertain. What is certain: after the midterms, the same terrifyingly unfit politician will remain one cardiac arrest away from the American presidency. The press characterises the Vice President’s missteps as ‘gaffes’, but a proclivity for making embarrassing mistakes in public doesn’t capture the scale of the problem.

James Forsyth

What Liz Truss got right

Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively. They were both irritated by the way Liz Truss was being praised as a ‘true Tory’ in some Conservative circles, compared with her more cautious predecessors. One of them remarked, as the other nodded, that people will soon ‘find out there’s a reason why we didn’t do those things’. Sure enough, the mini-Budget collapsed spectacularly and cost Truss her premiership. One of her mistakes had been simply to reject what had gone before, rather than to try to understand why compromises had been made. Her year-zero approach was one of the things that led to her being ejected from office so quickly.

Isabel Hardman

How Ed Miliband became the power behind Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer’s early leadership was defined by the expulsion of his predecessor. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour MP and will not be a Labour candidate at the next election. But now another former party leader is quietly defining Starmer’s leadership. This week Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, caused outrage by suggesting that rich countries should pay aid to nations worst hit by climate change. Miliband’s influence extends far beyond his brief. Resentment has been brewing among Labour frontbenchers about just how much Starmer seems to listen to him. After all, he presided over one of Labour’s worst election results in 2015, a memory that has faded only because Corbyn did even more damage four years later.

Kate Andrews

The US midterm results are a wake-up call for the Republicans

There was no ‘red wave’ in America last night. This became obvious fairly early on, when congressional seats the Republicans hoped to pick up in New England failed to flip. Many on the American right had made the assumption that seats won by Democrats by a few percentage points in 2020 would easily turn red. This turned out to be wrong. In fact, there has been very little turnover in the House of Representatives or the Senate in either direction so far. The election map looks stuck in time, a close replica of how politics panned out two years ago, with both Democrats and Republicans holding their seats. Yet much has happened since the last election: mainly economic turmoil. The US, like the UK, is dealing with inflation rates at a 40-year high.

Isabel Hardman

Gavin Williamson is still causing problems for Rishi Sunak

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions showed it is possible for someone who has resigned for being a distraction to continue being so even in absentia. The first questions from Keir Starmer were all about Rishi Sunak’s appointment of Gavin Williamson and his departure. The Labour leader had good lines, while the Prime Minister was unable to show strength in suggesting he had been the one to force Williamson out of government. Instead he could only say that he regretted ‘appointing someone who had to resign in these circumstances’ and that he wanted to send a message that ‘integrity in public life matters, that is why it is right that he resigned’. It all made Sunak sound rather passive and as though Williamson had been calling the shots.

Ben Domenech

Why the red wave never crested in the US midterms

The 2022 midterm election was supposed to be a red wave. Instead, it turned out to be a night of razor-thin victories for Republicans, disappointment for many Donald Trump-backed candidates and a sigh of relief from Democrats. It was nothing approaching the wave some polling suggested. And it raises fundamental questions about the direction of the GOP in an era of party factionalism. There are two fundamentals that consistently indicate the outcomes of most midterms: the approval rating of the president and the right track/wrong track question on the direction of the United States. Both indicators strongly showed a Republican wave was imminent, leading the overwhelming majority of prognosticators, myself included, to conclude that a major House sweep was incoming.

Robin Ashenden

Is Netflix’s The Crown fact or fiction?

The latest series of The Crown has arrived on Netflix. To its predictable advantage, the show has already had the advance-publicity of raised voices. Ex-PM Sir John Major, commenting on a particular scene in the series between him and the then-Prince Charles, said it was a ‘barrel load of nonsense’ and would be ‘profoundly hurtful to a family who are still grieving...’ Dame Judi Dench, in an open letter to the Times, claimed The Crown presented ‘an inaccurate and hurtful account of history’ and urged its creators (successfully) to add a disclaimer admitting the drama was ‘fictionalised.’ Now Sir Tony Blair has joined the chorus of criticism, letting it be known he considers aspects of the series ‘complete and utter rubbish.

John Ferry

The SNP’s ferry fiasco is a very Scottish sham

‘As first minister I am ultimately accountable for every decision that the Scottish government takes,’ Nicola Sturgeon announced on Friday as she gave evidence to the Scottish parliament’s public audit committee. Scotland’s ferry procurement fiasco is being closely scrutinised, and the latest developments have put Sturgeon’s record under the microscope.  In a performance reminiscent of her evidence session during the Salmond inquiry, the first minister spoke confidently, asserting several times that she was trying her best to be open – while dodging any actual accountability. It was classic Sturgeon.  There have been accusatory murmurings that the Scottish government may have corrupted the ferry procurement process for political reasons.

Steerpike

Standards slip for hungry MPs

It's the biggest issue facing British politics: what to do about parliament's catering? An army marches on its stomach and our legion of lords and legislators is no exception. For months, Mr S has heard grumbles about standards slipping in the Commons canteen. And now, finally, we have the proof, for today parly bosses admitted in a post on the internal staff intranet that: the most recent inspection led to a new food hygiene rating of two stars, down from [the] previous rating of five… Environmental health officers identified the presence of pests near catering venues. This is a particular challenge in parliament. Given the calibre of some MPs, that's an understatement, to say the least.

Freddy Gray

Midterms: No red wave, America is still very divided

Is it a red wave? A ripple? Or a trickle? Nobody quite knows. However, what looks certain is that the Republican blow out that many right wing pundits were anticipating has not happened. Crucially, the Democrats have won the crunch Senate race in Pennsylvania. John Fetterman, the man who had a stroke just a few months ago, defeated Mehmet Oz, who the late polls suggested would win.  Elsewhere, it turns out the polls were right — the Senate races are incredibly tight. It looks as if a dramatic late surge for Adam Laxalt in Nevada means the Republicans should squeak another Senate victory for there. So … over to Georgia, again, where it looks as if neither the Republican Herschel Walker nor the Democrat Raphael Warnock will win by 0.