Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Williamson out after bullying allegations

In the past few minutes Gavin Williamson has quit the government after another formal complaint was made about his conduct. In a letter to Rishi Sunak, the former minister without portfolio says the allegations against him – which he denies – were becoming a ‘distraction’ from the work the government was doing.  His letter, which you can read in full below, says he is stepping back from government so he can ‘comply fully with the complaints process that is underway and clear my name of any wrongdoing’. There have been two formal complaints made public so far. The first was from Wendy Morton, who alleged that Williamson bullied her in expletive-ridden messages about not being invited to the Queen’s funeral.

Matt Purple

Seven things to watch out for in the midterm elections

The sting music has blared, the media hype is in, and the midterms are set to be the most important American elections in nearly two years. Now, as normal people head to the polls, it’s time for us political junkies to jumper-cable our brains straight into the vote tallies. You, too, can pretend to know what will happen before the results are even in. Here are seven things to watch tonight as the makeup of Congress is decided. The Pennsylvania Senate race The most ballyhooed Senate contest really is worth all the attention it’s getting. For some of us, choosing between stroke victim John Fetterman and Oprah houseplant Mehmet Oz is the equivalent of deciding favorites in one of those intra-jihadist group feuds in the Middle East.

Isabel Hardman

Sunak escapes blame over Williamson allegations… so far

Pressure is mounting on Rishi Sunak and Gavin Williamson. The official who alleged that Williamson bullied them when defence secretary has made a formal complaint against him. This is significant because up to this point Williamson had claimed he was not aware of any ‘specific’ allegations and that no formal complaints had been made. It is also much more difficult when the complainants are officials, rather than fellow politicians who have to a certain extent opted into the hurly-burly of Westminster.  Then there are the claims of former deputy chief whip Anne Milton on Channel 4 News this evening that Williamson made inappropriate threats to a Tory MP in financial difficulty. He hasn’t yet responded to that interview from his ex-colleague.

Steerpike

Meghan speaks out (again)

These days, the Duchess of Sussex's ambitions are a little more grandiose than that of a mere English county. Now, the recalcitrant royal seems to have her heart set on being the voice of all women everywhere, unconfined by the constraints of mere geography or taste. For in the latest edition of her egomaniacal Archetypes podcast, the performance artist formerly known as Meghan Markle opted to suggest that epithets like her 'Difficult Duchess' nickname stemmed, in part, from (shock, horror) gendered sexism rather than, er, claims of objectionable personal behaviour. With remarkable understatement, the Duchess sighed to her listeners that 'not everyone is going to like you’ but that they ‘should respect you' regardless.

Gavin Mortimer

Macron won’t fix the migrant crisis

Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron met on the fringes of Cop27 in Egypt on Monday and the Prime Minister emerged ‘confident and optimistic’ that a solution will soon be found to the Channel migrant crisis.  Sunak should be careful he doesn’t suffer the same fate as Boris Johnson, who made vigorous noises in 2019 about eradicating illegal immigration and then proved utterly incapable of fulfilling his pledges.   If the PM is serious about finding a solution to the migrant crisis he’ll require more than just the cooperation of the French President. He’ll need to hold talks with the EU, the Albanian government and Giorgia Meloni.   So far this year approximately 40,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats.

Cindy Yu

Will Hunt protect the pensions triple lock?

12 min listen

Ahead of the Autumn Statement next week, questions remain over whether the government intends to protect the pensions triple lock. With pensioners being such an important part of the Conservative party's demographic, will Jeremy Hunt risk the inevitable backlash? Also on the podcast, what will Rishi Sunak do about Gavin Williamson as the bullying claims grow? Cindy Yu is joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth. Produced by Cindy Yu and Natasha Feroze.

Ross Clark

Britain would be wrong to pay climate change reparations

Is it right that Britain should pay £1.5 billion for developing countries to adapt to floods, cyclones and rising sea levels as Rishi Sunak has announced at Cop27? Absolutely. That is what aid money is for: to help countries cope with natural disasters. If you can spend some of this money in advance of those disasters so that these countries might better be able to cope with them when they do occur, then so much the better. Would Britain be right, on the other hand, to pay reparations to developing countries on the basis that the industrial revolution started in Britain and we, therefore, have high historic carbon emissions? Absolutely not, and for several reasons.

James Forsyth

Cop27: Sunak’s first overseas trip as PM

Rishi Sunak is back from his first overseas trip as Prime Minister. Despite Downing Street having initially said he wouldn’t go, Sunak did travel to Cop27, the international climate change summit in Egypt.   Given the UK has had three prime ministers this year, his non-attendance would have raised question marks The problem with Sunak not going was not only that the UK was handing over the Cop presidency to the Egyptians. Given the UK has had three prime ministers this year, his non-attendance would also have raised question marks over the UK’s commitment to this climate change agenda.

James Kirkup

Raising inheritance tax is fair and right

Here’s a thought experiment about tax and fairness. Imagine two people, Janet and John. They’re both 30 years old. Janet did better at school and works harder than John, does longer hours and earns more. Her salary is £50,000. Her take-home pay is £37,776 – she pays £12,224 in income tax and national insurance each year. John’s doing OK: he earns £25,000. His take-home pay is £20,881, after taxes of £4,119. Let us wind the clock forwards by twenty years and assume all else is equal: salaries and tax rates remain unchanged. Over those two decades, Janet’s efforts bring her £755,520. John’s total is £417,620. Then, aged 50, both our imaginary friends sadly lose their imaginary parents. Janet’s parents live in social housing.

Steerpike

Boris’s babes to join the Lords

They were the dynamic, priapic premiers who guided their country through a pandemic – and the comparisons between Boris Johnson and David Lloyd George don't stop there. For no man has done more to advance the cause of Lords reform since the days of the 'Welsh Wizard' than Johnson. In his seemingly ongoing quest to destroy the Upper House, this morning's Times reports that the Old Etonian has nominated some 20 names for life peerages. Among them include two youthful aides who, if accepted, would become the youngest life peers ever. The first is Ross Kempsell, 30, the Tory party's former political director, whose mooted nomination has caused something of an explosion in Steerpike's DMs. 'It makes a mockery of the system', fumed one former government aide.

Andrew Tettenborn

Rishi Sunak should consider levelling down HS2

If you’re after a lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people, look no further than the government’s cack-handed approach to improving transport in the Red Wall. Last week Grant Shapps announced insouciantly to any northerner who was listening that there was not ‘much point’ (his words) in an important part of the Northern Powerhouse rail project, namely a section of brand-new track covering much of the route between Manchester and Leeds. Although this would have slashed journey times between the west and east coasts at Liverpool and Hull, given the region a source of pride and put Bradford firmly on the rail map, he thought it simpler to put in some improvements on the existing, but already fairly congested, tracks between Leeds and Manchester.

Nigel Jones

The Biden elephant in the room

Let us face an unpleasant fact that many seem curiously reluctant to report or discuss. President Joe Biden appears to be suffering from severe and worsening cognitive decline which often makes his public appearances an embarrassing debacle.  As Americans cast their votes in the midterm elections which may well see Biden’s Democrats lose their slim majorities in one or both houses of Congress, the mental state of the leader of the free world should be of pressing concern to everyone on the planet. But we hear very little about it. Much of the US media made a tacit agreement that even mentioning the subject was an offence against good taste.  It is not as if evidence of the President’s decay is not abundant and out there for those who care to look.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Braverman chooses Jenrick to be her shield

Suella Braverman didn’t come to the Commons to answer the Urgent Question that her Conservative colleague Sir Roger Gale had asked about the immigration processing centre at Manston. Instead she sent a junior minister, Robert Jenrick, to respond. That’s not particularly unusual: cabinet ministers often use their juniors as a shield when difficult questions are being asked. In this instance, though, Jenrick was acting not just as a defence against political attacks on the Home Secretary, but also against further flame-throwing from the minister herself.  It was last week that Braverman told the Commons there was an ‘invasion’ of migrants coming across the Channel.

Steerpike

Matt Hancock’s taxpayer-serviced Aga

For the first time since Covid, it's the question all of Westminster is asking: where is Matt Hancock? Within the next 72 hours, the former Health Secretary is due to make an appearance in the I'm A Celebrity jungle, with Hancock set to receive a reported £400,000. Not bad work if you can get it. So Mr S was intrigued to discover that Hancock – an avowed environmentalist who distributes insulation advice to constituents– has clearly been doing his own bit of green-fingered energy work. For, according to his expense claims, Hancock billed the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority last November to clean and service his Aga cooker oven for £120.

Cindy Yu

Does Westminster have a whipping problem?

12 min listen

Gavin Williamson is in trouble, again. This time the reveal of some expletive-laden texts he sent to then-chief whip Wendy Morton has raised questions for the government over why Williamson was brought back into frontline politics. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about whether the dual role of government whips (as discipline enforcers and pastoral carers) is confused and out of date.Produced by Cindy Yu.

Freddy Gray

How worried are the Democrats about the US midterms?

‘There are two things that are important in politics,’ said the 19th century senator Mark Hanna. ‘The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ The maxim remains true in 2022. Public polling is all well and good, and useful in its way. Yet in a country as sprawling and complex and bitterly divided as the United States of America, and with so much information available online at everyone’s fingertips, polls can easily be used to suggest whatever you want.  Political parties inevitably lie about their electoral prospects and hide their rather more sophisticated (and less biased) internal polling. But campaigns can’t altogether conceal their spending patterns.

Roger Kimball

The Republicans will come for the FBI after the midterms

As one commentator noted, Tuesday’s red wave in the midterm elections is going to be like the red elevator scene in The Shining. I had to look that one up but, yep, it seems like an appropriate metaphor for what is about to happen. Some hapless scribe called Emily Oster recently wrote an article for the Atlantic called 'Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty'. That’s not likely, Emily. The rules introduced by power-hungry apparatchiks throughout the land destroyed businesses, ruined nearly two years of education and socialisation for children, made it impossible to visit your dying grandmother, go to the beach or to church or celebrate your favourite nephew’s birthday.

Fraser Nelson

Bright green: the case for eco-optimism

Of all the world leaders at the Cop27 summit today, I suspect Rishi Sunak will be one of the least comfortable with the whole jamboree. How can he justify a £50 billion-a-year net zero programme without anyone having worked out what difference, if any, the proposed extra taxes and regulations would make? How can a PM jet off to a luxury Egyptian resort and pledge this kind of cash – then fly back to London and constrain NHS and school spending, slash aid money, hike taxes, impose deep real-terms cuts in public pay – all to plug a £35 billion hole? No wonder Sunak said, at first, that he would not attend. The whole Cop27 agenda is a festival of fiscal cognitive dissonance: a malady that Sunak believes led Britain to its current economic mess.

Ross Clark

Would a lower foreign aid target be so bad?

Whatever happened to David Cameron’s promise to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid?    Amid much criticism, it survived Cameron and Osborne’s (failed) efforts to bring the public finances back into balance. Then, following Covid, the then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut the target to 0.5 per cent, saying that it would be restored to 0.7 per cent once the government was no longer having to borrow money to fund day-to-day spending. But could it be reduced further still in the Autumn Statement? That is what some fear. Indeed, it has been argued that Britain’s overseas aid budget has already dropped to far lower than 0.5 per cent of our national output.

Steerpike

Knives out for Gavin in text controversy

Ah Gavin Williamson – the man with more lives than Larry the Cat. Having been sacked as Defence Secretary for alleged leaking in 2019, then sacked again as Education Secretary for poor performance in 2021, Williamson is now facing his third dismissal in three years following fresh claims about his conduct. On Friday it emerged that the former Chief Whip had sent expletive-laden texts to his successor Wendy Morton concerning unfounded claims that she had excluded him from attending the Queen's funeral at Westminster. Tortoise reported that a formal complaint had been made about Williamson's behaviour; a story that was followed up two days later in the Sunday Times which published those texts in full.