Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

The Tories are addicted to self-destruction

Well, that round of party unity was fun, wasn’t it? Rishi Sunak, the pragmatist, ushered in an unfamiliar sense of calmness and competence as he entered Downing Street. It has lasted less than a week. Yet again the newspapers are chock full of ‘senior Conservatives’ gunning for each other: the target this time is Suella Braverman. The Tory cycle of violence continues. The question is: are the Tories just ‘ungovernable’ — as many said during Liz Truss’s collapse — or now fully addicted to self-destruction?  Braverman says there is a ‘witch-hunt’ against her: you just need to pick up a newspaper today to see what she’s getting at. So far this year 40,000 have entered Britain illegally: Braverman has said this amounts to ‘an invasion’.

Matthew Lynn

Rishi Sunak’s potential tax rises would guarantee a recession

It could be National Insurance. It could be income tax. Perhaps it could even be a rise in VAT. We don’t yet know what taxes Rishi Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have planned for their fiscal statement later this month. One point is surely clear, however. There will be no point in pretending that those can be paid for by either ‘big business’ or ‘the rich’. And, even worse, it will guarantee a recession, making even more tax rises inevitable in the future. It may not be quite so bad on the day. Both Sunak and Hunt are slick enough political operators to know that if they leak in advance that the fiscal statement will involve eye-watering tax rises – and if the rises are in the end simply very painful rather than completely brutal, many of us will be relieved.

Fraser Nelson

Could Robert Jenrick end up replacing Suella Braverman?

Why did Rishi Sunak reappoint Suella Braverman? Her decision to back him rather than Boris Johnson was probably the most decisive endorsement of the recent campaign – this might well have been done with the understanding that she’d be Home Secretary. If so, it would have been an understandable trade. She had been a Johnson uber-loyalist and if even she was not backing his return, her support for Sunak was the biggest symbol of the game being up for Boris Johnson. Her reappointment drove her critics wild and she has become the new lightning rod. Her performance in the Commons yesterday showed her doubling down. If people want to depose her, she said yesterday, then: 'Let them try'. Braverman’s critics say she is ungovernable, a verbal flame-thrower.

Nigel Jones

Why Sunak shouldn’t sack Suella Braverman

As Home Secretary Suella Braverman struggles to keep her job in the face of vicious attacks from the official opposition, her fate will be the first big political test for new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.  If Sunak bows to the almost hysterical shrieks for Braverman’s scalp she will be the fourth big beast brought down by a combined Labour and media assault – aided by a handful of usefully idiotic backbench Tory MPs only too willing to publicly undermine the government – since the Tory election victory in 2019. Already Labour MPs such as Chris Bryant have called on the Home Secretary to resign, while Keir Starmer has said Sunak should sack Braverman as she could pose a security risk.

Monday

Katy Balls

Why Sunak would find it tough to lose Braverman

The safest place for a minister in a crisis is meant to be the despatch box. The thinking is that it allows an under-fire minister to influence and even control events. This is what Suella Braverman tried to do this evening when she faced MPs in the Commons chamber following a series of allegations over both her handling of security matters and the detention of migrants under her watch. After apologising this morning for using her personal email address to handle official documents on seven occasions, Braverman appeared in the Commons to address the other crisis facing her: the situation at the Manston migrant centre in Kent. While the disused airport is designed to hold up to 1,600 people, the current number being processed there is thought to be closer to 4,000.

Michael Auslin

How Biden can help save Sunak

Spare a thought for Rishi Sunak. The Prime Minister must restore the UK’s fiscal stability, calm markets, and support the pound. He needs to unite a country facing increasing American-style social and political polarisation. He must also assure Britain’s allies and partners that it will remain a global actor, opposing Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s belligerence. It is a tall order for any leader. But Sunak could be helped significantly by US President Joe Biden in a few key areas – the question is whether Biden wants to do so. The economic, political, and security health of Britain is no minor matter for the United States. As global norms further deteriorate, the UK remains one of the handful of vitally important democracies.

Steerpike

Gove gets the gang back together

It's not just Suella Braverman and Dominic Raab who have got their old jobs back. Following the Truss interregnum, normal service has been restored in Whitehall, with Michael Gove being handed another post in his fourth Conservative administration. The erudite Aberdonian has returned to the Department of Levelling Up – the ministry he left just last month – as its Secretary of State once more, beginning his speech to officials this afternoon 'As I was saying before I was interrupted...' Gove's appointment has cheered many of the department's long-suffering staff, relieved, at last, to have a minister skilled in the art of Whitehall warfare.

Gavin Mortimer

Will the Tories copy Le Pen?

In the three years since its landslide victory in the 2019 election, the Conservative party has shed nearly seven million voters. The astonishing statistic was revealed in a report by the centre right think-tank Onward, released on the same day Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister; at least he’s in no doubt as to the scale of his challenge. To stave off disaster, Onward’s Will Tanner (a former adviser to Theresa May while she was PM) said the Tories must aim to hit a ‘sweet spot’: by appealing to the six in ten voters who are ‘left of centre on the economy, but…socially and culturally conservative’. This year Marine Le Pen’s National Rally found that sweet spot among the French electorate, winning 89 seats in the parliamentary elections.

James Snell

Russia’s ‘hunger plan’ is back

Until this week, the prospect of global famine had disappeared from the headlines, but earlier in Russia’s war against Ukraine, a sinister possibility had begun to take shape. Ukraine is a breadbasket. Its produce feeds the world. And Russia, knowing this, hatched a plan. Its soldiers could wreck Ukrainian farmland and kill its farmers. Russians would steal and sell all the Ukrainian grain it could. And the Black Sea – a vital artery through which most of Ukraine’s food exports travelled – would be blockaded by the Russian navy. Food shipments would not be let through. The world would starve, Ukraine’s economy would suffer, and – in Vladimir Putin’s mind – he would be the victor.

Katy Balls

How big is the problem facing Suella Braverman?

How much trouble is Suella Braverman in? Rishi Sunak’s decision to re-appoint her as Home Secretary less than a week after she was forced to resign over a security breach has proved to be the major upset of the reshuffle. Since then, opposition parties have gone on the attack with some Tory politicians also raising concerns about Braverman’s suitability for the role.  Former Conservative party chairman Jake Berry went public last week to say that Cabinet Secretary Simon Case had been deeply worried by the incident which saw Braverman share a confidential document on immigration with an MP using her personal email. He said Braverman – who has developed the nickname ‘leaky Su’ in the media – was responsible for ‘multiple breaches of the ministerial code’.

James Heale

How much trouble is Suella in?

14 min listen

Suella Braverman is under attack for sharing confidential documents with other members of parliament, and has admitted to sending official documents to her personal email on six occasions. Could she be forced out, again?  Also on the podcast, as Rishi Sunak faces pressure on the small boats crisis as well as his decision not to attend the COP27 climate summit, what sort of leader will he be? Will he buckle under the pressure? James Heale speaks with Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.  Produced by Natasha Feroze and Oscar Edmondson.

Patrick O’Flynn

The Channel migrant crisis is spiralling out of control

When did the scale of illegal immigration into the UK via Channel dinghies become a first order political issue for you? Perhaps you were, like me, outraged by the phenomenon from the start. If so, you will have been reassured by Boris Johnson's declaration at the outset of his premiership that those coming in this fashion would be 'sent back'. There were 1,843 such arrivals in 2019. Maybe your hackles rose at the end of 2020, when the Government confirmed that far from deterring the trade by implementing a successful returns policy, it had received another 8,466 irregular arrivals via dinghies during that year. Or, if you were relatively slow on the uptake, maybe you only became thoroughly irked at the end of 2021 when official figures recorded 28,461 such arrivals for the year.

Steerpike

Tory MP burns Braverman

Dogs bark, cows moo and the Home Office leaks like a sieve. Unfortunately, this time the finger of suspicion has fallen on Suella Braverman, the Secretary of State for the most malfunctioning ministry in all of Whitehall. Braverman has reportedly been dubbed 'leaky Sue' after repeatedly sending official documents to her personal email – the reason which forced her resignation from government 12 days ago. On one occasion she tried to use her personal account to send a draft written ministerial statement to her parliamentary patron Sir John Hayes - but, in her words, 'I entered the incorrect email address for his secretary unintentionally and unknowingly.

Andrew Downie

Lula faces an uphill battle in Brazil

The Brazilian presidential election yesterday was billed as one of the most consequential in decades – not just for the country but for the future of the planet. Anyone paying attention to either the climate crisis or the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, could hardly quibble with that description. The good news is that the Amazon can expect a breather. After four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s often destructive policies, the right-wing incumbent is being replaced. His leftist challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva squeaked home with 50.9 per cent of the vote in a bitter contest that ended with the smallest winning margin since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s.

Sunday

Jason Morgan

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is coming

This month, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist party, Xi Jinping was elected to a third term as chairman. ‘The New Mao’ – so has rung the common refrain. It’s an entirely accurate assessment. The very existence of the two-term-limit precedent that Xi has now broken was set by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, in 1982. The reasoning behind the term limit was to prevent the cult-of-personality chaos that Mao and his sycophants had whipped up during his untrammelled, ruler-for-life tenure at the helm of the Chinese state. Deng wanted to make China rich enough so its citizens wouldn’t care that they were not free. To do that, he needed law and order, not proto-woke Red Guards beating up middle school teachers.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday roundup: Gove backs Braverman

Michael Gove – Suella Braverman ‘is the right person’ to be Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s return to the government benches has become a lightning rod for criticism of Rishi Sunak’s new administration. She had been sacked only a few days prior to her reappointment, thanks to her sending an email containing sensitive information to the wrong person. Michael Gove, who has himself made a comeback as the Levelling Up Secretary, defended Braverman when challenged by Laura Kuenssberg, who was keen to share an inconvenient follow-up email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgTltFKpxFE Braverman ‘did not ignore legal advice’ Sophy Ridge was also keen to raise the issue of immigration, especially relating to the Manston Processing Centre in Kent.

Andrew McQuillan

Another set of Northern Irish elections won’t solve anything

Northern Ireland is set for another election. The failure to reboot the province’s power-sharing Executive by the deadline last Friday means Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris is compelled to call another poll. The current absence of an Executive stems from the Democratic Unionist party’s refusal to join in until substantive progress is made on the Northern Ireland Protocol. What will an election solve? The frank answer is nothing. Sinn Féin, currently the largest party following an election in May, will be able to present this to nationalists and republicans as yet another chance to give those democracy-denying unionists another mighty kicking on the road to a united Ireland.

Daniel DePetris

Is Biden finally finished with Mohammed bin Salman?

Saudi Arabia’s energy minister had some cheeky words for the Biden administration this week: don’t blame us for manipulating the oil markets, and start acting like grown-ups. Standing on stage at the Saudi-organised Future Investment Initiative, known as ‘Davos in the Desert’, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman laid into American officials. Not only was Washington responsible for where oil prices are today, but they were also selfishly expecting Saudi Arabia to sacrifice its own economic interests for the sake of the West’s foreign policy. ‘We keep hearing you “are with us or against us”, is there any room for “we are with the people of Saudi Arabia?”’ the kingdom’s top oil man said.

Sergey Radchenko

Putin’s war has exacted a terrible toll on Ukraine

Putin badly miscalculated. The Russian army terribly underperformed. Kyiv has shown unexpected resilience in the face of what experts thought was far superior Russian firepower. This, we’re told, is the story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and all of it is true. Vladimir Putin’s talk of a ‘dirty bomb’ is evidence of how badly the war is going for him. Russia has been taught a bitter lesson, one that other trigger-happy, self-proclaimed great powers would be wise to heed. But one part has been missed. For all of Russia’s difficulties, it is in a far better shape than Ukraine. Fighting has left Ukraine in ruin.