Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Katy Balls

The Liz Truss survival plan

At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message was that she was the one who could ‘unite the right’. Now, her plan to survive in No. 10 relies on dividing the Tory left. Regicide is a messy business. ‘It’s very hard to push her out,’ says a former cabinet minister. ‘We would need to change the rules. It could be seen as an establishment stitch-up. I think she needs to do the right thing and resign.’ Everyone in the Tory party agrees that there needs to be a unity candidate when Truss goes, but there is absolutely no unity on who that should be. ‘Until we know who to replace her with, we shouldn’t move,’ says a former government member.

Kate Andrews

What will the Halloween Budget bring?

Liz Truss did not think that spending cuts would be a major part of her agenda. She and her first chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were confident that markets, having lent Britain billions of pounds to cover the cost of the lockdowns, would be more than happy to do the same to transform the economy. Their argument was, as it turned out, calamitously wrong. The miscalculation cost Kwarteng his job and the Prime Minister her power. Truss’s new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has dismantled almost all of her plans. ‘Trussonomics’ has been snuffed out. This temporarily calmed the markets. But abandoning tax cuts – as painful as it was – will soon prove to have been the easier part of the job.

Isabel Hardman

Whips stay in post after a night of chaos

In a sign of how chaotic tonight has been for the Conservative party, I have now been told that the Chief Whip Wendy Morton and her deputy Craig Whittaker have not left the government after all. I have spoken to Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, who says: ‘I have just seen the deputy and he is categorical that neither he nor the chief have resigned.’ No. 10 has belatedly confirmed this too. Steve Baker seems to be the only minister trying to offer some kind of government line What seems to have happened is this. The whips instructed the party that the fracking vote would be a confidence issue this morning.

Sir Charles Walker

Read: Tory MP blasts his colleagues

The backbencher Sir Charles Walker told BBC News the following: As a Tory MP for 17 years, who’s never been a minister, who’s got on with it loyally most of the time, I think it’s a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling. I’m livid and, you know, I really shouldn’t say this but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in No. 10 – I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the ministerial red box. I hope it was worth it to sit around the cabinet table, because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary. I’ve had enough.

Coffee House

List of Tory fracking abstentions

The government won tonight's opposition day debate on shale gas extraction, but only after confusion around whether it amounted to a vote of confidence or not. Amid scenes of carnage in the Commons, no Tory MPs defied the three-line whip to vote against Labour's motion but some 40 did abstain. A full list of those who did is below.

James Heale

Government wins fracking vote amid chaos

The government won tonight’s vote on fracking but it truly was a Pyrrhic victory. On paper, the numbers involved – 315 'noes' to ban fracking for shale gas versus 228 'ayes' – might suggest a well-oiled whipping machine. But it was the carnage within the House of Commons that everyone was talking about tonight. Opposition MPs are full of indignation at the scenes they claim to have seen in the voting lobbies tonight. Labour’s Chris Bryant told Sky that he saw four Tory MPs, including Deputy PM Thérèse Coffey and her colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, physically man-handle a colleague of their party into their voting lobby. He added that he has photo evidence on his phone.

Isabel Hardman

Chief Whip out as government folds on fracking revolt

Yet another moment of high drama in the Commons. Wendy Morton has now left the post of chief whip after the government folded on the opposition day fracking vote being treated as a ‘confidence issue’. MPs were warned they would lose the Tory whip if they didn’t vote with the government. One MP who witnessed Morton walking past with the Prime Minister’s PPS, tells me: ‘She’s as mad as thunder and is saying ‘unbelievable’.’ Craig Whittaker has just come out of the lobby and said ‘I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck anymore.’ Chris Bryant has just alleged that he witnessed ‘bullying’ of MPs in the voting lobbies.

Isabel Hardman

Why is Grant Shapps replacing Suella Braverman?

Grant Shapps is the new Home Secretary. This takes the government into strange territory, to put it mildly. Shapps was openly campaigning against Liz Truss as Prime Minister just days ago, boasting happily about the spreadsheet he had set up with hundreds of data points about where Tory MPs stood on her leadership, and saying she had ten days to get her premiership back on track. It is quite hard to see how the time that has elapsed since he made that challenge has seen the Prime Minister meet it.

Suella Braverman

Why I had to resign

Dear Prime Minister, It is with the greatest regret that I am choosing to tender my resignation. Earlier today, I sent an official document from my personal email to a trusted parliamentary colleague as part of policy engagement, and with the aim of garnering support for government policy on migration. This constitutes a technical infringement of the rules. As you know, the document was a draft Written Ministerial Statement about migration, due for publication imminently. Much of it had already been briefed to MPs. Nevertheless it is right for me to go. I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility; I resign As soon as I realised my mistake, I rapidly reported this on official channels, and informed the Cabinet Secretary.

Mark Galeotti

Tsar Vladimir brings in martial law

Martial law can arrive with a bang: tanks on the streets, Swan Lake on the TV. It can also creep up on a country in the guise of a presidential edict with the title ‘The Decree On Measures taken in the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation in Connection with the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of October 19, 2022 No. 756’. Either way, Vladimir Putin has just moved Russia one step closer to totalitarianism. What is interesting is just how long and half-hearted a process this has been. When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, the sharpest-beaked hawks in his entourage were urging total war, and with it an imposition of tight state control over much of the economy.

Katy Balls

Suella Braverman out as Home Secretary

Just as it seemed a brief calm was emerging in the Tory party, the Prime Minister has lost her Home Secretary. Suella Braverman has left her role with Grant Shapps brought in to replace her. The circumstances of her departure are shrouded in mystery for now – but government sources suggest this is not a simple resignation. There has been friction between Braverman and No. 10 in recent weeks: at Tory conference, Braverman said a 'coup' had taken place when Truss was forced to abandon her 45p tax cut – and she is understood to have felt that Jeremy Hunt's appointment proved she was right in her controversial choice of word.

Douglas Murray

How to protest the protestors

These are bleak times in our land, and we must take our pleasures where we can. Personally I have been able to find a great deal of consolation over recent days in watching members of the public confronting protestors from the Just Stop Oil movement. There is some especially pleasing footage of van drivers in south London hauling protestors off the roads by the scruff of their necks. The colourful language which accompanies these acts is an additional delight, for the irate British public is not always immune to using words that polite people might deplore. All the videos bring some satisfaction. This week a strange-looking man-child with a comb-over sprayed orange paint on to the Aston Martin showroom in central London.

Lloyd Evans

The gripping spectacle of Truss’s fight for survival

A week of sheer hell for the Tory leader. Plots and rumours have swirled around Westminster. Rebels are said to be roaming the corridors and gathering support for an anti-Liz putsch. And yet she’s still here. Our death-row Prime Minister strode into the chamber apparently dressed for her own funeral. Black trouser suit, white cotton blouse. She got into trouble as soon as she opened her mouth. Her ritual answer, ‘I will be meeting ministerial colleagues and others’ brought howls of laughter from the Labour benches. Sir Keir Starmer stood up to deliver a brief and fatal inquisition. He began with a pun about a book covering her career which will be ‘out by Christmas’. But, he wondered, will ‘out by Christmas’ be the title or the release date?

Robert Clark

Why are our universities still cosy with China?

It sounds like something from a spy novel: scientists linked to the Chinese military complex working at UK universities on sensitive technologies, which can be used for weapons development by the Chinese Communist party. Except, this is no novel. This is very much reality. New research uncovered by Civitas has revealed that there are at least 60 individuals from tech and defence conglomerates in China, in addition to military-affiliated defence universities, who have either worked alongside UK universities or who are even formally associated with them. This figure includes at least two active members of the Chinese army (the People’s Liberation Army) who are still working at two separate British campuses, alongside many others who were previously listed at army organisations.

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Did Liz Truss just overrule Jeremy Hunt?

Prime Minister's Questions was not an easy ride for Liz Truss. Nor was it catastrophic. As James predicted earlier, crunch moments rarely end up being as crunchy as expected. The Prime Minister turned up with some well-prepared defensive lines (also something James predicted), including, curiously, ‘I'm a fighter, not a quitter’. It wasn't clear what particularly appealed to her about that famous line from Peter Mandelson’s victory speech when he held onto his Hartlepool seat in 2001 after being forced out of the government earlier that year. Not least because Mandelson had to quit the government a second time.

Isabel Hardman

Are the Tories walking into a Labour fracking trap?

The Tory whips have, in their great wisdom, decided to make today's opposition day vote on fracking a 'confidence issue' in Liz Truss's government. The Labour motion this afternoon isn't the usual non-binding partisan one, but a mechanism which would allow the opposition to introduce a bill into the Commons banning the practice. It is the same technique that saw 21 Tory MPs lose the whip during the Brexit debates. The Labour tactic makes it much harder for the government to just ignore the motion and allow MPs to abstain The Labour tactic makes it much harder for the government to just ignore the motion and allow MPs to abstain.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The triple lock will condemn Britain

Liz Truss is almost exactly the leader the country is desperate for. Britain needs someone to take painful decisions and even alienate voters in order to get growth going. Given that the next election is probably lost anyway, there is a case to be made that Truss should serve as the sin-eater for Conservative policy, implementing necessary but unpopular actions before she’s deposed. Last night rumour had it that she was planning to break the triple lock on pensions, instead bringing in a below-inflation rise. Perhaps this was to be one of those unpopular but necessary policy decisions? Not a bit of it. At PMQs, she told the Commons: ‘I've been clear, we are protecting the triple lock on pensions.

Steerpike

Revealed: the reason top Truss aide was suspended

Embattled, humiliated and lampooned, Liz Truss has few public allies left. And she certainly has one less after today, following the suspension of Jason Stein, her acting director of communications in No. 10. Stein is a longtime supporter who managed much of Truss's press operations during the summer leadership campaign. But shortly before PMQs the BBC reported that Stein had been suspended and is now due to face a formal investigation by the Propriety and Ethics Team in Whitehall. It follows a briefing in last week's Sunday Times in which unnamed No. 10 sources had ridiculed the prospect of Sajid Javid replacing Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor.