The Spectator’s Reality Check newsletter
Wes Streeting would be a disastrous PM – but not for the reason you think
The joke doing the rounds over the past couple of days has been that the choice of Sir Keir Starmer’s successor is between a candidate too frightened to go for it, another who is salivating over it but can’t go for it, a third who was investigated over her tax affairs and a fourth who has already done it and was so bad at it that his successor was Jeremy Corbyn. If you think we have had stasis under Starmer, just wait until we have a PM at odds with Labour MPs As an unashamed admirer of Tony Blair, I should be thrilled that there is at least one potential Labour prime minister who has a basic understanding of the real world.
The trouble with Gordon Brown
When Keir Starmer needed advice about clinging to power in Downing Street, there was only one person to call. Gordon Brown knows all about hiding behind the net curtains of No. 10 as electoral reality sets in. As Labour fell to a historic defeat at the local elections, the Prime Minister decided that what voters wanted was a special envoy on global finance – and that a Labour prime minister who never won an election was the man for the job. Brown has been keeping himself busy doing what he does best: settling scores The appointment is the latest act in Gordon Brown’s rather happy post-prime ministerial life. Brown has been keeping himself busy doing what he does best: settling scores. Every now and then, his great clunking fist descends from the clouds to take someone out.
Don’t blame Trump for food price hikes and cancelled flights
In the hierarchy of factors that will make consumers curse politicians and company bosses this summer, food price inflation probably ranks higher than holiday flight chaos. But both will contribute to an ugly mood that will manifest everywhere from Question Time audiences and airport voxpops to outbreaks of mass shoplifting. And only the last blip of both irritants can truly be blamed on what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. A thinktank report grabbed headlines on Monday with the claim that UK food prices could be 50 per cent higher by November than they were at the onset of the cost-of-living crisis in 2021. But that’s not a particularly startling figure, given that ONS statistics for the five years to November 2025 already showed a 38.
Did European rule in Asia and Africa really make colonised people poorer?
Few questions in economic history generate more heat than the one that seems, on the surface, most straightforward: Did European rule in Asia and Africa make colonised peoples poorer? The intuitive answer – of course it did – has animated a long tradition of scholarship stretching from Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974). At its core, this tradition advances a surplus-transfer thesis: that imperial powers systematically extracted value from subordinated territories, concentrating wealth in the metropole while deepening poverty at the periphery. If true, this would neatly invert the predictions of economic convergence theory, which holds that poorer countries should, over time, catch up with richer ones.
Is Reform brave enough to be a pro-family party?
Nigel Farage told Radio 4 this week that he had ‘made a mistake’ in trying to pursue pro-family policies, concluding that this is simply ‘impossible in modern Britain’. The Reform leader might be forgiven for thinking so. The moment Reform moved into this territory with a pledge to end the two-child limit (among working British families it was later clarified), the politics curdled. Britain has, in practice, built a ‘hostile environment’ for family life Voters have long suspected any proposed softening of the cap introduced in 2017, and quite rightly on the grounds of fairness. But still more so at a time when welfare budgets are running away and working Britain is creaking under the weight of the largest tax burden since the 1940s.
The UAE’s Opec exit is about much more than oil
The decision by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to quit Opec, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is a seismic blow to the oil cartel. Opec is already reeling from the energy shock of the Iran war and Tehran’s closure of the vital supply line through the Strait of Hormuz. There will be worries now that other member countries could depart, triggering chaos in the oil bloc. There is one winner in all this: Donald Trump, who has accused Opec of “ripping off the rest of the world” by inflating oil prices. The US President will be pleased that Opec has been weakened and hope that this leads to a drop in prices in the longer term.
The state should keep its hands off your pension
The worst thing about the government’s plans to force pension providers to invest their money in particular assets is that ministers and MPs themselves don’t have to worry about it. They, of course, are members of a gold-plated pension scheme that is underwritten by the taxpayer. They will receive their index-linked pensions whatever the economic performance of the country or of any particular assets. As for the rest of us, how well we do in retirement very much depends on how investments perform. That is why it is so obnoxious that the government is trying to force pension funds to invest some of their funds in UK assets and in particular public sector ventures.
Britain must learn from its energy crises
During my career in the energy industry, I have been through seven major supply disruptions. Each time nations vow to learn lessons, revisit strategy and reduce risk. Yet when the war in Iran sent wholesale gas prices surging by more than 65 per cent, the British government scrambled for responses. The harder question, the one nobody in Whitehall wants to answer, is why, after years of climate pledges, net zero targets, and energy security reviews, the United Kingdom found itself just as exposed to expensive gas as it was in 2021. The answer is uncomfortable: Britain does not have an energy strategy. It has a collection of incoherent policies, and there is a profound difference.
The Iran war hits inflation
The Iran war is being felt in Britain’s economy. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show inflation rose to 3.3 per cent in March – up from 3 per cent the month before. The rise was mainly driven by fuel prices, which jumped at their fastest rate in more than three years. Plane tickets and food prices shot up too as rising energy and input costs were felt across the raw materials that drive the economy. A Consumer Prices Index increase thanks to the oil price spike was expected but the trouble is these higher manufacturing input costs take time to feed through into the economy meaning this new bout of inflation could be a prolonged one.
Unemployment has fallen – but not in a good way
On the face of it, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have just released great news on unemployment. The rate – against all expectations – has fallen from 5.2 per cent to 4.9 per cent. Radio 4’s Today programme welcomed the ‘surprising’ news. But this is no good news story. To be classed by statisticians as unemployed you have to be actively seeking work. If you’re not then you’re put in the ‘economically inactive’ category. And that’s the bad news: whilst the unemployment rate has decreased, so too has the employment rate. What’s gone up is the inactivity rate – accounting for almost all of the change in unemployment. So what’s going on?