Uk politics

Monday

The Spectator

Cabinet reshuffle: Justine Greening quits the Cabinet

Theresa May's reshuffle is underway. Here are the key points so far: Justine Greening has quit the government; Damian Hinds is the new Education Secretary David Gauke becomes the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Esther McVey becomes work and pension secretary Karen Bradley is the new Northern Ireland Secretary after James Brokenshire resigns due to ill health Matt Hancock is the new Culture Secretary David Lidington appointed minister for the Cabinet Office Claire Perry is the new minister of state for business Brandon Lewis is new Tory party chairman following confusion over Chris Grayling's reported appointment.

Sunday

Carrie Gracie

Equal pay matters – that’s why I have resigned as BBC China Editor

I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC. The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure. In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a publicly funded organisation. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally. On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability.

Fraser Nelson

Announcing a change to Toby Young’s Spectator column

A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column - one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column was called Status Anxiety and the idea was to showcase his self-deprecating humour, while exposing the pieties of those who take themselves and high society too seriously. From the offset, readers loved it. But in the last few years, Toby's life has taken a different turn. He dedicated himself to setting up new schools for disadvantaged children, schools that he’d be happy sending his own kids to.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s new year has been more difficult than it should have been

Given everything that happened to her in 2017, Theresa May could be starting this year in a far worse position. But that’s not to say that she hasn’t started in in the best position in the circumstances, either. That the Prime Minister and her team recognise this seemed apparent from her decision to pre-record her Andrew Marr interview, rather than appear live and chance being asked about new awkward stories in the Sunday papers. Perhaps booking a pre-recorded interview is a sign that Number 10 has a bit more of a clue than it did in the months after the snap election, but only really in the sense that it has more of a clue about how to better identify the Prime Minister’s political weaknesses.

Steerpike

Must Toby Young’s role in creating schools now be held against him?

The furore over Toby Young's appointment to the board of the Office for Students (OfS) shows no sign of dying down. The Mail on Sunday splashes on a series of 'sexist and obscene tweets' sent by Young – reporting the Prime Minister's apparent ‘distaste’. Now it seems that some can't even accept Young's work in education which contributed to his appointment. Appearing on the Andrew Marr show this morning, the Guardian's Polly Toynbee came up with a new line of attack. Toynbee complained that Young had only founded the free school that led to his OfS appointment because 'he wanted to create a school for his kids'.

Saturday

James Forsyth

3 New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May

In The Sun today, I propose three New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May. She should be decisive on Brexit, bold on housing and try and fix social care. None of these will be easy; and all three of them will be made more difficult by her mistakes in 2017. But if the Tories don’t make progress on these fronts in the next 12 months, Jeremy Corbyn will be that much closer to Downing Street. May’s visibility this week—reiterating her desire to be the Prime Minister who fixes the housing crisis and apologising to NHS patients who have had their operations cancelled—shows she wants to hit the ground running. The reshuffle which is expected early next week, most likely Monday, is also meant to show a government that is energised.

Mark Piggott

London’s crime map tells a damning tale of two cities

It’s just a few metres from Bartholomew Court, EC1, where a young man was one of four stabbed to death over the New Year, to trendy Hoxton, famous for its cereal bars and hirsute hipsters. It would be easy to say these two worlds – those of the trendy media types lampooned by 'Nathan Barley' and 'Its Grim up North London' and the large nearby estates – are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, but it would also be inaccurate. Areas like Hoxton became popular in part because of this edginess, this picturesque urban decay, where drugs can be bought cheaply from local youths and consumed in the safety of the adjacent wine bars and gated communities.

Sarah Vine

Jeremy Corbyn’s silence on Iran is deafening

In Iran, women have had their lives dictated by ill-intentioned men for years now, as have homosexuals and anyone who dares oppose the hardline Islamic regime there. At last that nation’s downtrodden people seem to have found the strength and courage to rise up. No thanks, it must be said, to that self-styled champion of the oppressed, Jeremy Corbyn who, as men, women and children were laying their lives on the line in Tehran, maintained a deafening silence on the issue. Meanwhile, Labour trolls turned their attention to a far more pressing outrage: the appointment of a Conservative to a government quango. Toby Young’s addition to the board of the new higher education watchdog, the OfS, provoked outrage among entitled lefties who feel that kind of role is by rights theirs.

Friday

Katy Balls

Can Theresa May’s reshuffle live up to the hype?

Theresa May is expected to reshuffle her Cabinet early next week. Unfortunately for Theresa May, she's been expected to do this since before Christmas – after she refrained from appointing a new First Secretary of State in light of Damian Green's forced resignation/sacking. This means the reshuffle has dominated the news agenda for several weeks now. Each day this month, there have been several – often conflicting – stories about what the Prime Minister plans to do in the upcoming reshuffle.

Isabel Hardman

Should we blame patients for the NHS crisis?

The whose-fault-is-the-NHS-crisis game has taken some strange twists and turns this week, with the debate bouncing from patients costing the health service £1bn last year to Jeremy Hunt having to apologise to patients for cancelling their non-urgent procedures as a result of the increased pressures on hospitals. Political debate tends to prefer black-and-white and easily identifiable scapegoats, but the health service is too complex for that. Take the missed appointments story. Yes, patients failing to turn up cost the health service a staggering amount. But who are those patients? It turns out that the most likely people to do what the NHS classes as a ‘DNA’ (did not attend) are new mothers with psychiatric appointments, with two DNAs for every five who did turn up.

James Kirkup

Remainers must stop sneering at Brexit stamps and blue passports

First blue passports. Now Brexit stamps. For some, these belong in the same file as the Royal Yacht Britannia and Big Ben’s bongs. See also: filament lightbulbs and fruit and veg sold in pounds and ounces. For some (repeat: some) Remain-voting politicians and observers, this stuff is ridiculous, old-fashioned nonsense, an attempt to drag Britain back to some imagined 1950s idyll and proof to their suspicions that Leavers are old, weird and stupid. Just in case you need an illustration of this, dip into online 'debate' about the Sun’s Brexit stamps campaign. Now, I should declare an interest: I voted Remain and still can’t see any of the possible outcomes of Brexit that is better than those that faced us if we’d stayed.

Ross Clark

Keir Starmer must answer this question about John Worboys

A Martian visiting Britain in recent months might be a little confused as to the nature of human morality – not to mention as to where on the body we have our sexual organs. First the country becomes consumed by the wicked behaviour of man who lightly touched a woman’s knee. Then, a man who was found guilty of drugging and raping 19 women is quietly approved for release by the Parole Board as if his offences were no big deal. It emerges that he was suspected of 100 more rapes, too, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) never even bothered to charge him with those.

Fraser Nelson

A deleted tweet shows how even police are confused by the law on SatNavs

Yesterday, the Greater Manchester Police tweeted out the above picture claiming that that 'the only legal place' to put a SatNav is 'the bottom right hand side of your windscreen… everywhere else is illegal.' It was quite untrue. Deliciously, the picture showed a suspicious mark on the middle of the car windscreen that looked very much as if the police themselves had been holding their SatNav in the wrong place (see enlargement below). When this evidence was widely shared, and mocked, the Tweet was deleted without comment. A shame, because it's a great example of how the absence of any modern law on driving, mobile phone and SatNav use is leaving even police confused about the law.

Steerpike

David Aaronovitch: Brexiteers are dying at a faster rate than Remainers

After Tony Blair's call for a second referendum (and maybe even a third if that one didn't work out) fell flat on Thursday, the campaign to stop Brexit looks on shaky ground. However, Newsnight have put forward an argument that could be just the thing to put life back in the campaign. In a film for the BBC current affairs programme, David Aaronovitch – who once said 'if every one of the PM’s demands had been turned down I would still have been in favour of remaining in the European Union' – appears to find a glimmer of hope: Brexit voters are dying at a faster rate than Remain voters!

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Blair has himself to blame for Brexit

Time is running out to halt Brexit. That was Tony Blair’s dire warning on the airwaves yesterday, as the former prime minister once again waded into the referendum debate to say that: ‘2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided’. Unsurprisingly, his warnings have not gone down well in today’s newspapers. The Sun says that Blair’s ‘stomach-churning dishonesty on Brexit was putrid even for him.’. The paper says that the worst thing about Blair’s intervention was ‘his feigned concern for democracy’ in trying to insist that voters should be allowed another say on Brexit.

Jamie Bartlett

The trouble with ‘activists’

I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League demo or a bitcoin conference than trying to close a coal mine. I’d like to propose an answer: ‘the activist’. I don’t mean the gran who donates each month to Greenpeace, or even Caroline Lucas. I mean the pros who roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. The people for whom being a climate activist is part of their identity and social circle.

Nick Cohen

Unite’s bitter power struggle could spell trouble for Corbyn

Gerard Coyne’s campaign team will reform in Birmingham this week, as the whisper spreads that control of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, and a sizeable share of influence in the Labour party, is up for grabs. By rights, Coyne should no longer have a 'team' or a career. Last year’s election for the general secretary of Unite saw the far left and union bureaucracy use Putinesque tactics to ensure their victory. They marked their success by firing Coyne from his job as Unite's West Midlands regional secretary. He had had the bad manners to challenge Len McCluskey in a 'free' election. Clearly, such impertinence could not go unpunished. Perhaps nothing will change.

Thursday

Steerpike

Revealed: NUS omit Judaism from religion survey

Oh dear. Over the past few years, the National Union of Students has found itself in the headlines over the union's relationship with Jewish students. When Malia Bouattia was elected NUS president in 2016, three vice presidents of the NUS accused their president of 'anti-Semitic rhetoric' – with Bouattia referring to Birmingham University as a 'Zionist outpost'. An internal report later ruled that she should not be punished despite making comments found to be anti-Semitic. What's more, a report just last year found that many Jewish students 'do not feel their institution understands their needs'.

Steerpike

Blair and Corbyn’s popularity contest

As expected, Tony Blair's latest Brexit intervention has proved universally unpopular. Brexiteers have hailed his criticism as the best advert for leaving the EU in weeks, while Corbynistas have gone on the offensive over his harsh words concerning the dear leader. Despite all this, Tony Blair can at least still count on one man to back him up: himself. In an interview with ITV, it was put to Blair that Corbyn actually did better than the former Prime Minister in the 2017 snap election than Blair in 2005. The reasoning goes that Corbyn won a higher percentage of the vote, at 40pc to Blair's 35.2pc. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Blair didn't take too kindly to this way of looking at things: 'On that basis Theresa May would be a more successful prime minister than Margaret Thatcher.

Brendan O’Neill

Ann Widdecombe is the feminist hero we need right now

Britain has a new feminist hero. She’s a diminutive, eye-rolling force of nature. A BS-deflecting defender of the right and ability of women to get stuck into public life as well as any man can. A warrior against the neo-Victorian view of the female sex as fragile and unable to deal with the amorous advances of tragic blokes. It’s Ann Widdecombe, former Tory MP, Catholic convert, borderline national treasure, and now contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. But this is no ordinary Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a feminist one, a Suffragette one. Yes, the Channel 5 show has gone political, giving a nod to the hundredth anniversary of women in Britain winning the vote (well, women over 30) by making the CBB house an all-female one. (For now.