Uk politics

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

The political class has lost the plot

The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy theories being spouted by Ben Bradshaw and others — the David Ickes of polite society — which imply Putin is puppeteering the Western masses’ brains. It increasingly feels like we’re being governed not merely by fools and incompetents, but by nutters. Incompetence is the go-to explanation for the political class’s current malaise. And it’s a

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Priti Patel resigns from the Cabinet

Priti Patel has resigned from the Cabinet. Patel said that she accepted her decision to hold meetings with Israeli officials during her summer holiday without the prior say so of the government meant that her ‘actions fell below the high standards that are expected of a secretary of state’. The secretary of state for international development went on to ‘offer a fulsome apology’ to the Prime Minister. Theresa May responded by saying ‘now that further details have come to light’ about exactly what Patel got up to on her summer jaunt, ‘it is right that you have decided to resign’. Her resignation tonight is not much of a surprise. Westminster has spent

James Forsyth

Who might replace Priti Patel in a reshuffle?

Priti Patel is currently on her way to Downing Street, where she is expected to be fired by Theresa May. The early signs are that Number 10 is looking for a Leaver to replace her as International Development Secretary, to preserve the Cabinet’s Brexit balance. But this would be the wrong way to think about the reshuffle. Trying to replace Patel with someone who matches her profile as closely as possible would just be another advertisement of how weak May’s position is. In parliamentary terms, though, May is, obviously, in a weak position, Getting a clean EU withdrawal bill will be very difficult. (Indeed, the position of the Scottish Tories

Stephen Daisley

If the Tories fall, this will be regarded as a golden age of stability

One of the hazards of writing about a government so hapless you wonder if it’s doing it all for a dare is that it could fall any minute. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, Theresa May could be cramming that last pair of heels into the back of a Pickfords van. Let’s work on the assumption that someone is in charge, nominally at least, and hope we get through the next few minutes without a minister setting their desk on fire or putting Wales on eBay.  That this is a spectacularly inept ministry is now beyond all doubt. Al Murray has a cracking stand-up routine

Melissa Kite

Michael Fallon, for all the times I may have touched your knee while drunk, I’m sorry

This one goes out to all the male MPs I’ve taken to lunch. I want to apologise to each and every one of you. Some of you know who you are and what went on. Some of you were so tipsy you may not have been fully aware of how shockingly you were being exploited. I estimate there are dozens, if not hundreds, of you whom I’ve taken to lunch, dinner and drinks during my time as a political correspondent. In dark bars and expensive restaurants, or just casually in Commons corridors, I’ve sidled up to you in a designer outfit and pretty much said ‘Howdy, right honourable!’ Look, it

Rod Liddle

Priti Patel is right: Let’s give our foreign aid money to Israel

So, let me get this right. Priti Patel should resign because, while on a private holiday, she did some work – i.e. meeting foreign politicians. BBC PM’s Eddie Mair says she is in serious trouble. Only with arseholes like you, sunshine. The real reason for leftie anguish is that Patel suggested that Israel could possibly receive some of the UK’s foreign aid budget for its humanitarian work in the Golan Heights. Too right, Priti. If we are to have a foreign aid budget I think it should all go to Israel. Especially for its humanitarian work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Support democracy, militate against our enemies. Frankly I’d

Isabel Hardman

Focus in Priti Patel row switches to what Downing Street really knew

Priti Patel is on her way back to Britain to face the music following her strange holiday-cum-lobbying operation in Israel. Yesterday it emerged that the International Development Secretary had not told Number 10 that she had suggested giving humanitarian aid to the Israeli army in the Golan Heights. It has been so heavily briefed that she is expected to be sacked that there is little chance that the minister will get away with just another reminder of her responsibilities. But there’s an awkward extra element for Number 10 this morning, which is the claim reported in the Jewish Chronicle that the British government did in fact know about Patel’s meeting

David Butterfield

Gordon Brown still hasn’t learned his lesson from Bigotgate

As Gordon Brown’s new memoir, My Life, Our Times, sends mild ripples across the political play pool, the rest of the country tends to its own business. But there’s an episode from Brown’s turbulent spell as Prime Minister that merits revisiting: ‘Bigotgate’. Not only was it the moment that perhaps secured Labour’s dramatic fall from power but Brown’s finessing of what happened has worrying signs for politicians’ private frankness. You remember it well: while pressing the flesh in Rochdale as part of the 2010 election campaign, Brown found himself in conversation with a lifelong Labour voter. For a savvy politician, this was a golden opportunity to play the crowd and

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Priti Patel and Boris should go

Priti Patel could well follow Michael Fallon in making a departure from the Cabinet today. If she does leave, she’ll be the second minister to go in the space of only a week. So, is this bad luck on the part of the government? Not so, says the FT. The paper says this is a ‘symptom of a deeper malaise’ and ‘two domestic incidents have highlighted the sense of drift’ at the heart of the government. Boris Johnson’s blunder in suggesting an imprisoned British-Iranian citizen was ‘teaching people journalism’ is typical of his ‘blasé attitude’. The FT goes further though, saying that Boris ‘may be the least distinguished figure to

Tuesday

Hardeep Singh

Is Britain becoming a Christianophobic country?

Kicked ‘like a football’ were the words used by a Pakistani Christian to describe a brutal assault that left him unconscious outside a restaurant in Derby last month. The victim, Tajamal Amar, claims Muslim men singled him out for offence he’d caused by displaying a cross and two large red poppies on his car, and for being a Kaffir – a derogatory term for non-Muslims. As it happens, the attack occurred towards the end of National Hate Crime Awareness Week, and has been recorded as a hate crime. The British Pakistani Christian Association, a group who’ve been supporting Amar, inform me his wife and daughter have been moved to a

Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon was right to apologise to gay men

The cameras were on Nicola Sturgeon but it was Nick and Phil Duffy’s day. The couple sat in the public gallery of the Scottish Parliament to hear the First Minister announce her government’s Bill to pardon gay men historically prosecuted for same-sex relations. The old men, who sat holding hands, heard Sturgeon tell Holyrood that while disregards of past criminal offences were long overdue, they were not enough. A more meaningful reparation had to be made: a national apology to those whose lives were ruined and whose love was chased into the shadows. She declared: ‘Today, as First Minister, I categorically, unequivocally and whole-heartedly apologise for those laws and for the

Isabel Hardman

Welcome to Messminster, where ministers can get away with whatever they fancy

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’. He repeated the point about clarity being the

Alex Massie

Never mind fake news, this is fake government

There’s a line in ‘All the President’s Men’ which seems dismally appropriate for our current government: ‘News that would have occasioned banner headlines a few weeks ago was now simply mentioned in a larger story’. When things fall apart, boy they really fall apart.  This is not Watergate, of course, and Brexit must happen because that is what the people have commanded. Nevertheless, this is not a government that inspires confidence even on its own benches. And by God there is too much news. More, certainly, than can fit in a single story or be the subject of its own banner headlines.  Up until now, the standard view has been

Isabel Hardman

MPs tear into Boris Johnson for Iran blunder

Boris Johnson mysteriously decided to update the House of Commons on the fight against Islamic State today, even though everyone else was talking about another aspect of the Foreign Secretary’s job. He decided to include the row over his comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in this statement, presumably to take some of the heat out of the row. His other tactic in trying to reduce the row further was to accuse anyone who attacked him for his blunder in which he told the Foreign Affairs Committee last week that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalism of playing party politics. On the opposite benches, it wasn’t just Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry who mooted

Ross Clark

Has Brexit really made us all happier?

Apparently we’re all getting a little happier – if a little more anxious. The government’s official happiness index shows that we rate our overall life satisfaction at an average of 7.7 out of 10. We think our lives are 7.9 out of 10 worthwhile. We rate our happiness yesterday at 7.5 out of 10 and our anxiety rating at 2.9 out of 10 – a slight rise on early 2015 when national anxiety reached a low but still much less than when the index started in 2011.  Does it mean anything though? The Guardian seems to think so, publishing a story today which appears to hint that people in England are

Isabel Hardman

Why the social care crisis could get worse much sooner than you think

Social care is in crisis: everyone knows that. And everyone knows that if nothing is done about the long-term sustainability of the sector, then the crisis will only get worse. But less well-known is that there is a short-term crisis looming that could threaten the sector very quickly, too. Over the past few years, the sector has been trying to work out the implications of a court ruling that carers who stay overnight are entitled to the minimum wage for their sleep-in shifts, rather than a flat rate fee for a ‘sleep-in’ shift. This has been made rather more difficult by the government issuing guidance on the ruling which didn’t

Nick Cohen

Our dismal leaders make me mourn the decline of the professional politician

The collapse of the old order in the West provoked a collapse in confidence in ‘professional politicians’. It was a boo phrase as reliable as ‘heretic’ in the medieval church. A speaker wishing to endear himself or herself to the audience only had to say that the country was sick to the back teeth of them to earn a round of applause. On a material level, there were rational reasons for the loathing. We do not say often enough that Western societies have failed their peoples. The average Briton or American has not had a pay rise for over a decade. Growth rates in Britain appear to have taken a

Steerpike

Priti Patel’s jet set lifestyle continues

Priti Patel’s working holiday to Israel – in which she held secret meetings with Israeli politicians, including the country’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu – has landed her in hot water. Despite the backlash to Patel’s foreign escapade, however, it seems her jet set lifestyle shows no sign of stopping. In Parliament this afternoon, Patel had a chance to defend herself and tell MPs what she got up to on her summer trip. The only hitch? She couldn’t make it. In Patel’s absence, it was left to her deputy, Alistair Burt, to fill in. So where was Patel? ‘She is presently in the air,’ he told MPs to laughter in the Commons. Still,

James Kirkup

Priti Patel’s survival speaks volumes about the state of May’s premiership

‘Extraordinary’ is perhaps the most over-used word in the Westminster lexicon. Days, statements, speeches, developments – all are routinely described as extraordinary, so often that the word is, well, ordinary. But some extraordinary things deserve the term more than others. A statement issued yesterday by the Department for International Development about Priti Patel’s holiday is more than ordinarily extraordinary. I’ll leave aside the fairly obvious politics of all this: under any other circumstances, Ms Patel would have been sacked, and the fact that she hasn’t been is just another comment on the state of Theresa May’s premiership. Instead, I just want to draw your attention to that statement itself, that artefact, a

Monday

Nick Boles

The Westminster sex scandal is a chance to change politics for the better

In the last few weeks, stories of sexual harassment and abuse have swept through Westminster like a storm. Like many men in Parliament, I first thought the best policy would be to keep my head down and wait for it to pass. But I have now decided that’s not good enough. Male MPs need to stand up and be counted. We need to be vocal in our support of female colleagues who are pressing for a dramatic shift in the culture of Parliament. This is an opportunity to change politics for the better and we must seize it. It takes courage for anyone to complain about sexual harassment or abuse.