Steerpike is The Spectator's gossip columnist, serving up the latest tittle tattle from Westminster and beyond. Email tips to steerpike@spectator.co.uk or message @MrSteerpike
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Standing ovations in Congress these days aren’t what they used to be: the annual State of the Union is little more than an applause-fest peppered. But there was a rare exception last night in the House of Representatives when congressmen on both sides of the aisle joined together to welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington
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Ding, ding, ding! In the blue corner, it’s Joy Morrissey, government whip and the Tory member for Beaconsfield. And, er, in the other blue corner, it’s Simon Clarke, fellow Conservative MP and representative for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. The cause of today’s metaphorical bout? Planning and the thorny issue of where to build much-needed
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Where would we be without Jeremy Clarkson? The motor-mouth petrol-head is the unlikely saviour of Twitter addicts this Christmas, giving ever-online politicos the change to proclaim their utter disgust at his now-removed Sun column about Meghan Markle. Clarkson has now apologised for saying how he’d like to see the Duchess of Sussex being paraded through
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Are the wokest couple in all the West losing their star power? The first-half of the Sussexes’ new ‘explosive’ documentary attracted less than a million viewers in the 332-million strong USA, with one critic remarking ‘If I were Netflix, I’d want my money back.’ Meghan’s planned animated series Pearl has already been binned. And now
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It’s six days until the King’s Speech but tonight it was Keir Starmer’s to give it a go. The Labour leader hosted the great and the good of the lobby tonight at a Christmas knees-up to celebrate the end of term and multiple Prime Ministers. Starmer regaled HM press corps with his musings on events.
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The World Cup is drawing towards its close today and one benefit means we will get to hear less from Gary Neville, the left-wing right-back who has never met a camera he didn’t like. You would think perhaps that a man like Neville – a multi-millionaire working for the Qatari state broadcaster – might be
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In recent years, the SNP haven’t always covered themselves in glory in Westminster. Whether it’s silly stunts in the chamber or the botched complaint against the-then Chief Whip, Scotland’s party of government always seems to be at the centre of some various embarrassment. Still, one nat has managed to impress on both sides of the
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It’s less than a week since the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) launched and already organisers are optimistic about its success. The new group was born out of the Conservative Post’s ‘Boris ballot’ movement in October to restore the former Prime Minister to office via a petition which claimed to boast more than 10,000 Conservative members.
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To the Carlton Club, where Mr S found himself on Thursday evening at the seventh Margaret Thatcher Centre lecture. A smorgasbord of stars turned out in black tie to honour the late Prime Minister, with Lord Frost delivering the keynote address to the enthusiastic applause of the dozens of assembled Tories including Priti Patel. But
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Oh dear. Labour have had a pretty good run of late, castigating the Tory government at every turn. But given the chance to set out her alternative vision on Sky News this morning, Labour chair Anneliese Dodds could only squirm when pressed as to how her party would be handling the strikes. Under repeated questioning
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Trains, hospitals and schools – there are few aspects of British life left untouched by the winter of discontent. And now Steerpike hears rumblings of industrial discontent at the heart of British democracy itself: in the Houses of Parliament itself. Long-suffering staffers have had to endure months of vermin-infested kitchens, crumbling masonry and asbestos aplenty.
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Jacinda Ardern’s political philosophy is simple. When the New Zealand PM was asked to explain the qualities that led to her success, she said she valued: ‘Kindness, and not being afraid to be kind, or to focus on, or be really driven by empathy’. But does Ardern practise what she preaches? Not so if a
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Britain’s railways have ground to a halt for a second day running – but this time it’s strike action, rather than snow, that is causing the chaos. Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), has been out on the airwaves again justifying why workers are right
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Oh dear. It seems that Matt Hancock has been called out on his Covid record, again. In his newly-published ‘Pandemic Diaries,’ the former Health Secretary appears to pin the blame on the National Archives in Kew for the late publication of restrictions introducing the ‘rule of six’ on 13 September 2020. Hancock suggested that the
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A right royal row blew up this year over which of the great and the good were eligible to attend the Accession Council to confirm Prince Charles as King. According to the Mail on Sunday, in April Richard Tilbrook – clerk to the body of the Monarch’s advisers – ‘sparked fury’ by revealing that only
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Earlier this month, the Rother Valley Labour party made its pick for the next election, selecting Dominic Beck as its candidate for the Tory-held seat. Who he, you might ask? Well thanks to the work of GB News’ documentary-maker Charlie Peters, we now know. Beck is a local politician who has served on Rotherham Metropolitan
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Christmas is just two weeks away, and with it comes an inauspicious anniversary. It will be three years since the Boxing Day massacre, when the kimono-wearing, baseball-bat wielding KC Jolyon Maugham brutally beat a fox to death, incurring much mockery and the opprobrium of the RSPCA for his boastful tweets about the slaying. Maugham –
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To 2 Lord North Street, SW1, home of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Once it was the likes of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng that were feted here, but last night there was a new queen in town. Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House, swept in with all her magnificent curls, to be the
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Is that it? For months now much ink has been spilled about the ‘explosive’ revelations promised in Harry and Meghan’s multi-million pound Netflix bonanza, a ‘tell all’ sensationalist documentary replete with truth bombs to tear the curtain back on the whole squalid royal cabal. And yet, having digested all three soporific hours of the first
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Speaking at last year’s Tory conference, Liz Truss mocked those ‘portents of doom’, the ‘people who say that it is inevitable that because of Covid we are going to have a permanently bigger state.’ But despite the insistence of Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others, all signs suggest that an enlarged Whitehall will in fact be
