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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It seems that Grant Shapps’ day has just gone from bad to worse. Having cursed the Virgin Orbit mission by declaring that ‘tonight all eyes are on the United Kingdom’ an hour before, er, it failed, the Business Secretary has become embroiled in a Twitter row about photoshop. Shapps is, famously, a keen user of
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Is there something in the Westminster air? This morning the Times reports that Claire Perry O’Neill– the Conservative MP for Devizes from 2010 to 2019 – has quit the party and lavished praise on Sir Keir Starmer. In an article she praised the Labour leader’s ‘sober, fact-driven, competent political leadership’ and warned that Rishi Sunak
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Oh dear. The failure of the first ever satellite mission launched from UK soil last night left a number of people with egg on their face – including George Freeman, the government’s boosterish science minister. The Tory MP was excited to witness the ‘historic mission’ firsthand in Newquay: so excited in fact that he trumpeted
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Gifts, earnings and outside interests: all are in the news this week thanks to an interactive tracker unveiled by Sky News and Tortoise. One of the headline revelations is that Theresa May earned £107,600 speech for a speech she delivered in Saudi Arabia in November – a country she blocked ministers and officials from visiting temporarily while she
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What, if anything, will survive of Liz Truss’s legacy? Last week it was her childcare review that was dropped by ministers. And now, the Foreign Office (FCDO) has reversed her decision to end the department’s funding for the the Great Britain China Centre (GBBC), an executive public body established to support UK-China relations. Just seven
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It’s a tricky time for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. They’re well ahead in the polls but have little to say on strikes: bankrolled by the unions, they are nevertheless unable to support the cause because of their remorseless mission to prove their political credibility. They need to look sober, sane and sensible: wild spending
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One of the more surprising moments in Sunday night’s ITV interview was when Prince Harry sought to defend Lady Susan Hussey, the late Queen’s former lady-in-waiting accused of racism. ‘Meghan and I love Susan Hussey,’ declared Harry, ‘[Meghan] thinks she’s great. And I also know that what she meant, she never meant any harm at
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For days now, there has been great excitement about Prince Harry’s first UK television interview. Here, at long last, was a chance for a member of the great British press corps to ask the tough questions of the dilettante Duke of Sussex. Not for them, the soft-soaping, credulous quasi-therapy of an Oprah Winfrey light entertainment
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Poor old Tom Bradby. He got the interview that everyone wants to watch – the first sit-down with Prince Harry about his new book, which aired tonight on ITV – and his fellow journalists all hate him for being a frightful suck-up. We must all be jealous. Mr S, certainly, would kill for Bradby levels
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It’s a tough gig politics. One minute you’re leader of HM Loyal Opposition, the next you’re an independent backbencher likely to lose your seat come polling day. For Jeremy Corbyn, the witless, whip-less Member for Islington North, it’s been a tough few years. He lost the election in December 2019, lost the Labour leadership in
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Oh dear. In their endless Tory-bashing quest, it seems that the Observer has blundered again. The release of a new ITV show on a dodgy 1970s politician with a propensity for scandal prompted columnist Catherine Bennett to write how he ‘paved the way for today’s sleazy Tory MPs.’ In an article that appears in today’s
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It’s the first Sunday broadcast round of 2023. Ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big grilling on the BBC, Sir Keir Starmer was up on Sky News, keen to depict Labour as the party of change. So it was jolly bad timing then that Sky chose this week to unveil their ‘Westminster Accounts’ project with Tortoise Media:
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Away from the gun-toting, field-romping antics of the dilettante Duke of Sussex, normal politics carries on as usual. And this weekend will see the first in-person Jewish Labour conference since 2018. Much has changed since then, when the party’s antisemitism crisis was at its height. Chair Mike Katz reflected in Jewish News how, back then,
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You really have to wonder what Harry and Meghan, hunkered down in their Montecito wellness bunker, currently make of the reaction to Harry’s memoir Spare, which has been leaked to the world over the past few days. So far the book has made headlines for Prince Harry’s tales about losing his virginity in a field
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‘It never needed to be this way,’ sighs Prince Harry in the trailer for his forthcoming ITV interview: ‘the leaking and the planting… I want a family not an institution.’ The Duke has long-despised the meddling machinations of Fleet Street’s finest, telling Andrew Marr in 2016 that: Everyone has a right to privacy. Sadly that line
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How many people in Britain are transgender? Until today, there hasn’t been an official answer to that question. New census data give us a number: there are 262,000 people living in England and Wales in March 2021 who ‘identified with a gender different from their sex registered at birth’, in the words of the Office
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Sex, drugs and Nazi costumes: Harry’s memoir certainly had it all. And Fleet Street has gone to town on the revelations in the book, dedicating acres of space to rural romps behind Windsor pubs and two dozen dead Taliban fighters. Unfortunately all that coverage means poor old Sir Keir’s long-awaited big speech has been knocked
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The Sussexes’ self-promotional tour is up and running: interviews with Tom Bradby and Anderson Cooper for Harry this weekend, ahead of the official release date on Tuesday. And there’s no sign of the circus slowing down any time soon, with three further books for the happy couple in the pipeline plus their Netflix commitments and
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In his new memoir, Prince Harry claims that he regarded the 25 Taliban fighters he killed as ‘chess pieces’ not human beings. Yet Mr Steerpike can’t help but wonder if the young soldier prince didn’t learn something useful from his adversaries in war – the art of suicide-bombing. At least, in a literary sense, that
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It’s safe to say that most Conservative MPs will want to forget about 2022: three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors and nose-diving polls to boot. But for one MP at least, it wasn’t all bad. The Tories’ fortunes may have taken a drubbing, but unlike her party, Theresa May had a pretty successful year. Accounts published
