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
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
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:
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,
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
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
Oh dear. The stage was all set this morning for Sir Keir’s big speech, responding to yesterday’s Blairite tribute by Rishi Sunak. His sleeves were rolled up, the podium looked reassuringly solid and the factory backdrop was suitably metaphorical. But then came the technical issues: the curse of any aspirant Prime Minister hoping to show
It’s Rishi Sunak’s big day today. All of Westminster is eagerly awaiting his first major speech since taking office in October. The Prime Minister is expected to set out his plans this afternoon to encourage pupils to study maths until the age of 18. But ahead of Sunak’s address, the hoary issue of Channel 4
Is 2023 going to be the year of Boris? Much of the commentariat seems to think it’s possible, with the supremely-connected Paul Goodman writing this week in the Times that Johnson’s return to No. 10 ‘has a certain plausibility to his Westminster supporters.’ And now that same august paper of record has published another intriguing
They say you can’t keep a good man down. Geordie Greig, one of the finest networkers in British journalism, has returned to Fleet Street after a brief 13-month hiatus away. The Old Etonian was axed as the Daily Mail editor in a power struggle in November 2021 and since then he’s kept a low profile,
It’s not been the best few years for Sino-British relations, what with Huawei, Hong Kong and the whole Covid thing. So it was no surprise when, last month, Tower Hamlets council voted to block China’s new ‘super-embassy,’ with councillors citing security fears and the concerns of local residents. The borough of Tower Hamlets is more
It’s a new year but Lord Cruddas is not giving up an old causes. The onetime milkman turned billionaire led the campaign last summer to put Boris Johnson back on the ballot after the latter was forced out of No. 10. After that failed, Cruddas suggested he would stop funding the Conservatives unless it rewrote
They say time can be a great healer. And, in the case of Leo Varadkar, it seems that even the most festering of wounds can be fixed by a brief stint away from the premiership. Varadkar, who became Taoiseach again in December, was one of the great antagonists in the Brexit battles during his first
And you thought we’d seen the last of them in 2022. The new year kicks off with some old score-settling: for next week will see the publication of Prince Harry’s pithily-titled memoir Spare (or Going Spare, quips one royal insider). As the title suggests, the book is expected to focus on the fraternal frictions between
Four Chancellors, three Prime Ministers, two monarchs – one hell of a year. We said that it would be difficult to top the Covid craziness of 2021: we were wrong. Partygate, Pinchergate, porngate, beergate, queuegate – the greatest hits kept on coming as Boris Johnson was washed away in a sea of sleaze and scandal.
These days it seems that nobody can ever get through to their doctors’ practice. But one GP surgery left their patients wishing that was still the case this week after accidentally texting them to inform that they had aggressive lung cancer – instead of wishing them a merry Christmas. Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster sent
