Steerpike

Steerpike

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

Liz Truss’s resignation honours list: runners and riders

And so the Liz Truss regime ends after a glorious 45 days in power. And, appropriately, in a government where humour and tragedy were so often intwined, the Daily Telegraph is now reporting that Truss intends to draw up her own resignation honours’ list after a mere six weeks in office. Below is a list

Runners and riders for next Tory PM

Well, that’s that. The disastrous premiership of Liz Truss will come to an end next week after 52 days in office, the shortest tenure in British political history. Who can replace her? Someone with a strong stomach, a glutton for punishment and a taste for sipping from a poisoned chalice. Below Mr S runs his

Who will Ben Wallace back?

‘Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played, the red crashing game of a fight?’ Jessie Pope’s paean to the glories of war might equally be applicable to the internecine slaughter of the Tory party as its MPs gear up for yet another brutal leadership battle. But in war you can only be killed once; in

Will Fleet Street back Boris?

As the man who quite literally wrote the book on Churchill, Boris Johnson will be all too keen to encourage talk of a comeback. There’s much excited talk in the corridors of power about whether the former premier really can mount a comeback, just four months after leaving in disgrace. Lists of MPs are being

Revealed: the reason top Truss aide was suspended

Embattled, humiliated and lampooned, Liz Truss has few public allies left. And she certainly has one less after today, following the suspension of Jason Stein, her acting director of communications in No. 10. Stein is a longtime supporter who managed much of Truss’s press operations during the summer leadership campaign. But shortly before PMQs the

Liz Truss’s media strategy revealed

It’s the age-old dilemma for a media advisor when your politician is in a jam. How do you get out of doing an interview you really don’t want to do? Liz Truss’s former spad Kirsty Buchanan gave us an answer to that question to this morning when she revealed to the Whitehall Sources podcast just

Gove eviscerates Truss

It seems it’s a day for chatty rats in politics. First, longtime Hunt ally Steve Brine went on Politics Live and inadvertently called the Chancellor a ‘fantastic Prime Minister.’ And now, Michael Gove has told the JLA Speakers Bureau that the country is ‘going through hell’ and that ‘all of us are going to face

Watch: Tory MP calls Hunt a ‘fantastic’ PM

Find someone who supports you as much as Steve Brine supports Jeremy Hunt. Shortly after the latter’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer on Friday, Brine was all over the airwaves suggesting to Radio 4 that ‘you should see Liz Truss as chairman and Jeremy as chief executive.’ And four days on, Brine is at

Now the Aussies mock Truss too

How are the mighty fallen. Once, Liz Truss was the toast of Canberra, the champion of AUKUS and a Free Trade deal. But now her Liberal allies have lost power in the Australian capital and she herself is a figure of ridicule in No. 10. With her agenda in tatters and ‘Trussonomics’ dead and buried,

Wallace and Heappey go on the defensive

What do you do when a country is in crisis? You send in the army. And that’s exactly what two of the finest representatives of HM Armed Forces in parliament have taken it upon themselves to do, in light of the Tory party going a bit JG Ballard. Captain Ben Wallace of the Scots Guards

Cancelled Kanye West buys cancelled free speech platform Parler

Hear Ye Hear Ye! The news today has broken that Kanye West – who calls himself Ye – has bought Parler, the Trumpist social media platform. The news was announced earlier by Parler CEO George Farmer, the son of Lord Farmer, the Conservative peer. ‘This deal will change the world and change the way the world thinks

Mordaunt: Truss isn’t ‘hiding’ under a desk

Oh dear. Liz Truss ducked the opportunity to come to the House to explain Jeremy Hunt’s U-turn earlier today. So instead it was the turn of Penny Mordaunt – ‘the real PM’, her supporters jibe – to come to the Commons and defend the shambles of the past fortnight. Mordaunt, in her capacity as the

Watch: Tory Muppets show

Spiraling markets and grim-faced MPs don’t always make for the best of television viewing. Indeed, given the ongoing case in Westminster and Whitehall, farce seems much more appropriate. So Mr S was delighted to stumble across a well-crafted animation from Colin McQuaid which reimagines the Muppet Show intro but with the Tory government instead. Forget

Flashback: Truss promises ‘no new taxes’

Trussonomics is dead, long live Treasury orthodoxy. New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unpicked the bulk of his next-door neighbour’s policy agenda on TV this morning, telling the nation that nearly all of the tax measures that have not started legislation would now be reversed. Income tax will now remain at 20 per cent ‘indefinitely’, the free

Watch: first Tory MP calls for Truss to go

In office, Liz Truss promised to be the ‘disruptor in chief’. Unfortunately, most of that disruption has proved to be in the markets and the polls as her short-lived revolution tanked the standing of both her currency and her party. With Labour and mortgage rates on the rise, Truss’s authority has disappeared within days. She’s

Ben Wallace: If defence spending pledge goes, so do I

In politics, where there’s death, there’s life. And as Liz Truss’s premiership crumbles before our eyes, all attention in SW1 is which lucky legislator gets to replace her. Second time Sunak? The people’s Penny? Back again Boris? Or perhaps the man who many wanted to run this summer but ended up dropping out: Ben Wallace,