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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Well, you have to hand it to them. After an outcry, Manchester University has now told Mr S that they’re investigating a PhD student who published a research paper in which he detailed how he masturbated for three months to extreme Japanese comics featuring young boys. The saga started earlier today after Tory MP Neil
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Miaow. The claws are out in the Tory leadership race, after Liz Truss took a pop at Nicola Sturgeon. The frontrunner to be the next PM told a Tory hustings last week that the First Minister was an ‘attention-seeker’ who ought to be ‘ignored’ – a judgement that won her plaudits among the party faithful
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Boris Johnson is very much the elephant in the room of this leadership race, looming large over both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. And much like an intimidating pachyderm, neither candidate seems completely confident how to handle him without being squashed. Sunak’s approach is the simpler one: talk about the defenestrated premier as little as
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It’s a tough time for the arts at present. The cost-of-living crunch means institutes scaling back projects and families cutting back their non-essential spending. Still, over at one Britain’s biggest quangos, the good times appear to have kept on rolling. Data published earlier this year reveals how Arts Council England spent more than £100 million
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To Darlington, for another of the endless Tory leadership hustings. Last night’s clash covered much of the same old ground but was notable for several swipes which Liz Truss took at the media’s coverage of the race. Asked who was to blame for Boris Johnson’s downfall, several members of the audience interrupted to shout ‘the
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A curious row has exploded in the projectile-packed leadership race. This morning’s Yorkshire Post splashed on the news that Rishi Sunak (a Yorkshire MP) would oppose Tory plans for 1,500 asylum seekers being housed in a disused RAF base in the region, ahead of tonight’s Darlington hustings. Yet, just hours later, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace
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When it comes to spinning exam results, the Scottish Government gets straight As and a gold star for effort. Pupils in Scotland are receiving their school qualifications today following May’s diet, the first after two pandemic years in which examinations were cancelled and replaced by teacher assessments. Naturally, allowing teachers to mark their own homework
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With just four weeks left in No. 10, rumours are swirling about Boris Johnson’s future plans. Will he quit the Commons or face down his critics on the Privileges Committee? Make a mint on the speaking circuit or champion Kyiv’s cause? With debts, costs and childcare bills, one thing’s for sure: Boris’s next job will
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Oh dear. It seems that the Hiroo Onodas of Remainia have done it again. Best for Britain, the former Stop Brexit crusade now recast as a self-styled ‘civil style campaign’, is up to their old tricks on Twitter. In their haste to score points off anyone remotely associated with the Leave campaign, BfB has seized
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It’s the scoop they were all after. Finally, at last, the much-lambasted Washington press pack has obtained the media equivalent of the holy grail: images of Donald J Trump’s toilet. For months, such shenanigans have exercised the finest minds in American political journalism. Now, Maggie Haberman, the darling of the DC class, has pipped them
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After a long period in office, it’s natural for any political party to lose their zeal for governing. As problems mount up, loyalties fray as the stench of sleaze begins to reek. In hushed whispers, MPs begin to talk of a ‘spell in the wilderness’ as opposition looks increasingly attractive compared to the burdens of
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Among the many superstitions of the SNP is that the reorienting of Scottish politics around the constitution has been a ‘joyous’ and ‘civic’ affair. Far from pumping bitter political and national sectarianism into the public square, dividing the population into nationalists and Unionists has facilitated a great intellectual contest in the very best spirit of
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With four weeks left in the leadership race, how many more times is Liz Truss going to be ‘misinterpreted’? First, there was the U-turn over regional pay boards for public sector workers, which would see them get lower pay in line with local wages outside of London and the South East. A press release from
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In the fevered imaginations of some Remainiacs, Britain’s supermarkets are permanently bare, as Brexit-related supply shortages prompt an absence of the bountiful goods we once enjoyed in the EU. But there is one place in the UK where such dystopian fantasies have now indeed become a reality. Unfortunately for the more boss-eyed of Boris’s critics,
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Liz Truss has often been accused of ‘dressing up’ or ‘cosplaying’ as Margaret Thatcher. And her team has done little to dispel that impression this campaign, releasing images this afternoon of Truss standing in front of the world’s largest Union Jack, just as the Iron Lady once did. But it was tonight’s Tory hustings in
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It’s been a pretty bad-tempered leadership race thus far but at least most of the scrapping has been done by high profile ‘outriders’ of the two main candidates. Now though it seems that this penchant for ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks has spread to the backbenches too as Tory MPs take to Twitter to attack each other’s campaigns.
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When it comes to technology, it’s no secret that our ruling masters in Westminster and Whitehall have had their issues. From the NHS ‘supercomputer’ to disk files being regularly lost; gross mismanagement of resources to poor cyber security, problems with computers, software and equipment have bedeviled the inhabitants of SW1 for years. And now another
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With Truss and Sunak tearing chunks out of each other, inflation soaring and a cost-of-living crisis looming, you might have thought Labour would have the next election in the bag. But you can always trust the party to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, as the events of the past day have just shown
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Having failed to muster enough support for a leadership bid, Priti Patel is currently enjoying what are likely to be her final weeks in charge at the Home Office. The Witham MP has held the post for more than three years but despite her reputation as a hang ’em and flog ’em hardliner, there’s precious
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The Bank of England forecasts are out and they make for grim reading. The experts on Threadneedle Street predict that inflation will soar to 13 per cent, with Britain expected to undergo five consecutive quarters of recession. Interest rates are being hiked to 1.75 per cent – the biggest jump in 27 years – and