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

Wednesday

Steerpike

Manchester probe academic over self-love text

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 O'Brien tweeted a link to an article in the journal Qualitative Research titled 'I am not alone - we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan.' O'Brien noted that 'the non-STEM side of higher education is just much too big, producing too much that is not sociallly useful.' That's putting it mildly...

Steerpike

Sturgeon fires back at Truss

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 but raised eyebrows north of the border. And now the media-savvy Sturgeon has fired her own riposte to Truss, telling Iain Dale at the Edinburgh fringe about Truss's own attention-seeking antics. Sturgeon claimed that when she met Truss at last year's COP26 conference in Glasgow, one of the few things Truss was interested in was how to get featured in the fashion bible Vogue. Sturgeon replied: I said to her they came and asked me.

Steerpike

Do Conservative members miss Boris?

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 possible and for God's sake don't mention how the ex-Chancellor helped bring him down. Truss meanwhile has opted to praise the former PM while, er, claiming to be the change candidate who'd take a completely different approach in office. This of course begs the question: what do the Tory members actually think? Are they pining once more for Boris? Or are they glad to see the back of him? Polling would suggest something of a mixed picture.

Steerpike

Arts Council’s bizarre lottery splurge

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 of National Lottery money during the 2021-22 financial year. Mr S has been perusing that expenditure and discovered just what exactly such sums are being spent on. Arts Council England, which claims to ‘champion, develop and invest in artistic and cultural experiences that enrich people's lives’, gave three tranches of money to the ‘The Family Sex Show.

Steerpike

Truss turns on the media

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 media!' prompting Truss to smirk and reply 'Who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?' Truss, who once claimed that 'I would die in a ditch' for a 'free press', also took issue with the way in which host Tom Newton Dunn framed his questions. The latter asked the Foreign Secretary about her plans to help people with rising energy bills using tax cuts, when he mentioned 'your handouts' as he sought to pose a question.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Asylum base row after Sunak steps in

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 revealed he had 'withdrawn' the offer and insisted such an incendiary move is no longer happening. Wallace told ITV: I have withdrawn the offer to the Home Office for that site. It's been with them for a number of months. I have obligations to do something else with that site and you know there are other sites we made available to the Home Office if they wish to take it up. No word yet as to what 'obligations' they may be.

Steerpike

SNP spins its school stats (again)

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 resulted in a spike in the pass rate — up from 75 per cent to 89 per cent in 2020 — and the latest results are supposed to signal a return to normality and something approximating rigour. At least that’s the Scottish Government’s line. The SNP administration is boasting of ‘near record pass rates’ in Scottish National 5s, Highers and Advanced Highers. The Higher rate stands at 78.

Steerpike

Where will Boris write his column?

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 probably pay far better than the extra £79,000 he gets to be PM on top of his MPs’ salary. So it’s no surprise then that there is plenty of talk in Fleet Street right now about the Old Etonian resuming his columnist duties. Johnson received £250,000 a year when he was London Mayor to write a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph – a sum he memorably dismissed as ‘chicken feed.

Steerpike

Is Best for Britain the worst of Remain?

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 on a viral tweet sneering at Andrew Pierce, the longtime Daily Mail columnist. The original tweet, amplified to the group's 150,000 followers, was from an account which claimed to 'Detest Tories, Brexit and inequality. Love Lefty Lawyers.' It claimed that 'I've been blocked by Tory Boy Pierce for letting slip his real name is Patrick Donnelly which entitles him to an EU passport. Oops I did it again.

Monday

Steerpike

Who cares about Trump’s toilet?

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 all with pictures for her forthcoming hatchet-job on Trump, according to a breathless report by the admiring hacks over at Axios. Why the focus on Trump's toilet you ask? Well, Haberman reports that during Trump's tenure, White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher. J'accuse!

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s warning from history

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 statesmanship. Some Tories in Westminster appear to be flirting with such sentiments now, judging from the lackluster enthusiasm which the current contest seems to inspire. After a dozen years in office, the thinking goes, could now be the time for a 'reset'? A brief respite on the other side of the Commons, time for a Lab-led cabal to tear itself apart before a renewed, rejuvenated and above all, SOUND, Tory government takes power once more.

Steerpike

Yet another Scottish Unionist politician assaulted

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 democracy. Kevin Lang might have to disagree with that. Lang is the leader of the Liberal Democrats on Edinburgh City Council. Yesterday, he was delivering his newsletters in South Queensferry when he was assaulted by someone described as a ‘nationalist’.

Sunday

Steerpike

Truss is ‘misinterpreted’, again

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 the Truss camp suggested £8.8 billions worth of savings could be made this way 'if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers in the long term.' After an outcry, Truss insisted the policy had been 'misinterpreted' as 'it was never intended to apply to doctors, nurses and teachers'. Which begs the question as to why her press release suggested it could adopted for 'all' workers and trumpeted the 'billions' being saved...

Steerpike

SNP ferries fiasco prompts rationing warnings

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, it's nowhere in Leave-voting England. Rather such shortages are now happening on certain windswept Scots islands, where the long-suffering local residents are enduring the effects of the SNP government's woeful incompetence. Today's The Herald on Sunday splashes on the news that shops on certain islands in the Hebrides have been forced to ration essential items owing to widespread ferry cancellations due to a broken down vessel.

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: protesters crash Tory hustings

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 Eastbourne that offered the Foreign Secretary the chance to channel her political heroine after protesters disrupted her opening remarks. The unwelcome guests were there to protest Truss's previous employment at Shell and received a predictably hostile reaction from the disgruntled Tory audience after yelling 'Shame on you!'.

Steerpike

Backbenchers embrace blue on blue

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. First up this morning was Michael 'Fabbers' Fabricant launching one of his by-now routine attacks on Rishi Sunak, suggesting that everything about his campaign is 'stage managed, preplanned, and never authentic.' It prompted Simon Hoare, the standbearer of the Tory left, to fire off a terse response that seemingly poked fun at Fabricant's infamous blonde hair: 'Keep your hair on and your hypocrisy to yourself.' https://twitter.

Steerpike

Peers blighted by Whitehall tech failings

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 venerable name can be added to the list of long-suffering institutions facing such difficulties: the House of Lords. But this being the Upper House – where the average age of membership is 69 –  the technology is decidedly more old school than the newfangled kind of kit coming out of Silicon Valley these days. For the issue that is currently vexing their noble lordships is the parliamentary phone system.

Steerpike

Starmer’s dreadful day

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 once again. First, Sir Keir Starmer was found guilty of breaching the MPs’ code of conduct by failing to properly register more than £120,000 in land deals, corporate donations and Premier League tickets. He was forced to apologise to parliamentary ethics watchdog Kathryn Stone after the errors were uncovered. This was despite the Labour leader previously declaring that he was 'absolutely confident' that no rules had been broken. Whoops!

Thursday

Steerpike

Home Office’s bizarre diversity drive

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 little sign she's been able to change the prevailing culture in her department. Leaked messages in June showed the extent of internal opposition to Patel's flagship Rwanda scheme. 'Trans inclusive sports day' are still being held and there's a strong push for 'preferred pronouns.' And now Mr S has discovered the latest woke quackery being pushed by Patel's mandarins.

Steerpike

Revealed: Boris and Zahawi away from desks as recession looms

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 there’s increased fears about what this all means for a looming winter heating crisis. In such circumstances, you might expect it to be all hands to the pump in Westminster to try to calm fears. But over at 10 Downing Street and the Treasury, it seems that there’s a more relaxed approach to Britain’s current economic woes.