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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Following the election of Tracy Brabin last week to the West Yorkshire mayoralty, a by-election is set to be held in the Red Wall constituency of Batley and Spen. The seat in question boasts a Labour majority of just 3,525 votes with local Tories licking their lips at the prospect of another Conservative gain in
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This morning’s Scottish Affairs select committee session got off to a rocky start when Tory leader Douglas Ross clashed with SNP chairman Pete Wishart. A buoyant Ross, who led his party to its best Holyrood results last week, kicked off by welcoming Scotland secretary Alister Jack and his mandarin Laurence Rockey to the committee but
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It appears the Queen has become the latest figure to be dragged into America’s culture wars after attending the State Opening of Parliament on Tuesday. Her speech, which set out the government’s policies for the new parliamentary session, mentioned a bill to introduce mandatory Voter ID in British elections – something that has caused the monarch to become lionised by some
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Last night the great and the not-so-good of Westminster piled into London’s O2 Arena to attend the Brit Awards, the UK’s first major in-person ceremony of the Covid era. Special advisers, Cabinet ministers and ordinary backbenchers were among the 4,000 in attendance to trial how live events might work after the pandemic, with no social distancing or face
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The Queen’s Speech yesterday may have seen the government’s fairly dry vision for modern Britain but a group of Conservative backbench MPs and peers have now banded together to propose their own alternative. Cracking down on immigration, breaking up the BBC and taking aim at woke policing are all proposed in a new book by
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Oh dear. Amid a smorgasbord of investigations into the collapse of Greensill capital and its lobbying operation, onetime adviser David Cameron has been forced to release all his messages to politicians and civil servants. Cameron and his personal employees bombarded senior ministers and officials with at least 50 emails, texts and WhatsApp messages about Greensill
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Under first George Osborne and now under new editor Emily Sheffield, the Evening Standard has become something of a safe exile for onetime players in the Cameroon government. But now it seems the winds of cross-party change are blowing through Northcliffe House as Sheffield took to Twitter to announce the newest signing for the self-proclaimed
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The Labour soap opera rumbles on. Just as Keir Starmer appeared to be moving past the turmoil of his botched reshuffle with a very public Commons walkabout with Angela Rayner, relations in the party have kicked off once again. Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary Carolyn Harris MP has resigned over allegations that she spread baseless rumours about Angela
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Since the conclusion of Brexit, former EU negotiator Michel Barnier has been keeping himself busy, releasing his own ‘secret journal’ of the talks and wading into the Jersey fishing row to claim ‘the British are behaving like buccaneers.’ For years the former French foreign minister was the toast of Britain’s Remainers, meeting Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Chuka
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Westminster is synonymous with the word ‘Dimbleby’, the surname of Britain’s premier broadcasting family. It was here that patriarch Richard cemented his reputation commenting on George VI’s lying-in-state in 1952 and where his two sons Jonathan and David both made their careers on countless BBC and ITV political programmes and all night election specials. But since
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While the Conservatives in Cornwall may celebrate winning control of the council in last week’s election, they had one notable setback: Liberal Democrat Thalia Marrington won the Mousehole, Newlyn and St Buryan division, which has been Tory for as long as anyone can remember. What did it take for the Tories to lose England’s biggest
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Left-wing figures are picking over the carcass of the Labour party this morning, after the party performed poorly in Hartlepool and in the local elections across the north and Midlands of England. With the Labour candidate for Hartlepool admitting this morning that he doesn’t know what Labour stands for, a fight is now on to
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With dozens of Labour councillors defeated across the country, the recriminations and inquests have already begun. Various reasons have been suggested for Tory gains across the Red Wall including the vaccine rollout and Boris Johnson’s own personal popularity, with Labour’s leadership using the occasion to (attempt) a reshuffle of its top team. One defeated Labour
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The London election results have finally been declared and it turns out the poll were not lying: Laurence Fox is not to be the capital’s mayor. The onetime actor lost his £10,000 deposit last night after managing just 47,364 votes or, as he preferred to call it, ‘a football stadium’s worth of voters.’ This was
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As the dust settles from Scotland’s elections and the war of words heats up over a future referendum, one thing is perfectly clear: Alex Salmond’s Alba party has been a monumental failure. The former First Minister, whose disastrous party launch six weeks ago set the tone for what followed, failed to be elected as one
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Having claimed earlier in the week that would he take ‘full responsibility’ for Labour’s election results, it took until 4 p.m. for Keir Starmer to emerge and face the media on what went wrong in Hartlepool. In contrast to a jovial Johnson who got to do his piece to camera in front of a twenty
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Oh dear. Labour’s loss of Hartlepool on a 16 point swing to the Tories has not gone down well with Keir Starmer’s most vocal critics. Lloyd Russell-Moyle was first out of the blocks this morning, tweeting shortly after midnight that ‘Good to see valueless flag waving and suit wearing working so well… or not?’ Fellow
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How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the
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This morning Labour are in damage limitation mode after the party’s candidate in the Hartlepool by election conceded defeat. However, not everyone has got the memo. Step forward Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the onetime shadow minister for natural environment and air quality who quit Starmer’s frontbench in July last year. The Brighton left-winger did not even wait
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Last month Steerpike revealed which politicians are set to release books after putting their respective lockdowns to good use. But it appeared Mr S missed one looming literary attraction – the release of Michel Barnier’s forthcoming memoirs about the Brexit talks. Barnier, who held the role of the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator between 2016 and 2021,
