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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Poor old Andy and those sad eyes of his. The Mayor of Greater Manchester has had a pretty rotten day, being blocked by his own party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) by some eight votes to one. His sole backer was Lucy Powell, whose candidacy for deputy leader was memorably likened to Lurleen to Burnham’s
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The Phoney War is no more. Former Labour minister Andrew Gwynne is on the brink of standing down as an MP, after losing the whip during last year’s WhatsApp group scandal. A by-election is therefore on the cards in Gwynne’s Manchester seat, potentially paving the way for the ever-ambitious local mayor Andy Burnham to return
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Another one bites the dust. After Kemi Badenoch expelled Robert Jenrick from the Conservative party in Westminster, it seems that her Welsh counterpart Darren Millar this week wants to get in on the act too. This morning he released a statement on X, declaring that he expelled James Evans MS from both the Welsh shadow
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Oh dear. Less than 24 hours after Keir Starmer did his big Hugh Grant act over Greenland, Donald Trump has decided to make the Prime Minister’s life eve worse. The US President has overnight turned his guns on the Chagos deal, which is currently in the final stages of parliamentary scrutiny. Trump wrote on Truth
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It seems that Kemi Badenoch isn’t done with Robert Jenrick just yet. Tonight she is set to meet Tory MPs from both the 92 Group and the Common Sense Group. But before that, Tory apparatchiks have sought to finish what she started on Thursday when she sacked Robert Jenrick from the Shadow Cabinet, expelled him
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So, who’s gonna be the next to go? The rate of Reform switchers has stepped out in recent days with both Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell taking the plunge. But while elements of the Conservative parliamentary party seems to enjoy staging a performance of And Then There Were None, Kemi Badenoch is happier acting as
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It seems that Nigel Farage has not taken too kindly to all Kemi Badenoch’s talk of ‘cleaning house’. The leader of Reform UK has had his fair share of run-ins with different Tory MPs since being elected to parliament in 2024, even going so far as to call half of them ‘stuffy, boring old bastards’
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Leave it to Donald Trump to knock Robert Jenrick off the news cycle. The US President has not taken too kindly to the European contigent sent to Greenland, amid his continued threats to annexe the Danish territory. This afternoon Trump announced plans to hit the UK, Denmark and other European countries with a 10 per
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Can Keir Starmer get anything right? Just days after yet another U-turn on digital ID, it now seems that his flagship ‘Hillsborough law’ will provoke a Labour rebellion too. The bill is designed to impose a legal duty on public officials to act truthfully and support investigations into the state to ensure wrongdoing is not
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Oh dear. With the right in civil war, Keir Starmer might have thought his week was ending on a high, after yet another U-turn – this time over digital ID. But his loose-lipped cabinet have done it again, telling the Times that they believe Kemi Badenoch’s dramatic sacking of Robert Jenrick ought to serve as a
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Congratulations to Craig Guildford who has finally realised whatever else knew two days ago. The disgraced West Midlands Police chief has, at last, bowed to the inevitable and quit his post with immediate effect. It comes after the Home Secretary announced on Wednesday that she had ‘lost faith’ in Guildford after his force made misleading
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It’s a treacherous business, politics. One day you’re the future Tory leader, the next you’re sitting on the independent benches with Ayoub Khan. But Robert Jenrick’s expulsion from the shadow cabinet has meant a spot has opened up at the top table for another leading light. To replace Jenrick as shadow justice secretary, Kemi Badenoch
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So. Farewell then Robert Jenrick. The most popular member of the shadow cabinet (according to ConservativeHome at least) was this morning axed from the top team. Kemi Badenoch claims that she has been handed ‘clear irrefutable evidence’ that he was about to switch sides, ahead of a Reform press conference later today. There is still
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Congratulations to the Met: you are officially no longer the worst run police force in the United Kingdom. The West Midlands force, led by their flailing chief Craig Guildford, are doing the damnedest to take the crown off Sir Mark Rowley and his London rozzers. The centre of the Birmingham controversy is the intelligence used
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It was just 18 months ago that Keir Starmer took office, pledging to ‘stop the endless Conservative chaos’. How times change. Far from a politics that ‘treads more lightly on your lives’, it seems that every week now there is a fresh U-turn as the government totters like a punch-drunk boxer, stumbling from one crisis to
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When David Lammy announced that the Chagos Islands were to be handed over to Mauritius, it was greeted as the moment when the sun finally set on the British Empire. But a group of hardy peers are determined to rage, rage against the dying of the light, by doing their damnedest to hold up the
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During Covid, it used to be asked what Boris Johnson the journalist would make of Boris Johnson the Prime Minister. The same must be asked of Keir Starmer: what would the onetime civil liberties lawyer make of the incumbent premier? Having halved the number of afternoon lobby briefings in a bid to control the narrative,
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Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this then? It is a new year but the same old lines from Sir Mark Rowley, the permanently under-fire chief of the Metropolitan Police. Britain’s top bobby has been copping a fair bit of flack recently, amid never-ending questions about the behaviour of London’s bobbies and criticism of the capital’s
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The Dark Lord is back. Peter Mandelson has resurfaced, four months after being sacked as US ambassador for his links to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. In his first interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the Labour peer said he never saw girls at Epstein’s properties, and declined to apologise to the late paedophile’s victims for
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A new year and new headaches for the Labour whips’ office. Karl Turner, the long-serving MP for Hull East, has not taken too well to David Lammy’s plans to curb jury trials. He has been going out and about on the media airwaves, threatening all kinds of terrible trouble if the government don’t drop their