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
Oh dear. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar will have been hoping for some positive headlines this weekend, as his party’s 2025 conference looms next week – but it wasn’t to be. New Norstat polling for the Sunday Times, interviewing 1,026 people between 11-14 February, suggests Sarwar’s group is heading for its worst Holyrood election result
To Germany, where the Munich Security Conference is in full swing. The city is hosting a number of political bigwigs – although Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t make an appearance – including US Vice President JD Vance. Addressing the conference this afternoon, the VP gave a rather punchy speech, first taking aim at Nato before
Well, well, well. It turns out that just under £1 million was spent on Jobcentre translation last year, with £882,118 splashed on language assistance including the International Pension Service. The figure was revealed in a parliamentary answer from the Department for Work and Pensions to Reform’s Rupert Lowe this week – who has called on
Back to the assisted dying bill which, it would appear, seems to be dying a slow death itself. The legislation is losing support after an amendment was introduced by its sponsor Kim Leadbeater – which removes the need for a high court judge to approve cases – ruffled feathers, with the Sun newspaper now coming
To Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is, er, not very busy. In fact, Mr S can reveal the SNP’s former Dear Leader has made a grand total of two spoken contributions in the Holyrood Chamber over the last 12 months. One was during a debate on Ukraine while another speech reminded MSPs that more needs to
As birthdays go, this is unlikely to be Rachel Reeves’s most enjoyable – thanks to an unexpected present from the BBC. Its journalists have been busy digging around the Chancellor’s CV claims – detailed in Mr S’s full timeline here – and the corporation has accused Reeves of exaggerating how long she spent working at
Uh oh. Former Labour health minister Andrew Gwynne was sacked and suspended at the weekend after some rather controversial message exchanges involving the MP were revealed. A second MP, Oliver Ryan, had the whip removed on Monday after his role in the controversial group chat – ‘Trigger Me Timbers’ – came to light. But now,
It wasn’t Kemi Badenoch’s best day in the House of Commons today. But amid Keir Starmer’s endless demands that the Tory leader ‘do the homework’, the Prime Minister might just have slipped up halfway through the weekly Q&A. Badenoch asked her Labour counterpart about a ruling by an immigration judge which suggests that Palestinian migrants
Sir Keir Starmer’s Attorney General has had a rather rocky start to his role. Richard Hermer KC has come under scrutiny over his links to Sir Keir Starmer’s controversial Chagos deal, his stance on slavery reparations and his position on Israel. And now, at Prime Minister’s Questions today, the Prime Minister had to fend off questions
How much does a sell-out cost? Mr S has been trying for months now to work out what the Chagos deal will mean for British taxpayers. The Financial Times originally reported an estimated total bill of £9bn – before the Mauritian prime minister suggested last week the sum would be much higher. With a sum
Desperate times call for desperate measures seems to the mantra of the day in Labour HQ. First a foreign office minister insisted that ceding the Chagos Islands was essential to avoid, er, war – and now Labour MP Stella Creasy has invoked Paddington Bear to stand up for illegal migrants. You couldn’t make it up…
Just when you think Labour’s Chagos saga can’t get any stranger, it does. Now foreign minister Stephen Doughty has claimed that ceding the archipelago to Mauritius is necessary to avoid sparking war. Writing in the Times today, Doughty has rather bafflingly insisted that there is a risk foreign powers like China or Russia could exploit
And there we have it. Baroness Gray of Tottenham has entered the House of Lords. Sir Keir’s former chief of staff Sue Gray has today become a Labour peer after a whirlwind seven months under Starmer’s government. The political peerages document dropped in December after the nominations from the PM, Kemi Badenoch and Sir Ed
Another day, another positive poll result for Reform. The latest Westminster voting intention poll from YouGov shows Nigel Farage’s party swooping into first place – again. More than a quarter of Brits would vote for the Reform crowd if there were a general election tomorrow, with the party up a point since last week and
It was a late-night showdown in the Commons yesterday evening. The terrain? Labour’s Border, Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. But while the legislation was passed – by Pyongyang-style majorities – on the back of Labour votes, a row has now broken out over whether the Tories or Reform were more effective in their opposition. Nigel
The BBC is back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. As the trial between the Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie and NHS Fife continues – after Peggie’s suspension over questioning the use of female-only facilities by trans doctor Beth Upton – it seems that the Beeb can’t quite seem to work out how to
Back to the assisted dying bill. It has emerged that the legislation’s requirement for a senior judge to approve whether someone should be allowed to end their life has been removed over concerns about the toll it could take on Britain’s struggling courts. An amendment put forward by Kim Leadbeater, the bill’s sponsor, has now
Just what is going on at the BBC? It was only a fortnight ago that Laura Kuenssberg was ‘hacked‘ ahead of the launch of her new show. And now it is the turn of a second Beeb bigwig to suffer the same fate, apparently at the hands of another crypto scam. Nick Robinson, the star of
Another day, another Labour drama. Now a second parliamentarian involved in a rather distasteful WhatsApp group has been suspended after former minister Andrew Gwynne was sacked at the weekend over his rather strange message exchanges. It transpires that Oliver Ryan, MP for Burnley, has this afternoon had the whip removed after it emerged he was
With Sue Gray gone, one might have expected the Labour government’s infighting to have subsided. But there is a new public enemy now: Richard Hermer KC. The Attorney General has caused quite the commotion during his time in the top job, with questions raised over his links to Sir Keir Starmer’s controversial Chagos deal, his