Steerpike

Sound the by-election claxon, Runcorn is a-go! Yes, that's right – five months after his kerfuffle on the kerb, Mike Amesbury has (for once) done the decent thing. In an interview with the BBC, the disgraced ex-Labour MP today declared it is his intention to resign from the House of Commons 'shortly' and trigger a by-election in his Cheshire constituency. It will be the first by-election of the parliament – and a chance for Reform to replace the gap left by Rupert Lowe. Amesbury told the BBC that he will begin the 'statutory process' of winding up his office before resigning as an MP 'as soon as possible'. He was last month given a 10-week prison sentence, suspended for two years, after he admitted assaulting Paul Fellows.

Oh dear, it looks like the civil war engulfing Reform UK is showing no sign of simmering down. On Friday, the political party currently leading in the polls went into complete meltdown after it announced that it had reported one of its MPs, Rupert Lowe, to the police and was suspending the whip. Party chairman Zia Yusuf and chief whip Lee Anderson alleged that they had received complaints about serious bullying from Lowe, and accused him of making ‘threats of physical violence against our Party Chairman.’ For his part, Lowe has completely denied the allegations which he says are ‘untrue and false’ and says he is seeking legal advice.

It's a day ending in 'y', which means the Scottish Nats are arguing amongst themselves again. Ex-SNP MP Mhairi Black has taken a pop at the party's former Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon in a new BBC documentary released this week about her time in politics. In the programme – in which Black blasts Westminster culture and laments the toll it took on her mental health – the outspoken nationalist took a pop at Sturgeon over the SNP's careerist culture. In the Beeb's new show, one of Black's friends read out an article about the former first minister's comments that there were too many careerists in the Scottish National party.

Oh dear. Poor Richard Tice is the latest politician to have an embarrassing memory lapse. During his first trip to Scotland of 2025, the Boston and Skegness MP appeared in Glasgow this morning to reveal his party’s newest defectors. Except, er, he couldn’t quite remember their names… When he was grilled by one Scottish hack about the surnames of new recruits ‘John and Ross’, Tice couldn’t recall them. In fact, the party’s deputy leader didn’t appear to know all that much about the pair at all. ‘What are their surnames?’ the journalist pressed. ‘I’m answering policy questions,’ an irate Tice shot back. An excruciating back-and-forth ensued – during which Tice attempted to shrug off the reporter after he quizzed him on which councils his defectors were from.

It's a day ending in 'y' – which means there's more bad news for the BBC. Now the government has taken aim at the broadcaster, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy slamming the Beeb today in a parliamentary statement. In the scathing text, Nandy wrote of how she is ‘deeply shocked and disappointed’ about the Hamas documentary revelations and noted pointedly that she is not yet convinced similar slip-ups won’t happen again. Last week the corporation apologised for the release of a Gaza documentary in which the child narrator was later found to be the son of a Hamas minister. AND the Culture Secretary is far from impressed by how the BBC has handled the whole thing.

The western world might be collapsing but here in Westminster it is business as usual. In one of parliament's dusty old committee rooms, Kim Leadbeater's Assisted Dying Bill continues to slowly make its way through the legislative process, one agonising line at a time. But if you hoped that this exercise would be a Socratic discussion of open minds, you might be left somewhat disappointed. Virtually all of the amendments proposed have been struck down by the pro-Bill majority on the committee, by near-identical margins. Today it was the turn of the amendment on Down's Syndrome. The committee voted by 13 to 8 to exclude specific provision on the face of the bill for support for those with Down's syndrome when initiating conversations on assisted suicide and death.

When you've got a majority of 167, how do you keep control? The answer, it seems, is jobs for the boys (and girls). Another round of government appointments made a week ago has seen yet more new MPs promoted. Alex Barros-Curtis, Joe Morris and Jack Abbott are among the 2024 intake who ascended the first rung on the ministerial pecking order by being named parliamentary private secretaries (PPS). But it was the appointment of Mark Ferguson as a bag carrier at the Ministry of Housing which caught Steerpike's eye. The Gateshead Central MP gushed on LinkedIn that he is ‘especially excited to serve our Deputy Prime Minister and my friend Angela Rayner, who is driving forward change at pace’.

Well, you can't say they don't try. With Europe still reeling from Donald Trump's oval office bust-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, over in Scotland the SNP have piped up to make their feelings known about the American President. Never ones to miss a chance to try and stay relevant, the party's leader John Swinney took to the airwaves to insist that Prime Minister Keir Starmer retract the invitation of a second state visit for Trump to the UK. 'I cannot see how a state visit can go ahead for President Trump to the United Kingdom, if President Trump is not a steadfast ally of ours in protecting the future of Ukraine,' Swinney told the BBC. Swatting away the SNP's clamouring, it appears Starmer is having none of it.

Dear oh dear. Just as positive polling had lifted the spirits of the Scottish Nats, news of their membership exodus will bring them crashing down. As revealed by the august paper that is the Scotsman, the SNP has lost more than 5,500 members in six months alone. It’s hardly what you want to hear when you’ve an election to fight in a year, eh? The Scottish journal revealed that, as of 31 December 2024, the party had just 58,940 members – down from some 64,525 in the summer months. Not that SNP figures are strangers to an exodus, however. In 2019, the party had a staggering membership base totalling 125,000. This decreased to 103,884 in 2021.