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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All is not well in the Labour party. Diane Abbott has launched an attack on the Prime Minister over his behaviour towards her during the Frank Hester racism row. The Labour MP for Hackney North has told the Beeb that she felt Sir Keir Starmer treated her like a ‘non-person’ following the Tory donor fallout,
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There’s trouble in Sir Keir’s Labour paradise, it seems, after the Prime Minister jetted off to Italy for a migration-focused meet-up with Giorgia Meloni. The PM is struggling to find a small boat-busting strategy; with over 800 migrants crossing the Channel to English shores on Saturday alone, Starmer has turned to his European allies for
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To Glasgow’s Science Centre, where on Saturday Scotland’s former first minister Alex Salmond brought together a whole host of pro-indy voices for a nationalist natter. Featuring former SNP MPs Joanna Cherry, Alex Neil and Dr Philippa Whitford as well as online blogger Stuart Campbell (aka. Wings Over Scotland), Salmond’s ‘The Ayes Still Have It!’ was
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The Liberal Democrat party conference: surely a bastion of good old-fashioned free speech? Sadly not, it seems, given the storm which a single stall has provoked among activists down in Brighton.The party’s leadership has now been accused of ‘authoritarianism and intolerance’ over a backlash to a campaign group prompting single-sex spaces. Liberal Voice for Women,
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To Westminster magistrates’ court where Huw Edwards has this afternoon been handed a suspended jail sentence of six months imprisonment, suspended for two years after pleading guilty in July to making indecent images of children. The former TV star admitted to having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by another
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Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t been in office three months yet and already the Labour government is mired in cronyism controversies. One of the issues currently dogging the Prime Minister involves a rather wealthy donor Lord Alli and, er, Starmer’s wife. Last month, it emerged that Alli received a No. 10 pass after funding the PM’s
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Conference season has begun in earnest and the Lib Dems are having a whale of a time in Brighton. After their best results in a century, the party is in a bullish mood, with Sir Ed Davey even rocking up yesterday on a jet ski. The next James Bond perhaps? And it’s in that spirit
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If there’s something bad and you’re in a jam, who you gonna call? David Lammy! That’s right, the flailing Foreign Secretary has been out this morning doing his damnedest to defend the indefensible. The Talleyrand of Tottenham had something of a sticky wicket, following the Sunday Times revelations about gifts for Keir Starmer’s wife. And
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Oh dear. It seems that the ‘passes for glasses’ row isn’t going away any time soon. A month after it was revealed that Lord Alli had received a Downing Street pass after bankrolling Keir Starmer’s wardrobe, today’s Sunday Times contains a fresh development. Not content with dressing up the Prime Minister, it seems that Alli
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To the Women and Equalities Committee, to which Labour’s Sarah Owen has been elected chair. The Labour MP for Luton North achieved a majority of 7,500 in the July election and now has a select committee chairmanship under her belt too. But not everyone is especially thrilled by the announcement – not least because Owen
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Sir Keir’s Labour government hasn’t been in power for long but already his administration is causing quite the stir. Pub owners have fears about Starmer’s outdoor smoking ban, food companies are concerned about the junk food ad crackdown and, it turns out, everyone is rather down about Labour’s ‘£22 billion blackhole’ narrative. Chancellor Rachel Reeves
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While Sir Keir Starmer is trying hard to ban fun, the Scottish National party is hot on his heels. Now it transpires that, er, pint glasses with logos are proving too offensive for the Nats – with a possible crackdown on the horizon. Priorities, priorities… The SNP government has, it emerged, ordered experts to investigate
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Oh dear. It appears that Sir Keir Starmer’s own MPs are rather unhappy about the Prime Minister’s proposed smoking ban that would see a crackdown in beer gardens and shisha bars – so much so that one has even tabled a motion to oppose it. Talk about trouble in paradise… It transpires that Mary Glindon,
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To Scotland, where the closure of the country’s only oil refinery has been announced today. The site will shut next year – resulting in the loss of 400 jobs – after refining company Petroineos said it was unable to continue to compete with similar organisations around the world. With the news comes a wave of
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Sir Keir’s Labour government may be determined to deprive daily life of all fun, but there’s still a little humour left in politics yet. Now it transpires that when the government’s policing minister, Dame Diana Johnson, attended a meeting of senior police officers earlier this week, she, er, had her very own purse stolen. You
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Tensions are brewing between Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot and John Swinney’s SNP north of the border. Now Scotland Secretary Ian Murray has hit out at the Nats, urging the Scottish government to ditch their cack-handed foreign affairs efforts and focus on Scotland’s domestic issues instead. It’s not like they’ve already had almost two decades
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To the Trades Union Congress conference, where Mick Lynch is once again at the centre of political controversy. The RMT union boss took to the stage at a pro-Palestine fringe event to first berate the decisions of Foreign Secretary David Lammy before appearing to compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the, um, slave trade. Good
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With two months to go until his successor takes over, Rishi Sunak only has a handful of PMQs sessions left. But never fear: with the end of the Starmer/Sunak show comes a new leading man in the latter’s place. Nigel Farage – the man who loves to claim he’s the real ‘Leader of the Opposition’
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Ding ding! It’s not just in Westminster that the debate over illegal migration has got politicians tearing chunks out of each other. Over in Berlin, an emotional Olaf Scholz got up in front of the Bundestag to give his opponents a piece of his mind. The Chancellor’s speech was meant to be about the budget,
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Prisoners are out, the unions are striking and pensioners are having their winter fuel payments pulled. With Starmer’s Britain now bearing increasingly less resemblance to the land of milk and honey we were promised before the election, it’s good to see Labour MPs resorting to their default setting: banning things they just don’t like. Whether