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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Ping! An email arrives in Steerpike’s inbox. Some happy news for headline-starved hacks at last: the National Conservatism conference is back! After last year’s Westminster offering brought with it quotes galore from Miriam Cates and Suella Braverman, this year’s event in Brussels promises more of the same. For Braverman is now being billed as the
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Oh dear. In his never-ending quest to prove that he’s almost as funny as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert has tripped up again. The late-night American TV host was last night forced to issue a humiliating apology to the Princess of Wales after he produced a segment mocking her ‘disappearance’ and marriage – shortly before it
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It must be a hard job being the Metropolitan Police. Too hardline and you risk howls of protest from the left; too soft and you’re lambasted by the right. So Steerpike is pleased to bring his readers news of a policing decision that will please all inhabitants of the Westminster village, regardless of their political
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So. Farewell then Scott Benton. The disgraced Blackpool South MP today becomes the disgraced former Blackpool South MP after he announced plans to quit the House of Commons. In April last year Benton lost the Tory whip after being filmed in an undercover Times sting in which he offered to lobby for gambling industry investors.
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Come with Mr S on a trip down memory lane, to a long-forgotten era known as, er, the last parliament. Back then, Labour were all too keen to be all things to all men (and women). A prime example of that was the campaign by Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) to give compensation to
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Tough times for the Garrick Club, after the embarrassing leak of its membership list to the Guardian. Following the newspaper’s front-page splash on Tuesday, multiple senior Establishment figures quit the all-male club. They included MI6 boss Sir Richard Moore, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Robert Chote, the former head of the Office for
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On Monday evening at 6pm, the Princess of Wales announced her cancer diagnosis in a video message to the nation. Describing the news as a ‘shock’, there are reports that the family is optimistic about her prognosis. Watch the full clip here:
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It’s the end of another rocky week for Scotland’s First Minister. Humza Yousaf has been dealing with national outrage over the hate crime bill and remains under pressure to sack one of his closest allies in the party over an £11,000 iPad scandal. So Kate Forbes’s latest intervention is the last thing he needs. On
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Richard Tice is on a mission to crack down on ‘defamatory and libellous’ slurs against his party as the election draws closer. First, the Reform UK leader forced the BBC to issue a correction and an apology for using news agency copy that labelled Tice’s party as ‘far right’. Now, he’s got his sights set
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While the polls continue to predict a Labour victory at the next election, it’s not all rosy for Sir Keir Starmer. It transpires that his Labour party is still struggling to make a dent in the public consciousness. When quizzed on the big personalities at the top of the Labour Party, the good people of
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When you’re interviewing an expert, it never hurts to come prepared. But when Al Jazeera journalist Jane Dutton quizzed Douglas Murray on the conflict in the Middle East, the unsuspecting interviewer quickly became the interviewee in a rather humiliating twist… ‘You’ve got to inform your viewers of the facts, and you just misled them,’ Murray
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Just when you think the woke wars can’t get more ridiculous, they do. It transpires that the Diocese of Birmingham is advertising for the role of ‘Anti-Racism Practice Officer (Deconstructing Whiteness)’ to work in a ‘racial justice’ team across churches in the West Midlands for £36,000 a year — and Justin Welby is not happy
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Since she stepped down from her role as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has played witness to her party’s extraordinary slump in the polls, months of SNP infighting and her own arrest as part of the ongoing police probe. But, Humza Yousaf insists, his predecessor will still campaign for the SNP in the upcoming general election.
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President Joe Biden has been touring Nevada and Arizona in an attempt to win back disgruntled Hispanic voters. ‘This guy despises Latinos,’ he said, speaking of his adversary Donald Trump, the inevitable Republican nominee. Trump’s response? He posted the following on his Truth Social page: Laugh or scorn all you want. The polls show Trump
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Should we expect a flash sale on Garrick Club memberships? The cabinet secretary Simon Case is the second high-profile figure to have quit the exclusive all-male club just hours after earnestly defending his position. The top mandarin follows MI6 chief Richard Moore out the door. The spy chief told his colleagues that he too planned
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It’s hardly been a week since Lee Anderson defected to the flanks of Reform UK and already the red wall rottweiler is making headlines again. Anderson put Rebecca Knox, chair of Dorset’s fire and rescue authority, on the spot at a Home Affairs Committee meeting today, after she described her own force as ‘institutionally racist’.
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As Labour prepares for power, the party’s leading lights are busy u-turning: not least on their views on Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is Labour’s inspiration du jour, much to the anger of the party’s lefties. First, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones claimed that Thatcher oversaw a decade of ‘national renewal’.
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Oh dear. As the Conservatives struggle to put the remarks of their biggest donor to bed, the governing party north of the border now has its own racism row to deal with. This week’s pro-indy ‘Scotonomics’ festival is being co-hosted in Dundee by founder Kairin van Sweeden, a former SNP councillor accused of racism last
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At long last, Simon Case has received his hearing date for the UK Covid Inquiry. The most senior civil servant in the country was initially excluded from the Inquiry for health reasons, but now that he’s back and fighting fit, the top mandarin has been told to appear in front of Baroness Hallett on 23
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Another day, another BBC blunder. This time the broadcaster admits that it was wrong to describe Richard Tice’s Reform UK party as ‘far-right’ in a recent news report: In an article about the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference we wrongly described the political party Reform UK as far-right when referring to polling. This sentence was subsequently