Steerpike

Steerpike

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

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Truss on Sunak’s smoking ban

It’s going to be a long day for Rishi Sunak. It’s the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill and the Prime Minister is expecting to see a number of his own politicians vote against his smoking ban this evening. Opponents of the bill include Sir Simon Clarke and Sir John Hayes while Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch are understood to be considering voting against Sunak's proposal. And now former PM and passionate libertarian Liz Truss has made her intervention in the Chamber. Blasting the government for trying to make the decisions of adults for them with its ‘virtue-signalling piece of legislation’, Truss voiced her concerns that the smoking ban proposals were ‘emblematic of a technocratic establishment in this country that wants to limit people’s freedom’.

Steerpike

Khan changes his tune on fact-checking

There's 16 days to go until the London elections and Labour is comfortably in the lead. But is Sadiq Khan now feeling the heat? Perusing Twitter/X this morning, Mr S could not help but notice a new account has sprung up, under the name of 'London Tory Fact Check'. Its bio reads simply 'Exposing London Tory lies all day, every day' and its cover image bears the name of London Labour's regional director. Such tactics are usually considered part and parcel of normal political life. But Khan has form for being holier-than-thou on such matters. Back in 2020, he publicly attacked the Conservatives for spreading 'fake news masquerading as "facts"' after the party set up their own fact-checking website.

Steerpike

Brussels police move to shut down Farage at NatCon

Happy NatCon day, one and all. Yes, it's that time of year again, when some of Europe's most vocal right-wing exponents get together in a room for the annual National Conservatism conference. Last year's shindig was in Westminster and spawned numerous headlines about Miriam Cates and Lee Anderson. This time though it's being held in Brussels: home of well-paid Eurocrats and overzealous officials. Where better to make a stand for conservatism? Among those flying the flag for Britain is keynote speaker Suella Braverman and longtime MEP Nigel Farage. But the former Ukip leader encountered some difficulty this morning after arriving on stage at the Claridge venue in the Belgian capital.

Steerpike

SNP ditches public trust question from national survey

If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question. That seems to be the mantra by which the SNP is currently abiding. Careful analysis of the many, many years of the ferry fiasco to the recent confusion over former health secretary Michael Matheson’s iPad bill has shown that important queries haven't always been voiced when they should have been. And now, the latest example of question avoidance relates to a rather sensitive matter for the Scottish government: public trust.  It transpires that SNP ministers have quietly scrapped a question on this very issue from the Scottish Household Survey. The poll asks the public to rate their trust levels on everything from the civil service to local councils to the police.

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Lloyd Russell-Moyle called out over his behaviour in gender debate

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, received a rather humiliating dressing down in the Commons today. His ticking off followed the Health Secretary's statement on Dr Hilary Cass's report into gender services. During his intervention, a holier-than-thou Russell-Moyle welcomed the report for moving the discussion on but claimed that his reading of the review found fault with people being 'particularly nasty and vicious on all sides'. The Labour MP spoke of how he had faced abuse himself over the trans issue, and posters with 'rude words' had been put outside his house.

Steerpike

Sunak’s popularity among Tory members hits new low

Uh oh. The Prime Minister hasn't been back from Easter recess for one full day yet and he's already facing bad news. In the latest poll of Tory party members by ConservativeHome, Rishi Sunak's net satisfaction rating has dropped to a new low of, er, -27.7. In fact, Sunak is the least popular member of his entire cabinet — with the exception of illegal migration minister Michael Tomlinson. It's not exactly a record to boast about... Sunak's score has dropped by 4.6 points since last month, and by just under 10 since February. There are now 12 ministers with negative overall ratings — and the scores at the top of the chart are hardly anything to get excited about. Up top is Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, with a rating of 56.2.

Steerpike

Exclusive: Liz Truss interview – ‘The world was safer when Trump was in charge’

Eighteen months have passed since Liz Truss left Downing Street and after an initial period of silence, she has been making up for lost time. In recent months, Truss has tabled a bill in parliament, launched her own ‘Popular Conservatism’ movement and even done the lecture circuit in the US. And now, at last, the former PM has released her long-awaited memoirs, detailing what went wrong in office and who is really to blame. Ten Years to Save the West sets out Truss’s philosophy for a better Conservatism and a better world – and the former Prime Minister has sat down with The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson in her very first TV interview about the book.

Steerpike

Watch: David Cameron says Iran has suffered ‘double defeat’

The question of how Israel will respond to Iran's attack dominated David Cameron's first broadcast round since he became Foreign Secretary last year. Immediately condemning Iran’s attack as a ‘very, very dangerous act in an already dangerous world’ on BBC Breakfast, Cameron added that ‘fortunately, it was a failure’. The Foreign Secretary told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that ‘Iran has suffered a double defeat: a defeat because they’ve failed, but a second defeat because the world can now see that they are the malign influence in the region’. But it’s not Iran that Israel should be focusing on now, Cameron believes: They have every right to respond and you’d understand that as an Israeli citizen, you’d be thinking ‘my country came under attack, we must respond’.

Saturday

Steerpike

Watch: Pro-indy filmmaker’s bizarre currency claim

Another day, another nationalist gaffe. This time it’s pro-indy filmmaker and columnist — for that august journal the National — Lesley Riddoch in the spotlight. In a rather bizarre attempt to persuade the good people of Scotland that independence wouldn't be a terrible idea, Riddoch has demonstrated exactly why the Nats should not be in charge.  In a stilted documentary clip, Riddoch tries to contrast the Denmark-Sweden crossing with one that could exist between Scotland and England in an alternate reality. As she’s driving, Riddoch tells the camera of the ‘frictionless border between two different countries’. They have ‘different systems, different languages and different currencies’. She goes on: Does that get in the way of cross-border trade?

Steerpike

Diane Abbott’s private school hypocrisy

Oh dear. It seems that the sage of Hackney has blundered once more. Having lost the Labour whip last year for an asinine antisemitism letter, Diane Abbott is doing little it seems to try and win it back. She took to Twitter yesterday to criticise Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, for daring to suggest that a Labour government would use private healthcare to cut the NHS backlog. 'There is no principled case for using the private sector,' she sniffed. 'Just as the “spare capacity” in private health Wes talks about does not exist. Only #NHS doctors, nurses and the £million contracts Wes will give them.' So it was left to Streeting, a comprehensive state school boy, to deliver the obvious retort to Abbott, who famously sent her own son to the elite City of London School.

Friday

Steerpike

Scottish government spent £400,000 on promoting new hate crime law

Back to Scotland and Humza Yousaf’s controversial new hate law. The First Minister’s Hate Crime Act has left an already overstretched and under-resourced police force swamped with trivial complaints. Of the over 7,000 reports made in the first week, only three per cent of these were actual crimes. And now the spotlight is on the rather strange public information campaign released by the Scottish government. Not only was it pretty ineffective at communicating exactly what a hate crime is (hence the low crime to report ratio), it has now transpired that it cost the taxpayer nearly, um, £400,000. Crikey.

Steerpike

Police launch investigation into Rayner housing claims

Well, well, well. Less than 24 hours after Keir Starmer tried to brush off questions about Angela Rayner, it turns out she is now the subject of a formal police investigation. Greater Manchester Police have this morning confirmed it is looking into claims that the Labour deputy leader may have mispaid capital gains tax over the 2015 sale of a property in Manchester. Rayner has denied wrongdoing but she has refused to publish tax advice which she claims exonerates her – and has not shown it directly to Sir Keir Starmer. GMP re-examined an earlier decision not to investigate after a complaint by Tory Bury MP James Daly. The Times reported yesterday that more than a dozen of Rayner’s former neighbours had yet to be contacted by police.

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: Tetchy Starmer wriggles over Rayner’s tax affairs

Angela Rayner appears unable to shake off questions about her tax affairs — literally. And now in an interview with ITV Granada, even Sir Keir Starmer’s confidence in his deputy doesn’t seem to be watertight. The media attention on his second-in-command continues after weeks of speculation about whether Rayner avoided capital gains tax on her council house and broke electoral law. The deputy Labour leader has refused to make her tax details public and Starmer hasn't even seen the legal advice she received on the matter himself.

Steerpike

Reform apologises for not realising candidate had died

Uh oh. Reform UK has not had an easy ride with its general election candidates, to put it mildly. Richard Tice’s party has already had to drop ten prospective candidates for posting inappropriate comments on social media, including one who identified as a ‘pastafarian’ while another called for documentary maker David Attenborough to be ‘killed off’. It has now come to light that over 50 others were ditched for ‘complete inactivity’ — including York Central's Tommy Cawkwell, whose lack of campaigning was down to the fact that he was, um, deceased. A party spokesperson said today that Reform was ‘mortified’ for not knowing the RNLI volunteer had died, adding: ‘I can only apologise profusely for my mistake.

Steerpike

JK Rowling won’t forgive Harry Potter actors for trans stance

All is not well in the Harry Potter universe. Author of the hit wizarding novels and prominent women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling has revealed that, even if they apologise, she will not go easy on the lead actors of the Potter films for their stance on the trans debate. Less, er, expecto forgiveness and more expelliarmus…  Rowling’s comments come in the wake of the published report by top paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, which found that ‘remarkably weak evidence’ and a ‘lack of high-quality research’ had allowed young people in the UK to change their gender. In a series of tweets, the acclaimed writer blasted supporters of gender-altering treatment in children and said they should apologise to ‘traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women’.

Steerpike

Boris lashes out at Rishi’s ‘mad’ smoking ban

Oh dear. Having his leadership questioned is becoming an almost-daily occurrence for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. When he announced he was going to introduce a smoking ban at the Conservative party conference in October, there were people in his own party rather aghast at the proposal, with more recent talk of a rebellion on the issue. And now Sunak’s predecessor Boris Johnson has sided with the PM's rivals… Sunak wants to phase out smoking by raising the legal age for the purchase of tobacco by one year, every year, from 2027 onwards. But the health-focused PM is facing a backlash from his own politicians.

Steerpike

Watch: Canadian MPs sing God Save the King after constitutional motion defeat

Well, well, well. In a turn of events that is good news for Canada’s monarchists, a motion that would have amended the country’s Constitution Act — and made the oath to Canada’s monarch optional for MPs — was, on Wednesday, defeated. 113 voted for the motion while 197 voted against it. A cross-party group of parliamentarians, including those from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, killed the bill. This means that the Canadian Constitution will remain as is, with every new MP required to swear they will be ‘faithful and bear true allegiance’ to the current monarch before they can legally assume their seat. Meanwhile, Quebec-based parties were keen to see changes that would have allowed politicians to swear an ‘oath of office’.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch: Tory tax protestors target Rayner in Teesside

Try as she might to duck questions on her tax affairs, the issue just keeps following Angela Rayner around — literally. On a campaign event today in Teesside, the deputy Labour leader was met by three men in high-vis jackets, one of whom was later identified as local Tory councillor John Coulson who took part in the protest alongside other Conservative councillors. The men were carrying an ominous black banner that read: ‘Angela Rayner Tax Dodger?’ Where Rayner walked around Yarm, her unexpected guests went too. In fact, so hot on Rayner’s tail were the protestors that the shadow levelling up secretary eventually had to leg it out the back of a pub she'd just walked into. Not like Labour to about turn...

Steerpike

Labour overtakes SNP in polls for first time

Uh oh. Today brings tidings of misery for hapless Humza Yousaf as a new poll reveals that support for Labour has overtaken the SNP for the first time since the 2014 indyref. The YouGov survey sees Labour on 33 per cent, up a point since October last year, while support for the Nats has gone down by two points to 31 per cent. How the mighty fall… Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has been narrowing the gap between the two parties for the last year, with the resignation, police probe and arrest of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon providing a helping hand. Meanwhile support for independence has stagnated, with 'yes' stuck at six points behind 'no'.

Steerpike

The ten candidates dropped by Reform

Reform UK's election campaign hasn’t got off to the best start. Richard Tice’s party has already had to drop ten prospective parliamentary candidates after some rather unsavoury social media posts were highlighted by media organisations and campaign groups. The Reform leader has since said that his party had published its candidate list early so that outside organisations could help vet them and that he welcomes the ‘extra scrutiny’. It does, however, raise rather serious questions about the quality of his own vetting processes… Here is the full list of the candidates ditched so far: Ian Harris Harris, a self-proclaimed ‘pastafarian’, is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.