Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Corbynistas are becoming more Machiavellian by the day

Who held the power in the supposedly inappropriate relationship between Labour MP Simon Danczuk and gorgeous, pouting etc seventeen-year-old Sophena Houlihan? The fragrant young lady bombarded the loopy old goat with a string of lascivious text messages, in which she fantasised about having sex with him. An odd fantasy, I admit, but each to their own. Anyway, it’s hardly surprising that Danczuk panted after her, drooling like a Doberman Pinscher presented with a sack of offal. And now the ghastly woman has decided that Danczuk’s behaviour was ‘unprofessional’. This isn’t just any old hypocrisy – this is Marks and Spencer’s level hypocrisy. Now Danczuk has been suspended, the police got

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Is the dream over? Team Corbyn gives Jeremy’s economic guru the ‘cold shoulder’

Back in August — after much anticipation — Jeremy Corbyn finally revealed some of his economic policies to the world. His policies — also known as ‘Corbynomics’ — took inspiration from the tax expert Richard Murphy’s blog. While several of the ideas — which included reclaiming the £120bn ‘tax gap’ and quantitative easing — were described as ‘starry-eyed, hard left’ policies by Labour’s Chris Leslie, Corbyn was not put off. The Labour leader invited Murphy — who is not a party member — to Labour conference. In fact, Murphy even thought at one point that he was in line for a role in the Labour Treasury team. Alas the dream appears to have come to an

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron tries to soothe MPs ahead of challenging year for party management

David Cameron’s pledge to his MPs that none of them who want to stand again in 2020 will be left behind as a result of the boundary changes is a sign that the Prime Minister thinks party management will be seriously important this year. A fight between MPs over fewer constituencies would have been bad for party morale, and inevitably theories about MPs favoured by the party leadership being kept safe would have spread through the party. But given the changes aren’t being submitted until 2018, the decision to announce the ‘no-one left behind’ pledge now suggests that Cameron thinks 2016 is a good year to calm any Conservative nerves

Thursday

The Spectator

Soggy thinking

As the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, Lord Deben, observed this week, there is a bizarre dislocation between the government’s pronouncements on climate change and its attitude towards spending on flood defences. Only a month ago, David Cameron was at the Paris climate summit lending his weight to apocalyptic warnings of flood and tempest unless the world acted quickly to reduce carbon emissions. Yet with tracts of northern cities underwater, his government continues with a make-do-and-mend flood-defence policy which, never mind climate change, is incapable of dealing with the climate we already have. While lecturing us on the threat of greater rainfall and rising sea levels, the government

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Jeremy Corbyn must be delighted by Simon Danczuk’s suspension from Labour

Simon Danczuk’s lightning-fast suspension from Labour – as they investigate whether he sent ‘lewd’ texts to a seventeen-year-old girl – is an embarrassing note to end the year on. Especially for an MP like Danczuk who has spent much of the last few years positioning himself as a campaigner against child abuse. He has described today’s story in the Sun as being ‘not entirely accurate’ but has suggested that his behaviour ‘was inappropriate’. ‘I was stupid and there’s no fool like an old fool’ he said via Twitter. My behaviour was inappropriate & I apologise unreservedly to everyone I've let down. I was stupid & there's no fool like an old fool — Simon Danczuk (@SimonDanczuk) December 31, 2015

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham pinpoints Labour’s problem

Labour is very cross about a knighthood going to the man who ran the election campaign that beat the party in May. Andy Burnham issued a statement about Lynton Crosby’s inclusion in the New Year’s Honours list which was supposed to highlight what his party thinks is an abuse of the system. But really, it just highlights his party’s own failings. The Shadow Home Secretary said: ‘This outrageous award is the clearest evidence yet that the Tories think they can get away with whatever they like. It is a timely reminder that Labour must make it a New Year’s resolution to stop facing inwards and expose them for what they

Douglas Murray

Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam? | 31 December 2015

Written after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January and revised after the Paris attacks in November, Douglas Murray’s piece on politicians’ responses to Islamic terror attacks was The Spectator‘s third most read article of 2015: The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony

James Forsyth James Forsyth

I won’t be Corbyn’s man in London . . .

Sadiq Khan has long been known as one of Labour’s most pugnacious politicians: someone who likes to fight, and likes to win. The son of a bus driver, he became a human rights lawyer, entered parliament in 2005 and that same year was named newcomer of the year at The Spectator’s parliamentary awards. He ran Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign in 2010 and led Labour’s fierce — and surprisingly effective —campaign in London last year. Now, his sights are set on reclaiming City Hall for Labour and persuading even those on the right that he is the natural heir to Boris Johnson. ‘I want Spectator readers to give me a second

Peter Oborne

Benghazi notebook

In their interview in the Christmas edition of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth asked the Prime Minister whether he now considered that his intervention in Libya had been a mistake. David Cameron accepted that matters could have gone better since the fall of Gaddafi, but insisted that ‘what we were doing was preventing a mass genocide’. Like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi’s genocide seems to have been a fiction. It was reiterated over and over again by government and in the media in order to whip up support for the imposition a no-fly zone in March 2011. However, there was never any convincing evidence. Later that

The Spectator

Next year’s war

From ‘The Military Situation’, The Spectator, 1 January 1916: The opening of a new year is a time for taking stock of our situation. When we look back upon the beliefs and predictions of a year ago, we have to admit that there have been many disappointments and that unforeseen things have happened; but war would not be war if it were not full of surprises. We have as much to be thankful for as to deplore, and on the whole we think there is a good balance to our credit. We are a visibly winning people. If we were a losing people, we should be lamenting by this time all

Jan Morris

From Celtic tiger to pussycat

After a healthy Irish lunch I drove blithely off through the streets of Roscrea, I think it was, to find that everywhere I went the populace was cheerfully waving at me, smiling, gesticulating or blowing horns. When I stopped to ask them why, I found that I had left on the roof of my car a wallet containing my entire worldly wealth, cash, credit cards and all. So paradoxically enjoyable was all this, so irresistibly amused and sympathetic were the bystanders, that I came to think of the event as a sort of leitmotif of my visit to Ireland. For whatever else has happened to the Republic, through it all

Robert Colvile

Bye, George

The race to be London Mayor is the biggest personality contest in politics. And one personality looms largest: George Galloway, back from Bradford and seeking his fortune on the capital’s streets. In his public appearances, the Respect party leader has been on his usual bombastic form. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent that his campaign — and his career — is on the shakiest ground. In 2012, Galloway won the Bradford West by-election by 10,000 votes: a staggering coup. But at the general election this year his party was drummed out of town. Not only did Galloway lose, but Respect’s four councillors (who had only recently rejoined

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

France: #ToutsAuBistrot!

My word, I do like the French! That’s up there with things I thought I’d never say, like ‘Just the one, please.’ But after spending three days in Paris two weeks after the Islamist massacre, I have become their biggest fan. Yes, I’m fully aware that the Parisiennes aren’t the French –— but the pedants among you will please overlook the sweeping generalisation. I thought it was important, having read that France had already lost €2 million worth of business due to a wave of cancellations, to show support. When I read that Parisiennes were trending the hashtag ‘#ToutsAuBistrot’, it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we arrived on the first day

Wednesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why I’ve finally given up on the Left

Nick Cohen’s cover piece in the Spectator on the demise of the Labour party – and of his own support for it – is the 4th most-read magazine piece of 2015. ‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the

Benjamin Weinthal

Meet Jeremy Corbyn’s German doppelganger

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has a socialist doppelganger in Germany. Her name is Sahra Wagenknecht and she serves as co-chairperson of the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag—The Left Party. Her remarks blanketed the German media on Tuesday because she equated Islamic State terrorism in Paris with Britain’s aerial campaign designed to help destroy the terrorist organisation in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres of war. ‘Of course it is no less a crime to murder innocent civilians in Syria with bombs than it is to shoot them in Parisian restaurants and concert halls. One is individual terrorism, the other state-sponsored,’ Sahra Wagenknecht, an admirer of the now-defunct East German communist state

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Benedict Cumberbatch should take a vow of humility, not silence

Should celebrities really shut up about politics? Nick Timothy makes a persuasive argument on ConservativeHome that Benedict Cumberbatch et al should stop lecturing theatregoers and pontificating about Edward Snowden because they lower the standard of political debate in this country. He writes: ‘So if I had a wish for 2016, it would be that these pompous, hypocritical, self-obsessed political celebrities would take a vow of silence. If that proves impossible, surely it is time for our politicians and the media to stop humouring these vain and ignorant liberal luvvies. Doing so would be good not just for my sanity but the standard of political debate in this country – which

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

In defence of Jeremy Corbyn

At No 6 in our rundown of the Spectator’s most-read pieces of 2015 is a piece that takes a surprising stance. Freddy Gray’s November defence of Jeremy Corbyn as a ‘shockingly steadfast’ politician in contrast to David Cameron who ‘makes up his foreign policy as he goes along’ was hugely popular, and not just with the Corbynistas who support the Labour leader.  What strange people we Brits are. We spend years moaning that our politicians are cynical opportunists who don’t stand for anything. Then along comes an opposition leader who has principles — and appears to stick by them even when it makes him unpopular — and he is dismissed as

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Oliver Letwin had no choice but to apologise for ‘deeply racist’ memo

There is no point in anyone trying to defend Oliver Letwin’s 1985 memo to Margaret Thatcher in which the then aide to the Prime Minister argued that white people were not prone to public disorder and that regeneration of inner city areas would only result in those from ethnic minorities setting up ‘in the disco and drug trade’. No-one has really tried, though Tim Montgomerie has rather kindly said that in his experience, the Downing Street policy chief doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. But it’s clear that at some point the gaffe-prone minister had a racist thought, and that he was comfortable enough with that thought to put

Steerpike Steerpike

Miriam González Durántez’s Theresa May interview misses the mark on Today

This week the Today show is being edited by a selection of guests including Sir Bradley Wiggins, Lord Browne and the architect David Adjaye. The Welsh actor Michael Sheen kicked proceedings off on Monday when he managed to upset a number of flood victims as he dismissed calls to cut foreign aid in order to spend more on flood defences at home as a’false dichotomy’. Today it was the turn of Miriam González Durántez — the high-flying lawyer who is married to Nick Clegg — to take the helm. Durántez — who had presenters in a spin last week over whether it was okay to refer to her as Nick Clegg’s wife — gave her edit

Tuesday

Peter Oborne

What Ed Miliband got right

We’re republishing our ten most-read articles of 2015 and no8 is from Peter Oborne in defence of Ed Miliband. The Spectator has a proud tradition of running well-written features that go against the magazine’s own political sympathies and challenging conventional wisdom. In the end, Miliband lost – but on election day every opinion poll and bookmaker had him on course to win – or, at least, deny Cameron a majority. And those who think that Miliband’s manifesto was a pile of guff should ask why George Osborne has now implemented so much of it. Oborne’s piece is a wonderful example of the argument that almost prevailed. We also include his discussion with Dan Hodges. [audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_Feb_2015_v4.mp3″ title=”Peter Oborne and