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
Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford has caused a bit of a storm in the Westminster bubble this morning – the 22-year-old’s plea to the PM to extend free school meals into the summer holiday has not gone unnoticed. As Katy Balls writes this morning, there is a growing feeling among Tory backbenchers that the cost of the
Non-essential shops across Britain opened their doors for the first time since lockdown today, as the government attempts to breath some life into the UK economy, while avoiding a fatal spike of Covid-19. Retailers meanwhile, face the difficult task of persuading people that it is safe to shop in their stores as the pandemic recedes.
Today, it was announced that Emily Sheffield, founder of ‘This Much I Know News’ and former deputy editor of Vogue, has taken over as editor of the Evening Standard. She replaces former Chancellor George Osborne, who will now become editor-in-chief of the publication. Osborne spent three years at the helm of the paper. Sheffield takes
It’s been 45 years since the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ first aired on the BBC, in which Basil Fawlty coined the memorable line: ‘Don’t mention the war’. Perhaps now though it would be more apt to say, ‘don’t mention Fawlty Towers’. Last night the Guardian reported that the video streaming site UKTV (which is
Which statue will be the next to go? It won’t be Lord Baden-Powell’s if locals in Poole have their way. Campaigners want the effigy of the founder of the Scout movement to go because of his alleged racist views. But those who live in Dorset, where Baden-Powell’s statue gazes across to Brownsea Island, aren’t too
Yesterday, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that he was forming a new commission to investigate the landmarks, street names and statues of the capital, to see if they should be knocked down or renamed because of their racist past or links to the slave trade. The announcement came after a statue of the slave trader
London mayor Sadiq Khan promised today that he will begin the process of pulling down ‘inappropriate’ statues around London – after Bristolians dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the river at the weekend. To investigate London’s landmarks, Khan has created a ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ which will review statues
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has insisted that its decisions and policies have been led by the scientific advice on the virus. It’s a commitment that has allowed the government to convince the public that drastic interventions to stop the disease have been necessary. But, equally, there have been criticisms in some quarters
Priti Patel was in the Commons today, to be asked about the policing of the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the country. And, it was an understatement to say that the Home Secretary was taking no prisoners when it came to accusations from Labour that she or the government did not understand racism in this country.
Yesterday, protestors at a Black Lives Matter demo in London vandalised the statue of Winston Churchill which stands in Parliament Square. The protestors spray painted Churchill’s stone plinth so it read ‘Churchill was a racist’ and sellotaped a Black Lives Matter sign to the former prime minister – the man who led Britain against the
Another day, another BBC apology. But Mr S isn’t convinced this one is actually needed. The BBC’s new boss was announced this morning and it fell to the corporation’s media editor Amol Rajan to fill in viewers about who Tim Davie is. Rajan explained Davie had a ‘hellishly, hellishly difficult job’ in manning the ship over the next
After the New York Times published an op-ed written by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton – calling for the military to be deployed in the face of nationwide protests – the editors are facing a staff revolt. Reporters at the paper have been quick to take to social media to denounce their own publication. Mr S was
It was the plot-twist in the Covid drama nobody expected. At the start of the pandemic, Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan quickly became the self-appointed Robespierre of the lockdown movement. Anyone who broke the rules, or did not support tighter restrictions, was in his eyes a killer, responsible for untold deaths as the virus
Last week, the BBC show Newsnight found itself in hot water, after its presenter Emily Maitlis was rebuked by the BBC for not showing due impartiality, when she opened the show with a broadside against Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson. You would think, therefore, that the programme would be on its best behaviour at the
Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch was having none of it in the Commons chamber this morning. SNP MP Alison Thewliss asked the minister about the ‘no recourse to public funds’ policy, which Boris Johnson was quizzed over at the liaison committee last week. Safe to say, Badenoch wasn’t particularly happy with the line of questioning, accusing Thewliss of ‘confected outrage’
It was not a very good morning on Good Morning Britain. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani did an interview with Piers Morgan, and to say it did not go well is a major understatement. After some initial back-and-forth between Giuliani and Morgan, the conversation descended into a shouting match between Morgan and Rudy about guns, violence
Was Boris Johnson wearing an earpiece during PMQs? Of course not. But that didn’t stop some of those who should know better suggesting otherwise. Former media editor of the Times Raymond Snoddy shared a claim that ‘it seems entirely possible the PM is in fact having radio prompts to attempt to make him appear competent’.
MPs tried out Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new voting system for the first time today, as they prepared for a return to the House of Commons and the end of the virtual voting system. The reforms have already proven controversial among MPs, who have complained that the new system will involve long queues, will take at least
Today the House of Commons fully opened its doors to MPs again for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak. Members were summoned back to Westminster so they could vote on new proposals to end the ‘hybrid system’, where politicians were able to Zoom into debates and vote remotely. From tomorrow, MPs
Last month, Mr S did a little digging into Matt Hancock’s claims that he managed to reach 100,000 tests a day – finding that Health Secretary had been fudging his figures by including tests that had merely been posted rather than just tests that had actually been completed. The expert verdict is now in, with the UK