Politics explained

When Rishi Sunak delivered his first Budget on 11 March last year, he had been in the post for just over three weeks and assumed it was the most difficult task he would face in the job. The  annual statement to the House of Commons is normally the culmination of months of preparation, the moment when a chancellor can put his stamp on the direction of the country and when his – and so far it has always been his – decisions come under scrutiny of the most intense kind.Few chancellors have had their reputations made or destroyed by a single Budget, but it is a day when individual gaffes or masterstrokes can fundamentally alter voters’ perceptions of the government and its competence. More

The European Research Group is a body of around 70 to 80 Conservative backbench MPs with a wider penumbra of sympathisers in government, including the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman and Michael Gove. It is chaired by Mark Francois, and Steve Baker is another prominent spokesperson for it. They regard themselves as the Spartan warriors of the Eurosceptic movement. On a good day and on the right issue it could wipe out the government’s present majority, and frequently did so when Theresa May and Boris Johnson were running minority governments and trying to get their various Brexit deals through the Commons before the December 2019 election. Since then, the opportunities for Brexit mischief have subsided, but the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol has opened up a new front. The ERG want it scrapped, and, superficially, they have some strong arguments. More

There’s nothing as ex as an ex-prime minister,” so they say, but that has never stopped our most senior elder statesmen and stateswomen from trying to prove otherwise. Usually they make no difference; sometimes it can be fun to watch. David Cameron is an interesting example. Telling Boris Johnson to be more “muscular” in his environmentalism might carry more authority had Cameron not turned down the offer of chairing the COP26 Climate Conference in November. It’s also worth recalling how he once famously dismissed the climate crisis as “green crap” and fitted a ludicrous miniature windmill to his house in Notting Hill, derided as the ultimate in pretentious token politics and rumoured to be powered off the mains. The Coalition government he led might have had some success is getting CO2 emissions down, but part of that was by crashing the economy into an austerity recession. In his memoirs Cameron did take the opportunity to tell a few home truths about Johnson in his memoirs, published in 2019, but bybthen it was far too late. Knowing that Johnson never believed in Brexit might have been handier Intelligence had we known about it earlier. More

There can be few cases more complicated and tortured than the war by proxy between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. The pair, once political allies and firm friends, are now engaged in mortal political combat. If the latest explosive claims made by Salmond against Sturgeon and others are upheld, it will mean that, among other things, she lied to the Scottish parliament, broke the ministerial code and she will have to resign. Resign, that is, in the middle of a pandemic during which she has mostly been held to have acquitted herself well, with crucial parliamentary elections in a matter of weeks, and little public clamour for her to go.It is an extraordinary state of affairs. It might have been better, all round, if their differences, profound and vital though they are, could have somehow been resolved in the purely political domain. Instead, they have been, and are continuing to be, fought in legal and quasi-legal arenas, with procedure taking precedence over substance, and bewilderingly so. More

Rather like his master Boris Johnson, Dilyn the dog doesn’t seem to care where he cocks his leg. Last year, for example, it was allegedly the turn of a handbag belonging to Downing Street adviser Katie Lam to get a golden shower. In the fracas that reportedly ensued in the usually tranquil garden of 10 Downing Street, Carrie Symonds, the prime minister’s fiancée, is said to have intervened to protect the little terrier. According to some possibly fanciful reports, the incident did not endear Lam to Symonds, and may have contributed to Lam leaving her job this month. Poignantly, Lam had some responsibility for HR. More likely, her departure was part of a continuing clear-out of those associated with Dominic Cummings and the Vote Leave campaign. This has resembled not so much a reshuffle as an exorcism. The other recent victim of the purge was old Cummings ally Oliver “Sonic” Lewis, so-called because of his supposed resemblance to the computer game character, though in fact he looks more like the Duke of Gloucester. He was supposedly briefing against Michael Gove, though Lewis denies it. After a month or so, he is no longer responsible for the union unit. No one is. More

Many Labour supporters and some commentators say that Keir Starmer’s opinion poll ratings are disappointing. What they usually mean is that they dislike Boris Johnson and think that he has handled the coronavirus badly, and as a result believe that Labour ought to be miles ahead in the polls by now.In fact, the polls suggest that enough people think the government has handled the crisis well to keep the Conservatives afloat, and an overwhelming majority think the government has done well on vaccines.What has happened in the past few weeks, then, is that the prime minister and the Conservative Party have received a modest boost in the polls thanks to the vaccines, and this has little to do with what people think of the Labour leader. More

Apart from the welcome spirit of internationalism, the announcement that Britain’s forthcoming “surplus” of Covid vaccines will be distributed to developing countries is significant in other ways. Given that the vaccination programme is not yet complete, although proceeding smoothly, it seems premature to be distributing doses that do not yet exist. The only pressing need to announce such a thing would seem to be the imminent (next Friday) G7 summit in Washington. Britain, post-Brexit, needs to demonstrate that it has a role in the world, and the rapid “world-beating” vaccine rollout provides an irresistible temptation to indulge in “vaccine diplomacy”. Like China and Russia, but pointedly unlike the European Union, Britain can also be seen to be able to win friends and influence people globally, and save lives into the bargain. Recent spats between London and Brussels over vaccine supply probably made shipments from the UK to Europe politically impossible. The vaccines are headed for villages in Malawi rather than Bavaria, and it is difficult to argue it should be the other way around. So Britain, in the personage of Boris Johnson, wants to strut its stuff on the world stage. It is probably inevitable that a post-imperial power that retains its “Global Britain” mindset should crave to be seen to still count for something. The UK will host the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow in November, having hosted June’s G7 in Cornwall. Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, is busily trying to get Britain into the Trans-Pacific Partnership and win trade deals with emerging powers such as India. Britain has resumed its individual seat at the World Trade Organisation, and is establishing itself as the lead in mapping the DNA of coronavirus variants. More

Arguably, the appointment of a “free speech champion” and strengthening the laws around freedom of expression in universities is at best unnecessary, and at worst another cynical attempt to start a culture war. Gavin Williamson, the beleaguered education secretary, may have looked enviously at the successful forays into cultural combat recently undertaken by Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Oliver Dowden and the prime minister himself, (on Black Lives Matter protests, lefty lawyers, racial justice, statues and the BBC), and fancied a slice of the action himself. Nothing delights the Tory base so much as watching a cabinet minister get tough on “wokery” and pour scorn on the sensibilities of ministries and progressives. It’s like a legal high (or would be, if legal highs hadn’t actually been made illegal). More