Robert Peston | The Spectator columnists & writers

Kwasi Kwarteng is a politician from a different age

Liz Truss doesn’t waste energy on unnecessary emotion. At the announcement of her victory at the QE2 Centre, she ditched the convention of hugging your partner and shaking hands with the runner-up. Instead she grabbed her notes from her husband Hugh O’Leary and marched past Rishi Sunak without a second glance. No time for sentimentality! Different from Johnson, surrounded by his siblings and ubiquitous father, or the uxorious Cameron and doting May. She knifed to the microphone with the same steely determination she showed all those decades ago when she told the Lib Dem conference to abolish the monarchy. The script has changed, the focus has not. Just before midnight on the first day of her regime, she rejected another convention: the showy buttering of POTUS.

Will the Bank of England say sorry?

Months ago I said the Bank of England would face a barrage of criticism and a challenge to its independence for failing to raise interest rates enough last year during the post-Covid economic rebound and then for putting them up big time now as we head into recession. So it has proved. And by the way, this does not mean that Bank independence has failed, or that allowing politicians greater sway over how much and when interests rise, would be better. It probably wouldn’t be. Nor does it mean Liz Truss would be right to review the Bank’s mandate, or the target the government obliges it to meet (though there may be a case for this). What it does mean is that the Bank should stop pleading that its failure to call the inflationary turn early enough is irrelevant, because the big contributor to our woes is Vladimir Putin’s wartime decision to limit the flow of gas.

What Liz Truss learned from the Brexit referendum

Liz Truss may have been a Remainer but she has learned the political lesson of the EU referendum in the way that her genuine Brexiter opponent has seemingly failed to do. The point is that in today’s milieu, and especially with an electorate of 160,000 largely Brexit-supporting Tory members, power is with the insurgent. In pinning her colours to at least £30 billion of immediate tax cuts, against Sunak’s steady-as-we-go no-tax-cuts-till-prudent mantra, she has defined herself as the crusader against alleged stultifying Treasury orthodoxy. Every time a credible economist accuses her of risking financial ruin – by pushing up national debt and inflation – all she has to do is whisper ‘there they go again, the spineless establishment, refusing to take the risks that will restart Britain’s economic motor’.

Liz Truss presents a serious challenge to Rishi Sunak

After all that, Sunak entered the final members' round to be Tory leader and UK PM with a comfortable 24 vote margin of advantage over the runner-up Liz Truss. But her 113 votes are enough of a mandate from MPs to present Sunak with a serious challenge during the summer contest. Tory members, who according to surveys seemingly prefer Truss to Sunak, can't be swayed by the idea that Truss would not be able to lead MPs because too few support her – which would have been a credible argument if Sunak had been supported by nearer 200 of his colleagues. So the fight is on. And it is for the economic soul of the Tory party, because there is an important ideological divide between Sunak and Truss – with Truss saying cut taxes now, and Sunak arguing taxes should only be cut after inflation is tamed and the public finances are in better shape.

Kemi Badenoch’s role in the Tory leadership race isn’t over yet

Labour won the Tory leadership debate

That was quite a debate. I’ve never seen senior Tory ministers and MPs lay into each other so publicly. Rishi Sunak accused Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt of being socialists – not a compliment in the Tory lexicon – for being reckless with the public finances. Truss attacked Sunak for raising taxes to record levels. Kemi Badenoch called for unity while attacking more or less everyone for everything. Mordaunt seethed at what she saw as the cheap personal attacks she’s faced in recent days, especially over the trans debate. Tom Tugendhat attacked everyone else for being current or recent members of Boris Johnson’s government. Given that every candidate said they wouldn’t have Johnson in their cabinet, maybe Tugendhat had a point.

Will Tugendhat and Badenoch fight on?

Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch have both fought impressive campaigns. They were both relatively unknown before the contest and they've significantly enhanced their reputations. But they are both so far behind it would take a miracle for either of them to reach the magic 120 votes needed to enter the final run-off where members pick the leader from two chosen by MPs (Badenoch needs 71, and Tugendhat 88 – when there are at best just 27 of Braverman's former supporters going begging). Given that the electorate is 358 MPs who already know them, they would need to have self-belief beyond what is psychologically healthy to think that their relative performances in the TV hustings could launch a bandwagon that would carry them to No.

The Conservative party is in a terrible state

Does Sunak want to face Mordaunt or Truss?

To use a sporting cliche, Penny Mordaunt has brought the Tory leadership election alive. The little known former Defence Secretary placed second in today’s first round, with 67 votes – which is 17 more than third placed Liz Truss, and 21 behind the leader Sunak’s 88. And given that the MP contest is all about finding the top two, Mordaunt will believe that the momentum is with her – whereas the foreign secretary, Truss, should feel anxious. The question is whether the way that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries yesterday positioned Truss as the Boris’s-Revenge-on-Sunak candidate has hurt or helped Truss. Either way, she has considerable ground to make up. Tonight there are three big questions. First, where will the votes of the two knocked-out candidates, Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi, go tomorrow? Talking to Tory MPs, it seems a good number of Hunt’s 18 supporters will transfer straight to Sunak.

Will Sunak’s polished campaign harm his chances?

Rishi Sunak has launched a slick, well organised leadership campaign very early. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that he has been preparing his leadership pitch quietly for weeks and months. Will this hurt or harm him? There may be some Boris Johnson loyalists who will accuse him of disloyalty - although Johnson did not manifest much fealty to Theresa May when she was PM and he foreign secretary. Per contra, Johnson’s many critics may want to reward Sunak for quitting as chancellor last Tuesday and triggering the crisis that led on Thursday to Johnson announcing he was stepping down. So it is not clear to me whether Sunak will be rewarded or punished for contingency planning for a bid to become PM while in theory there was no vacancy at the top.

Could Boris Johnson cling on until November?

The prime minister is resigning today, and staying on as caretaker till the autumn, but that leaves very big decisions to be taken not only about who succeeds him but about the process for replacing him. I am told Boris Johnson rang Sir Graham Brady – chair of the 1922 backbench committee and de facto shop steward for Tory MPs – this morning. Yesterday, Brady told him he’d lost the confidence of the party and that he should resign. Johnson refused and said he was determined to battle on. This morning he telephoned Brady and said that, having reflected overnight, he would be quitting after all. Which was simply the triumph of cold political facts – namely that there has been an avalanche of resignations from his government – over his determination to remain at No.

Is Starmer trying to have his Brexit cake and eat it?

There are three big questions about Sir Keir Starmer's 'five point plan to make Brexit work'. First is whether it makes sense economically: will it help return the UK to growth? Second, will it impress the EU, and is there any chance that what Starmer wants will be agreed by EU leaders? Finally, does it make sense politically, will it reinforce support for the Labour party? In an interview this afternoon, I probed Starmer on all this, and didn't emerge much wiser. You can watch the whole (short) interview here: On whether it makes economic sense, I pointed out that many economists would say that the economic price to the UK of being outside the EU stems mainly from the increased costs of trading with the EU that were imposed when the UK left the EU's single market and customs union.

Nicola Sturgeon has put Boris Johnson in a tight corner

Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she will not contemplate breaching the rule of law by holding an independence referendum was pretty blatant trolling of Boris Johnson, given the multiple allegations he faces of being less than scrupulous in following domestic and international law. But Sturgeon also put Johnson and the Tory party in a tight corner by asking the Lord Advocate to petition the Supreme Court in London to determine the legality of a referendum. If the Supreme Court rules her way, then there will be the mother of all constitutional crises if Boris Johnson continues to reject the lawfulness of any vote by the Scottish parliament to hold a poll on 19 October 2023. And if the Supreme Court rules against her – and there is a reasonable chance it will – then she says she will fight the next general on one issue alone, that Scotland should be independent.

Where’s Boris’s plan to stop the economic chaos?

Interest payments on the national debt rose 70 per cent last month to £7.6 billion (compared with a year earlier) – largely because of the impact of inflation on income paid to holders of index-linked gilts, which are inflation-protected government bonds. More worryingly, this was 49 per cent more than the official forecast made in March by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It suggests the OBR’s forecast that the government will have to pay £87.2 billion in interest payments (a colossal sum) may be too low, especially since the ONS is not factoring in the most recent inflation figures in its calculations of the monthly bill. Little wonder Rishi Sunak says 'rising inflation and increasing debt interest costs pose a challenge for the public finances, as they do for family budgets'.

Boris Johnson’s inflation contradiction

As Boris Johnson tries to limit pay rises to bring down inflation, ministers have no explanation for why planned rises in the state pension and benefits would be less inflationary than increasing teachers’ and nurses’ pay. The government is attempting to limit public sector pay to 3 per cent, while allowing pensions and benefits to rise to around 10 per cent. This is not to argue against protecting the poorest through the standard indexation of pensions and benefits. But it is to say that Mr Johnson’s pay policy is confusing. And he cannot pretend there is no pay policy. Even refusing to engage directly in pay talks with rail workers – despite owning the network and funding services – is a policy. Johnson’s mantra is that incomes have to be suppressed to bring down inflation.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a problem Boris created

If Boris Johnson was elected on a single slogan, it was ‘Get Brexit done’. He then claimed it was done at the end of 2019 in the terms for leaving the EU he agreed. Not so. Today legislation will be introduced by the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unilaterally overhaul a central pillar of the UK’s negotiated exit from the EU, the Northern Ireland Protocol – which is seen by the EU, whatever the government may claim, as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations. Economic relations with the EU, still the biggest market for our exporters by a country mile, were already bad. They are about to become appallingly bad. As the UK’s former ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers said in a magisterial lecture on Thursday: ‘The EU… is bound to commence legal proceedings… [It] will view the threat to rewrite the Protocol unilaterally as self-evidently in bad faith, as an extraordinary hostile step to take at this geopolitical juncture and as warranting retaliatory safeguard measures.

Boris’s moment of maximum danger is yet to come

Much as Boris Johnson wants to 'bash on', deliver popular populist policies, and characterise Monday's confidence vote as the catharsis that purges him and his party of the partygate poison, his struggle to re-establish his credibility and authority will be the challenge of his life. First of all, most of the 148 Tory MPs who rejected him cannot be bought off, because they typically want him out not for the policies he espouses but rather for what they see as his character flaws – and they are doubtful he can change his spots. I asked one rebel what was the new plan, after the rebels failed to muster the 180 votes needed to unseat him. The answer: 'A process for securing 30 extra votes.' A few rebels have said today that they will try to bury their qualms and do the unity thing.

The dilemma facing Tory MPs

There are two questions for Tory MPs today. One, do they believe that the PM will cost them or save them their seats at the next general election. Two, how pernicious to confidence in the important institutions of government is the widespread perception that the politician at its apex is dishonest. The first question is about the future of the Tory party. The other is about the future of the UK. They are of course linked. Tory critics of Mr Johnson say that he is now, in the words of one, ‘our Jeremy Corbyn’, by which they mean large numbers of potential Conservative voters will never again vote for their party while he is leader. But Mr Johnson’s supporters say he is the most formidable campaigner their party has known in the modern era, and if anyone can turn round the ailing fortunes of the Tories it is him.

I’m not exaggerating partygate

A veteran Tory MP, who I've known for almost 30 years, just laid into me – and my colleagues in much of the media – for allegedly exaggerating the seriousness of how Covid laws were systematically broken in 10 Downing Street. He hadn't read Sue Gray's report into the rule-breaking parties and did not attend the PM's statement on her findings. He has already decided that all is for the best in Boris Johnson's best of all possible worlds. His decision to ignore Gray's report is not what most voters would expect from their elected representatives. What many would see as his negligence is all the greater because in my lifetime there has never been a report into misconduct at the heart of government as damaging as Gray's.

A Treasury cost-of-living help package could be imminent

A £10 billion package of help with fuel bills and the cost of living targeted at those on lowest incomes could be announced as soon as Thursday, I am told. No final decisions have been made, but the prime minister wants to reset his administration before the Queen’s Jubilee parliamentary recess and after the publication tomorrow of Sue Gray’s report into Downing Street parties - which is expected to be damaging to the PM’s reputation. The expected acceleration of new Treasury support for the poorest follows today’s announcement by the energy regulator Ofgem that energy bills are likely to rise a further £800 in the autumn to around £2,800 per household on average. This rise would mean that in England alone, just under 10 million households would suffer from 'fuel stress' - meaning they would be shelling out 10 per cent or more of all their net income on energy - according to new research by the Resolution Foundation.

The unspoken argument behind a windfall tax

How does Boris Johnson save the economy?

'For the first time since records began, there are fewer unemployed people than job vacancies,' the ONS says. The number of unemployed people in January to March was 1,256,846 whereas vacancies in February to April 2022 rose to a new record of 1,295,000. At a time when we may already be in recession, and we certainly face it later this year, this is extraordinary. Part of the explanation is that hundreds of thousands of people have voluntarily left the Labour market, as the Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey told MPs yesterday. One explanation is that large numbers of people have long Covid and cannot work. Others are clinically vulnerable and are choosing not to work because they don’t wish to take the health risk when Covid remains prevalent.

Why Starmer had to put his job on the line

Keir Starmer had no option but to say – as he has done – that he will resign if fined for breaching Covid rules, as I already pointed out on Friday when Durham police announced it was investigating whether his beer and curry last April was work sustenance or an illegal party. There were two reasons why he had to put his job on the line. First, he would never get over the charge of grotesque hypocrisy had he failed to do this, given that he and his party have repeatedly and urgently called on Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to quit, after they received fixed penalty notices for attending the PM’s birthday party. Second, and this is short-term politics, tomorrow Starmer would not have been heard in the important Queen’s Speech debate on Johnson’s new legislative programme, because Tory MPs would have repeatedly interrupted his address to taunt him about the police probe.

Partygate could still sink Boris Johnson

There are two big questions in UK politics, neither of which has been decisively resolved by local election results in England so far – and probably won't be by the time all UK results are announced over the coming few days. They are: Will and should Conservative MPs remove Boris Johnson as their leader and the country's prime minister? And has Keir Starmer set Labour on a path that could see the party win the next general election? In London, the swing from Tory to Labour of three symbolically important councils – Barnet, Wandsworth and above-all Westminster – is humiliating for a Prime Minister who still boasts of his erstwhile popularity as two-time London mayor. It also confirms the durability of the big Brexit-connected historic switch in British politics: that much of the very rich south is now hostile territory for the Tories, whereas swathes of the working class midlands and north remain relatively fertile ground for Johnson's Conservatives.

Why is Boris Johnson suppressing the incomes of the poor?

As the Prime Minister pointed out this morning, looming recession and soaring inflation are not uniquely British problems – though right now the UK economy is slowing faster than many of our rich country competitors. In the US for example, the IMF’s former chief economist Ken Rogoff has warned just today that the Federal Reserve’s official interest rate may have to go as high as five per cent to suppress rampant inflation. Which is one of the reasons I was nonplussed when the PM told Susanna Reid on ITV's Good Morning Britain that he’s reluctant to increase universal credit and benefits and protect poorer people from the ravages of inflation because doing so would stoke inflation and force the Bank of England to put up interest rates.

What’s going on with the Met and partygate?

I don't understand the logic behind how the Met Police is conducting its probe into unlawful parties at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. My confusion reached brain-aching proportions after my ITV colleague Anushka Asthana disclosed on Friday that officials had received fixed penalty notices – fines – for attending perhaps the most famous of all the Downing Street events, the Bring Your Own Booze garden party on 20 May 2020, revealed by an email leaked to ITV News. The point is that I know of at least two relatively junior officials who have been informed by the police that they've been fined. So there is no longer any doubt this was a law-breaking party. And it was a party that the PM has admitted he attended and has talked about at some length, in the House of Commons no less.

What’s wrong with the Rwanda plan?

There are many unanswered questions about the government’s new policy of compelled expulsion to Rwanda of uninvited asylum claimants. Here are just a few. 1) What is the estimated cost per expelled refugee? None of the briefings give a clue. In its absence, how can the policy be assessed for its value for money, compared with the status quo? 2) What is the UK’s responsibility – moral, legal – if bad things (illness, accident, attack) happen to the expelled refugees after arrival in Rwanda? This would be a concern even if Rwanda did not have a recent history of trampling on civil liberties and basic human rights (see this report from the US state department). 3) Since the UK and Rwanda say only adults will be shipped to Rwanda, and the Home Office says families will not be broken up, how can the Home Secretary be confident she has not created a perverse incentive to malign smugglers, to carry whole families across the dangerous Channel crossing in precarious small boats, putting the lives of more children at risk? 4) Here is the Foreign Office’s assessment of the welfare and safety of the LGBT+ community in Rwanda: Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda but remains frowned on by many.

This is a constitutional crisis

The police have today concluded that Boris Johnson, the Chancellor and the PM’s wife all attended illegal parties that breached Covid laws written by the PM. This is most serious for the prime minister of the three of them because it was he who told MPs on 8 December that he had been ‘repeatedly assured’ there were no parties and that no Covid rules were broken. He now has the challenge of his life to prove that he did not willfully and knowingly mislead MPs – because if he did deliberately mislead MPs then he has no choice but to resign under the code of conduct for ministers, which he signed off and approved in keeping with normal practise on becoming PM. This is perhaps the most important test of the robustness and efficacy of the checks and balances in the British constitution of my lifetime.

How Boris misled MPs over partygate

The significance of today's announcement by the Met Police that 20 individuals who unlawfully attended parties in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office will be fined is that it confirms the Prime Minister misled the House of Commons on 8 December. On that date he told Sir Keir Starmer, Labour's leader: 'I have been repeatedly assured that the rules were not broken. I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken.' We now know there were lots of parties, and the Covid-19 rules that banned them at the time – drafted by the government on the orders of Boris Johnson – were breached. What we don't know, of course, is whether the Prime Minister knowingly misled the House of Commons.

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