Tim Shipman
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Political Editor, The @spectator. Ex-Sunday Times, Mail, Sun Tel, Express. Author of the Brexit quartet. Order No Way Out and Out here: lnkfi.re/oCRrDT
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Articles by Tim Shipman
Is Burnham preparing to call a December election?
What is the purpose of a Budget? To stabilise the national finances? To kickstart economic growth? If you’re John Healey, it may be to show the markets that you’re fiscally responsible and the public finances are safe in your hands. If you’re Andy Burnham, the goal is to show the public that you’re trying to do something about the rising cost of living – and to convince Labour MPs that they were right to give you the job.
‘Boring does not prevent it from being dangerous’: What to expect from Burnham’s first Budget
Don’t tell John Healey this is a boring Budget. ‘We have to get people out of this frame of mind that the only way to judge a Budget’s significance is the size of its tax line,’ complains one Treasury official of what is being billed as a ‘steady as she goes’ statement by the Chancellor next Wednesday. With green shoots of growth finally showing themselves after back-to-back Budgets by Rachel Reeves, which hiked tax by £75 billion, Healey’s team is making a virtue of fiscal minimalism.
Burnham’s unpopularity in Scotland makes a general election less likely
Andy Burnham has gone to Scotland, where the SNP annual conference is under way in Aberdeen. In his speech at Labour’s get together in Liverpool, he gave one of the most passionate defences of the Union by a major British politician since the Scottish referendum 12 years ago. Today he delivered a speech on devolution 150 miles away in Lanarkshire. He invited the SNP to join him in pushing power out of the capital and into the regions.
Does Andy Burnham actually have a foreign policy?
It often takes an outsider to see us most clearly. When I had breakfast with the ambassador of an EU country last week he asked me: ‘What is the Burnham government’s foreign policy? Because it seems to me there is only domestic policy conducted on the international stage.’ Keir Starmer and David Lammy’s approach was ‘progressive realism’. Under New Labour, Robin Cook advanced an ‘ethical foreign policy’.
Kemi Badenoch has given the Tories cause for hope
The old jokes are the best. When I arrived in Birmingham on Sunday evening for the Tory party conference, I immediately ran into a former Downing Street bigwig. ‘The Conservative party has two modes – panic and complacency,’ he noted. ‘Last year was panic. This year it’s complacency.’ Twelve months ago, everyone was miserable. Kemi Badenoch’s leadership was on the line and the Tories were on between 17 and 22 per cent in the polls.
Fourteen things we learned from Kemi Badenoch’s Tory conference speech
Kemi Badenoch delivered her Conservative party conference speech in Birmingham this afternoon. Here are fourteen things we learned from her speech: 1) Kemi Badenoch has her tail up Anyone who read my interview with the Conservative leader last week, where she claimed: ‘I get better every day,’ knows that Badenoch is not lacking for confidence, having turned her personal prospects around with a barnstorming speech to the party faithful at last year’s annual conference.
Is Badenoch cutting through?
We are on the home stretch of the party conference season. It’s the turn of the Greens this weekend and Zack Polanski – now a distant 6-1 shot to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election next week – has given his big speech, promising to keep Andy Burnham’s Labour honest. ‘Vote Green and watch Labour move,’ he cried, citing the government’s shifts on Israel and fossil fuels. Polanski is now the one in the hotseat with the regional broadcast political editors.
‘I get better every day’: Has Kemi Badenoch revived the Tory party?
Kemi Badenoch, like many in the Labour party, is not sorry to see the back of Keir Starmer. ‘I did not find Starmer an interesting person,’ she says. ‘He never said anything interesting.’ Andy Burnham is a different proposition. ‘Quite interesting,’ she thinks. ‘He has more of a clear sense of who he is politically, which makes him more confident in terms of what he wants to do.
14 things we learned from Andy Burnham’s speech
1) He’s the most effective speaker we’ve had in a PM for years I’ve been attending party conferences since 2001 and in that time I’ve heard around 70 leaders’ speeches from all the parties. This was one of the most important and defining – I expect it will remain among the half-dozen most memorable. It was big on heart, rather than brain, at times hugely emotional and strangely moving as Burnham became overcome when discussing the recent death of his father.
Burnham pours cold water on a snap election
Andy Burnham has just ruled out a general election next May. As I wrote in my cover story this week, there are a lot of people at the top of Labour thinking about going to the country but – as I and most of my sources concluded – the polling numbers are just not there and the only meaningful policy freedom the PM would gain would be the ability to put up personal taxation.
Burnham’s bet: is the Prime Minister planning to call an election?
On 1 September, Andy Burnham gathered Labour MPs in No. 10 for a rousing speech. ‘We are a fighting force,’ he said. ‘We can win the next election. We have an opportunity now. We’ve got the initiative.’ Some of those present wondered if this was the Prime Minister rolling the pitch for an early election. One MP recalls a comment by Burnham in a smaller group that night: ‘We’ll hopefully see some of you back after the election.
Andy Burnham’s deafening silence on the Russian threat isn’t sustainable
It’s hard to keep up with what might kill us first. A week ago, the tech-bros were competing to tell us that AI might wipe out humanity within a decade. This week, most of Europe seems to be warning about a Russian unconventional attack on the West. French President Emmanuel Macron today called a meeting of all the political leaders in France to share intelligence assessments of Vladimir Putin’s posture and what appear to be growing aggression from the Moscow machine.
Revealed: Ed Miliband ignored MI6’s warnings over Israel sanctions
When Andy Burnham was quizzed at PMQs last week about his and Ed Miliband’s decision to sanction the Israeli government over its handling of Gaza, the Prime Minister was surprisingly frank about the trade-offs. He presented it as a decision to prevent ‘the collapse of the two-state solution’ for a peace deal in the Middle East, which he claimed was ‘dying before our eyes’. In his statement to the Commons, Miliband referred to ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Meet the most powerful woman in Britain
Some years ago Antonia Romeo, now the Cabinet Secretary, was stuck in a boring meeting about civil service reform. She regarded the plan as inadequate to create the leaner, meaner machine she hoped to see. ‘Basically you’ve given me a Ford, when I’m more of a Ferrari girl.’ It was a moment which summed up the official who is now accruing arguably more power than any of her predecessors. Romeo is glamorous, suspiciously racy and likes to move fast towards her goals.
Reform UK is a party in crisis
Deputy heads have rolled. Reform UK, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage's right hand man, and James Orr, the party's head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. ‘They have left the building and they won't be coming back,' Anderson said. Footage screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night showed Jukes appearing to suggest a way to get around electoral law to secure a foreign donation of £500,000.
The five takeaways from Reform’s conference
1) THE SPEECH Nigel Farage has made his big speech to Reform’s party conference in Birmingham this evening. It was a bravura display which had his army of supporters in raptures. ‘I believe there will be an election next year’, Farage said, demanding a vote and branding Burnham ‘the Messiah without a mandate’. ‘We will fight to win,’ he said. If he wins power, Farage pledged: ‘We will stop the boats within 100 days of a Reform government. End of.’ Slash benefits spending by £50 billion.
Reform UK is a party in crisis
Deputy heads have rolled. Britain’s populist Reform UK party, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage’s right hand man, and James Orr, the party’s head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. “They have left the building and they won’t be coming back,” Anderson said.
‘The plan is for the country to fall in love with Nigel again’: Richard Tice on what’s next for Reform
Emulating Donald Trump may be a strategy with diminishing returns in British politics, but Nigel Farage plans to channel the US President’s time on The Apprentice if he becomes prime minister, telling his cabinet ‘You’re fired!’ if they fail to deliver within 100 days of taking office.
This year’s silly season has turned sinister
There’s a great scene in The West Wing where the White House is engulfed by a crisis in the Middle East and President Bartlet’s daughter, Ellie, is learning about the region at school. Her teacher, Mr Pordy, asks why there has always been conflict in the Middle East and she gives a response stressing the centuries-old conflicts over land and culture.
Revealed: the feuding at the heart of Reform
If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: ‘Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.’ Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way.
Politicians’ contempt for the press is contempt for the public
I was hacked by the Chinese a few years ago. Security at News UK, where I was employed on the Sunday Times, told around 20 journalists that our emails had been compromised. An agency of the Chinese state was searching for information on our coverage of Chinese issues, including Beijing’s crushing of Hong Kong and the decision to sanction members of parliament. To be honest, I’d have been pretty offended if I hadn’t been on the list.
Rod Liddle was one of the finest journalists of his generation
I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him and to a large degree in his shadow. He was irascible and lugubrious and bloody funny, both in person and in print. Like a lot of bogeymen, in person he was a delight and nothing like his image.
No election? Don’t bet on it
When Dwight D. Eisenhower had to decide whether to launch the D-Day armada he kept a close eye on the weather. Pick the wrong moment and the entire cause of winning the war would have been set back and the lives of 135,000 soldiers imperilled. The supreme allied commander, head of a fractious coalition riven by egos and infighting (you see where I’m going here), had plenty of expert advice, as is made clear in David Haig’s play Pressure.
Voters are buying what Burnham is selling
We are approaching the end of Andy Burnham’s first week in power. There are as many questions as answers about where he will ultimately plant his flag on the big macro-economic stuff and on policies which make for difficult politics. But his Downing Street team will be pretty happy with how things have gone for the first few days.
Andy Burnham’s centrist act isn’t fooling anyone
When Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood arrived in Downing Street on Monday afternoon, the image of political rivals arm in arm symbolised a new government of differing views taking shape. It might have been more awkward.
Andy Burnham has a plan – but he won’t tell us what it is yet
Burnham’s schtick is that he is going to re-discover Labour’s true faith When I was covering Barack Obama’s battle with Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, there came a moment when only she among sentient adults seemed unwilling to acknowledge that Obama had beaten her. We would traipse to Clinton rallies to be greeted, without fail, by the strains of my favourite Tom Petty song, ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
Andy Burnham can’t afford to please everyone
Andy Burnham thinks his critics need a new joke about him. The old one about a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walking into a bar (‘Hello, Mr Burnham,’ says the barman) is about to be eclipsed. On Monday, it won’t be a barman offering good wishes – it will be the Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, when Burnham walks into No. 10 as Britain’s 59th prime minister.
Former British minister Ann Widdecombe murdered
13 July 2026 Ann Widdecombe, who served as a minister for the Conservatives in the 1990s, was found dead at her home on 9 July with serious blunt force trauma to her head. The police say they do not believe her murder was politically motivated. Widdecombe had recently become active in the right-wing populist Reform UK party and attracted attention with extreme statements, for example when she likened Brexit to slaves rising up against their masters.
Westminster reels at Ann Widdecombe murder probe
Westminster is reeling from the news that police believe Ann Widdecombe, the former shadow Home Secretary, was murdered. She was found dead in her remote Dartmoor home on Thursday with serious injuries. As I write, police have arrested a white male suspect after a manhunt (n.b. as of 8.30 a.m. on Saturday morning, the suspect has been released from custody).
Will Nigel Farage’s big gamble pay off?
When Reform high command gathered in the boardroom of their Millbank headquarters last Tuesday, the meeting was supposed to be to select candidates in their 120 most winnable seats and choose dozens of campaign managers. It went on for six hours, as party chiefs instead addressed a growing sense of unease that the great momentum of 2025 has been lost.
Can Labour’s Golden Generation deliver?
Andy Burnham is just finishing an ‘ask me anything’ Reddit interview, which may shed some light on his plans, but if it’s anything like the interview he gave to Andrew Marr yesterday evening, we are still at the vibes stage of Burnhamism. So let’s talk about the personnel, rather than the policy, where things seem to be a bit clearer – and it was who would be up and who would be down which sucked up most of the oxygen at The Spectator summer party on Wednesday.
Reform is right to fear the return of Boris
The man from Reform had barely sat down at our table at the French bistro when he leant forward conspiratorially and asked: ‘What’s Boris up to?’ The suspicion that Boris Johnson, Britain’s 55th premier, must be up to something is a familiar one. For the first time in several years, however, the question is interesting. And the fact that Reform is raising it gives a small insight into the current state of politics.
Five things I’m hearing about the Burnham ascendancy
We are at the phony war/silly season stage of the Andy Burnham ascendancy and there’s a lot of nonsense flying around. A lot of decisions have not yet been made – and some of them remain highly problematic – but, in descending order of confidence, this is what I’m hearing: 1) Is Mahmood edging ahead of Miliband to be chancellor? Burnham makes his big speech on the economy and devolution in – where else?
Can Burnham resist the siren call of the left?
Power, when it is gained and lost, is transferred in stages: the actual, the visual and the constitutional. The latter took place on Tuesday evening when the prime minister presumptive sent a letter to Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, requesting that she commence access talks with his team. Keir Starmer had already given permission for them to proceed, but the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office had told Romeo she could not initiate proceedings. Andy Burnham had to ask first.
The 42 reasons why Keir Starmer failed
Before David Cameron got the job of prime minister, he was asked why he wanted it. ‘Because I’d be good at it,’ he replied. This has always been told as evidence of Cameron’s arrogance and hubris, but it was also, until the end, a defendable position. I’ve always thought Keir Starmer thought largely the same. He’d risen to the top of the law and considered politics a logical career change. He believed he could get more done that way.
The nine contenders to be Burnham’s chancellor
Andy Burnham is the new MP for Makerfield and is well on the way to becoming the new prime minister. Much blood may need to flow under the bridge first, but few in Westminster doubt the inevitability of his ultimate elevation to No. 10. Which raises key questions about what he will do, and how he will convince the wicked Bond villain markets to go along with it.
‘As soon as Andy wins, the world changes’: Burnham’s plans for power
There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by ‘quite a mad dog’. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain. The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week’s by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow.
John Healey’s resignation is devastating for Keir Starmer
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard two things in recent months. Serving and retired military commanders, ministers and former ministers, strategists, advisers and MPs parrot the line that the defence of the country is the first duty of any government. They also complained that John Healey was too polite, too much of a Labour man to march over the road and demand the money that is needed. This was only half right.
‘Rupert Lowe turns up for work; Nigel Farage doesn’t’: an interview with Kemi Badenoch
There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare.
Revealed: the missing Mandelson messages
Darren Jones has become the government’s Walter Model, the general known during the second world war as ‘the Führer’s fireman’ for his deployment to shore up any position which appeared lost. In that capacity, Britain’s first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had the thankless task of presenting the government’s case to the House of Commons on Monday following the publication of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson.
Reform’s strange balancing act
Nothing illustrates the challenge facing Reform UK better than the strained interview Danny Kruger gave to the Today programme on Monday morning. Kruger, a former Tory MP who defected to Reform last September, has been charged by Nigel Farage with preparing the party for government. He clearly wanted the interview to be a high-minded examination of the intricacies of the Whitehall machinery. Instead, he had to deal with more pungent street politics.
‘Being a Labour mayor in Manchester is playing politics on easy mode’: Is Andy Burnham up to the job of PM?
When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory. There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls.
The Burnham Gambit: Makerfield or Breakerfield?
Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield, has decided to stand aside and resign his seat so that Andy Burnham can fight a by-election and return to Parliament as a candidate for the Labour leadership. Burnham has just confirmed that he is seeking permission from the ruling National Executive Committee to stand. This is a high-stakes gamble for everyone involved. But then, in Labour politics right now, everything is Makerfield sits next door to Leigh, the parliamentary seat Andy Burnham used to hold.
‘It’s like a Mexican stand-off but no one has any guns’: inside the farcical coup against Keir Starmer
It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says. The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party.
18 ways to save your political career
Dear wannabe leaders of Britain. What a lot of you there are! I’ve been writing about leadership and the craft of politics for 25 years and I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated. I’m keen to help. So listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn. 1) TL;DR: If you have no time for impertinent journalists, here’s the executive summary. You need a plan, plus strategy and tactics to deliver it. You need a narrative to explain it to voters.
Is the country ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?
When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: ‘What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government.
It’s over for Keir Starmer
Politics has calmed down again after a week of rare frenzy, even by the standards of the past decade. Next week promises a few more dramas before MPs head into recess for the local elections, which once more look like they could be the most consequential for a generation.
‘It’s worse than during the worst of Boris’: how the civil service turned against Starmer
Somewhere in the vast array of documents the Cabinet Office has gathered on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side.
The National Lottery verdict shows Labour isn’t serious about growth
The government keeps telling us that they are desperate for economic growth and keen to attract overseas investment in UK plc. But a case at the High Court last week casts some doubt over that. It all goes back to a case brought by Richard Desmond, the owner of the Express newspapers (and retired pornographer), who sued the Gambling Commission over their decision in 2022 to award the National Lottery licence to Allwyn.
How Peter Mandelson became Britain’s ambassador to the US – despite failing vetting
I have just been contacted by a source who knows much more about what happened with Peter Mandelson’s vetting. It supports the case that I made in my summary of the case last night and Sam Coates made in his thread yesterday that the crucial decision was Keir Starmer’s political decision to appoint him. In essence, Oliver Robbins – the top civil servant who overruled Mandelson’s failed security vetting – was rubber stamping a decision which had already been made.
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