4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Give something clever this Christmas. |
| 0:02.2 | Treat a loved one to a year of The Spectator, in print and online, for just £99. |
| 0:07.9 | And we'll send you a bottle of our very own English sparkling wine worth £48 £48, absolutely free. |
| 0:15.3 | Have a bright and sparkling Christmas with the Spectator. |
| 0:17.7 | Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash Christmas. |
| 0:26.6 | Please and gentlemen, thank you very much. Thank you for coming along this evening. I now want to |
| 0:34.3 | introduce our Star Spectator writers. |
| 0:38.5 | And here they are, our political correspondent, James Heel. |
| 0:44.3 | Our deputy editor, Freddie Gray. |
| 0:48.8 | Our parliamentary sketchwriter, columnist and assistant editor, Madly Grant. |
| 0:53.1 | And our political editor, Tim Shipman. |
| 0:58.0 | James, do you want to tell us about your political moment of the year? |
| 1:01.0 | So my political moment of the year, I think, was probably the most important in terms of UK politics. |
| 1:07.0 | There was also a bit of levity as well involved in it, which was the summer welfare revolt, in which |
| 1:13.1 | suddenly, after about a year or so of being elected, a lot of Labour MPs, in the words of one |
| 1:19.0 | government aid I spoke to, started thinking for themselves, and they started deciding they weren't |
| 1:25.2 | too keen on all these welfare cuts, and there were five |
| 1:27.8 | billion proposed in the Universal Credit Bill, and suddenly all of a sudden, sort of the Viet Cong, |
| 1:33.4 | 126 of them, had signed this so-called reasoned amendment, which would have killed that bill |
| 1:38.0 | to stone dead. As a result, there were all these kind of late-night discussions, the Labour Party |
| 1:42.9 | turning on itself, and it was therefore |
| 1:45.1 | as a result of that, they had to pull the cuts. And so because of that, we now have a government |
... |
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