Coffee House Shots: who won 2025? with Quentin Letts
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As is fast becoming a tradition on Coffee House Shots at this time of year, James Heale and Tim Shipman are joined by sketch writer Quentin Letts to go through the events of the past 12 months. From sackings to resignations, and Farage to Polanski, it is a year in which the centuries-old consensus has been challenged and Westminster is delicately poised ahead of a 2026 which will define politics for the remainder of this parliamentary term. On the podcast, they discuss who is up and who is down, why Farage might be running out of steam and who is the most insufferable MP?
Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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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. |
| 0:28.4 | Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shult's year and review. And today I'm joined by Tim Shipman, |
| 0:32.4 | the politicalistler of The Spectator and Quentin Letts, sketchwriter for The Daily Mail. |
| 0:36.5 | Now, looking back over the past 12 months, |
| 0:38.6 | gents, what are the things that strike you most as the key political moments of 2025? |
| 0:42.3 | Well, I think the start of the year, Keir Stama had kind of solved some of the problems that he had |
| 0:48.2 | in the last three months of 2024. And the tail of the year has been him gently throwing away that position and being pushed around |
| 0:56.5 | by the left of the Labour Party. So I think you can see that he did a decent enough job keeping |
| 1:01.7 | the Americans on side and giving points for that. But after that, it got pretty sticky. |
| 1:06.8 | The welfare rebellion basically showed the Labour Left and a bunch of recalcitrant MPs |
| 1:13.3 | who think they're already going to lose their seats and don't really like the idea of party |
| 1:17.9 | discipline and whipping. |
| 1:19.2 | That's the sort of thing the right does, whipping. |
| 1:21.1 | We don't really like whipping very much on the left. |
| 1:23.5 | So that sort of undermines Stama's position. |
| 1:26.2 | It was very clear from quite early on that the economy was in big trouble |
| 1:31.9 | and that taxes needed to rise. |
| 1:34.4 | And we then spent six months of the year speculating about what that might be |
... |
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