All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Cometh the hour, cometh the Humza. Scotland’s beleaguered First Minister could have only days left as First Minister, despite insisting on Friday that he will not resign from the post and intends ‘to win the vote of no confidence’. Hapless Humza Yousaf made his bed on Wednesday morning by U-turning on the Bute House Agreement
It had been billed as an electrifying encounter – the US Secretary of State preparing to confront Beijing with a catalogue of global misdemeanours, ranging from stepped up support for Russian aggression against Ukraine to the intimidation of ships in the South China Sea belonging to US treaty ally, the Philippines, and the systematic breaking
If you have been doing as badly as Rishi Sunak has as prime minister, then it doesn’t take much to register a notable improvement. Yet there is no point in his detractors denying that over the past week he has done just that. First, he got stuck into the issue of Britain’s burgeoning ‘sick note
Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. ‘I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you,’ she says. Her fans are lapping up The Tortured Poets Department, but her critics say dishing the dirt on her ex boyfriends isn’t
When the thousands of international athletes march proudly behind their national flags along the banks of the River Seine in Paris to open the Olympic Games in a few months, the country that usually leads the parade, behind the host, will be absent. Afghanistan, first in the alphabetical order of nations, has been captured by
The Kyiv government will need to rush to make use of the new batch of American weapons coming to Ukraine. With the much-delayed aid available at last, Ukraine will have to build up its defences to withstand a Russian offensive in the summer, and make enough headway to prove to the US – and in
Does anyone else miss the nineties terribly? Everything seemed simpler in that pre-internet era of The Fast Show, the band Suede and heaving nightclubs. Twenty-five years ago today, one of the defining films of that decade – Notting Hill – held its premiere in London. In the years since, we’ve made progress, of sorts: technology
As the Premier League season draws to a nail-biting close at both ends of the table, my hometown club of Luton Town FC is still in with a shout of surviving the drop back to the Championship. The club is one point from safety with four games to play. Staying in the Premier League is
If the Scottish Greens are good at anything, it’s making every issue about themselves. While the First Minister of Scotland faces two votes of no confidence next week — one in his own leadership and another in the SNP government — his party’s former coalition partners continue to vent their anger at the breakdown of
Today it was announced that, after a very positive response to his treatment for cancer, King Charles will resume public-facing duties next week. The statement went on to say that both he and the Queen will be making a joint visit to a cancer treatment centre next Tuesday, in a conscious nod to the help
A while back, Lee Anderson got himself into trouble for claiming Islamists had ‘got control’ of Sadiq Khan. Levelling said charge at London’s Mayor was said to be ‘Islamophobic’ but surely more important is that it was wrong. Khan is neither an Islamist nor under their sway. He is a standard-issue identity-politics progressive, and with
As the German AfD’s European election campaign kicks off tomorrow, the far-right party’s leadership could be forgiven for counting down to polling day in June with dread. This campaign launch marks the end of a torrid fortnight for the party that is threatening to jeopardise the AfD’s future in Brussels. Two of the party’s top
Our universities are not safe from the messy realities of spies and geopolitical competition. The most infamous Soviet spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five – was recruited from, obviously, Cambridge University, back in the 1930s. Kim Philby and co. went on to share all sorts of damaging secret information with Britain’s Cold War adversary.
The BBC has struck upon a new wheeze to make the Proms accessible and inclusive: it has booked famously ‘non-binary’ singer Sam Smith. The pop star, best known for cavorting on stage in ill-fitting outfits, is joined in this year’s line up by Florence Welch. A disco prom will also take place, which for those of us of a certain age immediately
Dogs bark, cows moo and Sadiq Khan puts his foot in it again. With a week to go until polling day in the capital, you might have thought that the Mayor of London would try to avoid any bad headlines. But there he is, giving another ill-judged interview to Mehdi Hasan. In it, the Mayor implied
Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways is not much of a plan at all. Rather, it is a list of goals: to eliminate ‘fragmentation, waste, bureaucracy’, to ‘bring down costs for taxpayers’ and to ‘drive-up standards for passengers’. All lofty ambitions, all lacking a strategy. What little detail we do have points to significantly more
Humza Yousaf is facing the biggest crisis of his leadership after the First Minister axed his party’s power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens. Since that decision on Thursday morning, events have spiralled in a way that few in the SNP believe Yousaf was prepared for. The SNP leader has this morning cancelled a speech he
The Northern Territory News, Darwin’s daily paper, is known worldwide for its front pages with headlines so cleverly lurid that they outshine the efforts of the Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie in his editorial heyday. Over the years, the newspaper has run front pages highlighting everything from UFO and mythical beast sightings to the bizarre behaviour of
‘When in doubt, blame Britain’ has, since Brexit, become something of an iron law of Irish politics. So it came as no surprise yesterday to see Michael Martin, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, attribute Ireland’s mounting migration crisis to Britain’s Rwanda scheme. There’s an obvious appeal for the Irish government to blame the Rwanda scheme, when it is
Britons should be fearful of Tony Blair’s call to the Labour party to ‘reset’ relations with the EU. The former prime minister has advised Keir Starmer that if he wins the general election he must build a closer political partnership with Brussels. Blair told the Sunday Times this was vital in order for the UK
Gillian Keegan has declared that she will no longer use the slogan, ‘trans women are women’ because, as she explains, her understanding of the issue has ‘evolved’. Good for her; it is far better that politicians develop their positions than dig their heels in and refuse to countenance the concept that they were ever wrong.
Did Humza Yousaf think it through? When he decided, late on Wednesday night, to pull the plug on the Green-SNP coalition arrangement, did he game-out the consequences? That is the question political Scotland is asking this morning as Yousaf’s job hangs, by common agreement, in the balance 24 hours after he unilaterally ended the Bute House cooperation
Oh dear. Poor Chris Philp has done it again. Fronting up the broadcast brief last night, the policing minister was wheeled out on Question Time to sell the government’s migration mission. But the Home Office minister appeared to make a bit of a blunder when asked a question about the Rwanda scheme. One audience member
The Prime Minister’s announcement this week of an increase in UK defence spending from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 was unexpected. Debate continues on whether this is indeed, as Sunak claimed in Poland, ‘historic’, or sufficient for the UK to ‘re-arm’ in the face of ‘real risks to the United Kingdom’s security and prosperity’. All
Oh dear. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is no stranger to poor poll outcomes – but a new survey may cut a little closer to the bone. Over 500 GB News loyalists were quizzed on their political attitudes in the lead up to the next general election and the results are now in. Amongst the channel’s
‘What is Civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t definite it in abstract terms – yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’ So suggested Kenneth Clark, looking towards Notre Dame at the start of Civilisation, his magisterial televisual guide through Western art, architecture, and
First, a word of warning. If you donate money to Greenpeace, you might think you’re helping save the whales or the rainforests. But in reality, you may be complicit in a crime against humanity. Last week, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and several other NGOs managed to stop the cultivation and use of vitamin A-enhanced rice in
The target of Wednesday’s dawn raid has been on the radar of western security services for some time. There has been growing concern that Nuctech, which manufactures airport baggage scanners for European airports and ports, poses a potentially serious risk to national security. But the European Union officials who raided the Warsaw and Rotterdam offices
Rebecca, a British friend who taught theatre studies at a celebrated English public school before she was brutally sacked during the pandemic, moved to France and looked for a job. After putting out feelers, she got a phone call from the director of a lycée (high school) in a socially challenging neighbourhood of Béziers, a city in the