Ukip’s deputy chairman Suzanne Evans has announced she is seeking the party’s nomination for the 2016 London Mayor election. Speaking to Iain Dale on LBC this morning, Evans said from the off she is very unlikely to become Mayor, but that she hopes to influence the race and offer Londoners a difference: ‘I have thrown my hat
The Labour leadership contest has taken so many odd turns already that a few more might return it to a vague normal track. But with Jeremy Corbyn announcing last night that he thought Tony Blair could be tried for war crimes over Iraq, and Andy Burnham appearing to tack left on rail re-nationalisation, there are
At 6:30pm this evening, London will descend into chaos as the City deals with yet another Tube strike. This time, Transport for London and the RMT trade union are squabbling over the introduction of the Night Tube — services running throughout Fridays and Saturday nights on a few lines. The union isn’t happy about the
From ‘Apology’, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: Does any public body ever apologize to the world? Such a concerted effort has never, we think, been made through any authorized mouthpiece. The effect of such an experiment might be colossal. Suppose, if the supposition be not too absurd, that a Pope should apologize in the name
Robert Conquest, the historian of Soviet Russia who has died aged 98, was also The Spectator’s literary editor between 1962 and 1963. The following essay was published in the magazine on 4 May 1961, in response to a letter published in the Times about the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The round robin on behalf of some supposedly Leftist
The charity Kids Company is under so much pressure that some people are starting to worry about its outgoing chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh. Recent reports of financial mismanagement published in The Spectator and elsewhere have contributed to Batmanghelidjh being forced to quit her £90,000 post, which she has promised to vacate by October 31, but
Fourteen years is a long stretch. The punishment imposed on former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes for his role as ‘the hub of the conspiracy’ to rig yen Libor rates is the same as the maximum sentence for burglary with intent to commit GBH. Even though no public attempt has been made to quantify
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid has so far managed to inspire a legion of new supporters to join the Labour party. Alas, his unexpected popularity is also causing a problem for some members of the media. After the Guardian launched an in-house investigation into whether their own Corbyn coverage was bias against him, Emily Maitlis, who has
One of Andy Burnham’s problems is his occasional pandering towards populism. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Labour leadership contender tries to talk up his credentials as an ordinary bloke and says he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life in politics, arguing there should be a limit on how long MPs should remain the Commons: ‘Not necessarily,
George Osborne is having a good summer. He got in first with wooing the new intake of Tory MPs, to the extent that many of them seem slightly besotted with the warm and friendly Chancellor who welcomes them cheerily to drinks events. He humiliated Boris Johnson with jokes about his ‘dilapidated’ campaign bunker – and
Friends of mine who still call themselves ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ occasionally confide in me that they think the left might be screwed. Depending on how I feel on that particular day I tend to reply either that (a) they must stay and fight their political corner and make the left decent again or (b) one
Over the weekend Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign received a much needed boost from the founder of the Milifandom Abby Tomlinson. The 17-year-old declared that after meeting with each of the leadership contenders, it was Burnham rather than Jeremy Corbyn who she would be backing for Labour leader: ‘I have decided that I am going to be
Though it hasn’t been hitting the headlines recently, the situation in Yemen has been rapidly deteriorating and looks set to grow worse in the coming months. The country now seems to have fallen into all-out civil war, with a level of complexity which echoes the catastrophic war occurring 1,500 miles north in Syria. The war in Yemen is part
The Spectator is looking for an assistant production editor, to help us produce our magazine and supplements. The job will be three days a week, ideally Tuesday to Thursday, and initially on a six-month contract. What kind of person are we looking for? You are a careful, rapid and sensitive text sub capable of hitting
It is of course too soon to make any meaningful response to the Ted Heath allegations. However, in reporting the ‘mystery’ surrounding the former Prime Minister’s sexuality, the media and the social media are insinuating something sinister: that Ted Heath’s unwillingnness to out himself as a homosexual is somehow in itself suspicious. Journalists are putting
Last week there was worldwide outrage as news broke that an American dentist had killed a famous lion in Zimbabwe. Rather than a routine procedure gone wrong, the medical worker had actually paid roughly £35,000 to hunt the animal, seemingly unaware of the lion’s popularity. Now, someone has taken the fight for justice for Cecil to Trafalgar Square.
Is the government set to bring bombing Islamic State terrorists in Syria before the Commons soon? The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has announced that the RAF’s Tornado aircraft will be kept in service until 2017 for air strikes against the Islamic State, to ‘ensure we maintain this crucial operational tempo’. On the Today programme, Fallon explained
For too long, Westminster has overlooked mental health. It has been languishing in funding obscurity for decades as a forgotten arm of the NHS. But thankfully, there was a shift in priorities during the last Parliament as all political parties woke up to the importance of providing good mental health care. The issue rose so
From ‘Warsaw and Russia‘, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: ON Thursday afternoon the German wireless news announced the occupation of Warsaw. Official confirmation is lacking as we go to press, but in any case it is probable that the city will be evacuated very shortly. Earlier news had encouraged the hope that the determination of
Gill Pharaoh was a geriatric care nurse who had spent years caring for the elderly. When she herself began to grow old, she decided that she didn’t want to go through what her patients had suffered, travelled to Switzerland, and passed away at an assisted dying clinic. She was not terminally ill. She didn’t want to
