Theresa May should have had a rather difficult Prime Minister’s Questions today. Jeremy Corbyn chose to lead on the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and then moved onto rough sleeping. Both matters are vulnerabilities for May, and ones Corbyn has consistently made a great deal of noise about. But there were two
I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought
Here we go. The European Commission draft guidelines for the Brexit trade negotiations have leaked – and, as expected, it doesn’t make all that pretty reading for the British government. Although Theresa May’s Brexit speech was well-received in the UK, in Brussels many of May’s arguments and proposals appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, is in town today for a three-day state visit with a charm offensive from the British government and royal family. Proving that he is a very modern prince, Mohammed bin Salman has also managed a media PR blitz with pro-Saudi Arabia adverts in a host of
The stock market is reeling. The White House has already witnessed the resignation of the President’s most senior economic adviser. The EU is preparing retaliation, and other countries are checking the rule books to see what sort of tariffs and quotas they might be allowed to impose. In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to
There are many things the Conservative party needs to do before it is election fit – whether local or national. There’s securing a good Brexit deal, building more homes and repairing the damage done in the snap election – to name a few. As I write in today’s i paper, one of the big things brains
Young Labour members have made headlines today after calling for a ban on alcohol at CLP meetings to ensure the party can ‘become truly inclusive of women and other minorities’. Now it seems the Liberal Democrats could be next in the battle against patriarchy-fuelled booze. Speaking at a Grassroots Women panel this week at the
Not even twenty minutes had passed into the discussion between guest speakers Carl Benjamin and Yaron Brook at King’s College London before free speech was suppressed. Swarms of violent protestors stormed the lecture theatre, with masks and bandanas, hurling verbal abuse and inciting physical attacks. We were faced with a chilling demonstration of contemporary fascism.
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As 66-year-old former Russian Military Intelligence Colonel, Sergei Skripal, and a companion lie critically ill in a Salisbury hospital. The familiar question is asked: is this another Russian assassination attempt? We don’t yet know if Col. Skripal was deliberately targeted, or by whom – the cause of his illness may be entirely innocent – but
Not many world leaders can claim to be on friendly personal terms with Donald Trump. There are fewer still who would regard a visit to this particular president’s White House as a crowning achievement, and one which would increase their popularity at home rather than being seen as a moral failing. So the lesson of
Why on earth would we want to put up a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square? That’s the question that a number of politicians are asking after the possibility arose once again at the weekend. ‘Steady on,’ said Nicola Sturgeon. Labour’s Chris Bryant was (unsurprisingly, perhaps) rather more verbose. ‘What Mrs Thatcher did to
A Russian man convicted of spying for Britain has mysteriously been taken ill due to an ‘unknown substance’ – I wonder who could be responsible? Of course one can’t assume at this point, and the Russians will express bafflement as to why they’re being accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. No doubt
It’s safe to say that Boris Johnson is not having a good day. As well as finding himself in a row over whether or not he suggested England could withdraw from the World Cup in Russia, the Foreign Secretary has received a ticking off from John Bercow. The Speaker took issue with Johnson after he arrived
The death of Zac Cox is more than a horrible industrial action but a metaphor for modern sport: the scale of its corruption and the readiness of its fans to tolerate the intolerable as long as we are entertained. Mr Cox was 40 and working on a World Cup stadium in Qatar when a catwalk
This morning the new Justice Secretary, David Gauke, delivered one of those keynote speeches about prisons. You know the sort: half an hour in front of a crowd of ‘stakeholders’ at a convenient London location. It’s increasingly hard to take such occasions seriously. Not only are we on the sixth justice secretary since 2010 –
But for Toby Young, it is possible that few of us would have noticed the appointment of a transgender model called Munroe Bergdorf, who resigned this morning as a member of Labour’s LGBT advisory board. Her appointment might have gone unnoticed, along with her past comments on social media, which included attacking what she described
With one obvious exception, former Ukip leaders have a habit of disappearing into obscurity, but it seems Henry Bolton is determined not to go quietly. The party’s ousted leader has now set up his own political outfit: ‘OneNation’. Bolton says he decided to act because of the ‘urgent requirement for a 100% ‘leave’ party’. OneNation’s website
Munroe Bergdorf has resigned as Labour’s LGBT adviser after just one week in the job. Her appointment looked quite promising until it emerged she had deployed ‘butch lezza’ as an insult, joked that she’d like to ‘gay bash’ a TV character, and described gay Tory men as ‘a special kind of dickhead’. ‘Ever find that sometimes you’re just NOT
We live in a strange era when it comes to Russia. On the one hand there are people who seem willing to insist that absolutely everything is controlled by the government and agencies of that country. They claim that Russia has the power to install an American President, to make the British vote Brexit and
