Politics

‘Don’t be a fatty in your 50s’, that was the advice Boris Johnson had for his colleagues following his recovery from coronavirus. It seems he’s taken that comment to heart – the PM has signed up a new PT to help him shift the pounds.  The Evening Standard reports that celebrity trainer Harry Jameson has been spotted alongside the 56-year-old Prime Minister while out on a jog in Westminster this morning. Jameson is known for his work out sessions with Love Island presenter Laura Whitmore as well as Rocky IV star Dolph Lundgren (Mr S has resisted the temptation to make a joke about a ‘rocky’ few weeks).   The question is, what happened to all of Boris’s other personal

Some in Westminster have been missing Dominic Cummings. It turns out he had an operation in late July, which he delayed a year ago when Boris Johnson persuaded him to become his chief aide, and has been convalescing in the north of England since. He returns to normal duties at No. 10 on Monday. Whitehall source tells me he has not been working and was not looking at emails or messages. I imagine it has been an unmitigated joy for him to switch it all back on again — especially to read the reported remarks of his father-in-law about the PM’s alleged (and denied) early retirement plans. 

Edward Snowden says that he didn’t mean to end up in Russia when he fled after leaking secrets from his job at the United States National Security Agency (NSA). He writes in his autobiography, Permanent Record, that he agonised about where to go. Europe was impossible because of extradition. Africa was a ‘no-go zone’ because the US ‘had a history of acting there with impunity’. Eventually, he went to Hong Kong and after hiding out there for a short time, he made a dash for Ecuador in hope of getting asylum. But the US cancelled his passport and, in what we’re told was an unfortunate coincidence, he got stuck in Sheremetyevo airport

All over the country, large numbers of businessmen are anxious. They do not know when – if ever – trading conditions will return to normal. So there is a squeeze on costs, a clampdown on inefficiency and – to use the euphemism – employees whose performance might have been acceptable in easier times are ‘let go.’ This is understandable. But there is an exception. In one very important enterprise, an employee who could never have made a worthwhile contribution somehow survives. What does Gavin Williamson have to do before he is replaced? This is a man who can neither think in private nor perform in public. His response to any

Among the encroachments on Milton’s three supreme liberties contained in Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Bill is a cloturing of the debate on gender identity and the law. Proposals to remove medical expertise from the gender recognition process have either stalled or been shelved, but not before their radical scope prompted a lively dispute about the ethics of gender identity, sex-based rights and the freedom to dissent. That freedom will be meaningfully reduced in Scotland if the Hate Crime Bill becomes law because it is a piece of legislation that begins from the position that all legitimate debate has already concluded. The Bill creates an offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against