Politics

As junior doctors exercise their right to strike today over government plans to change their contracts, Jeremy Hunt has been keeping a surprisingly low profile. In fact the Health Secretary has declined interview requests, instead sending his senior clinical advisor Norman Williams to field questions from the media. Alas, there are some questions that are not appropriate to ask Williams. One such question is ‘where is Jeremy Hunt?’. Sky‘s Darren McCaffrey found this out the hard way after he asked Williams why Hunt was refusing to take media requests. At which point an aide dived in to stop the interview: ‘Hang on a minute, we’re not doing any of this nonsense.’

Have Labour MPs who oppose Jeremy Corbyn just given up? Given many of them have chosen to stay on the frontbench after the reshuffle in which the Labour leader made clear that it was his way or the highway, and also that he does want to change party policy on Trident after all, it looks as though many have just resigned themselves to a miserable few years in which they struggle to mount any meaningful resistance to the Labour leader. It’s certainly true that Corbyn’s opponents don’t have a clear plan for removing him. Some of them have concluded that the best option is for the unions to turn against

Junior doctors are now on strike over their new contract, with recriminations between the two sides continuing as the picket lines fill up. It is clear that there has been a fundamental breakdown of trust between the BMA and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, to the extent that both sides seem to be talking about completely different contracts. Many Tories think the BMA is going too far and is not serving the cause of its members well by provoking the public with cancelled operations. It is striking that Sarah Wollaston, who has criticised the government’s approach to the matter, is now attacking doctors’ decision to strike as counterproductive, too. But what’s

Labour’s reshuffle isn’t, as some foolishly alleged, over. It may never end, as frontbenchers decide to resign over the internal warfare in the party. This morning Catherine McKinnell, who was Shadow Attorney General, has resigned, citing family reasons, the struggle to balance frontbench and constituency life, and ‘the situation in which the Labour Party now finds itself’, which the Newcastle North MP says has ‘amplified’ the first two issues. She writes: ‘However, as events have unfolded over recent weeks, my concerns about the direction and internal conflict within the Labour Party have only grown, and I fear this is taking us down an increasingly negative path. I feel that I

There was something inevitable about Milo Moire’s naked protest in response to the New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Cologne in the name of feminism. Moire stood in the square outside Cologne’s Cathedral, utterly clothesless except for a pair of red trainers. She held a placard that said ‘Respect us! We are not fair game even when we are naked!’ Moire is of course just another attention-craving narcissist, although in her defence it should be said that she does have an impressive pair of (fake?) breasts. According to her Wikipedia entry, Moire places ‘herself at the interface of art and pornography’. Judging from her saucy Twitter account, I would say she tends

Jeremy Corbyn’s Today interview was a reasonably good stint for the leader after a bad week. He had clearly worked out better ways of talking about terrorism that make him sound reasonable – although he deliberately left in tell-tale references to what he thinks of the West. While he refused to say whether or not he would back a drone strike against the new British jihadi militant revealed in an Isis video last week, he also told the programme that France was no more responsible than any other Western government for terror attacks: ‘Of course the French government are not responsible for the attacks on the streets of Paris any