Politics

It will create lots of well-paid jobs, especially in Scotland. It will reduce our electricity bills. And it will make sure the lights can still be switched on regardless of what is happening in the rest of the world. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has made a big pitch today for ‘energy security’, promising to rip up planning rules for onshore wind power and create a state-owned green energy giant that will provide all the power the UK needs, as well as hitting all our targets on climate change. But hold on. On closer inspection, it seems that Sir Keir knows barely anything about energy security. His backbenchers, and definitely

Want to avoid Pride month? Bit tired of the, almost literally, in your face, carnival of uninhibited sexual freedom we see on our streets throughout June? Then come to Japan. It’s not that Pride doesn’t happen here at all, just that the Japanese for various cultural and historic reasons, don’t make a song and dance – or a borderline street cabaret – out of it. Japan’s version ‘Rainbow Pride’ is held in April and lasts just two days. It was back on this year for the first time since 2019 and was apparently reasonably well-attended. I say ‘apparently’ because I saw no sign of it, nor watched or read a

Boris Johnson’s dwindling brigade of supporters point to the Conservatives’ landslide election win of 2019 as evidence he’s too gifted a politician for his party to lose. But they conveniently ignore the fact his charm stopped working at the border with Scotland. Voters across much of England may have flocked to Johnson but he repelled many Scots. In 2019, the SNP won back 13 of the 21 seats it had lost two years previously, when Theresa May was prime minister. The Tories lost seven Scottish seats. There is a particular caricature of the distant, uncaring Conservative that repels Scottish voters. And that caricature is Boris Johnson-shaped. So, over recent years,

It seems the Americans are belatedly waking up to the reality of the Sussexes. Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, has finally cottoned on to the fact that Harry and Meghan aren’t exactly model Stakhanovite grafters. He has this week come out and attacked them as ‘fucking grifters’, after their £15.6m Archetypes podcast deal with Spotify was unceremoniously canned. The Wall Street Journal reports that the couple may not have met the productivity requirements to get the full payout. How will they cope? Now it’s all over: not a moment too soon You can see why Simmons is angry: the pair really embraced ‘quiet quitting’. The Duke and Duchess of the Sussex signed

Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold a pass giving him access to the Parliamentary Estate as a former MP. So it is odd then that almost nobody has commented on Keir Starmer’s exposure for the commission of a new political fraud – even though it came in the high-profile setting of PMQs. While lambasting Rishi Sunak for permitting Boris Johnson’s resignation