Politics

With Reform surging in the polls, no one in No. 10 wants a by-election anytime soon. But thanks to ‘Iron’ Mike Amesbury, such a contest now looms in Runcorn and Helsby. The ex-Labour MP was sentenced on Monday to ten weeks in prison, triggering a recall petition. Already Nigel Farage’s ‘People’s army’ is up in Cheshire collecting signatures, following the party’s second place finish here last July. So with a difficult race on their hands, who might Labour party managers turn to in their desperation? Perhaps Jon Ashworth, the former shadow cabinet mainstay cruelly turfed out in Leicester last year. Ashworth, who now works as Chief Executive of the Labour

It’s a day ending in a ‘y’ which can only mean one thing – noted geopolitics expert Gary Lineker inflicting his opinions on the Middle East on the rest of us. Gary’s latest dip into the Arab-Israeli conflict comes after the BBC was forced to pull its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, from iPlayer while it performs a ‘due diligence’ check on the programme. This was prompted by the allegation that one of the programme’s child narrators was the son of a Hamas government minister. Since then, it has also been alleged that the programme mistranslated certain words used by its interviewees – changing the Arabic words for ‘Jew’ and

On 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was a historic turning point, or Zeitenwende, for European security. Scholz promised to transform German foreign and defence policy, and substantially modernise and rearm Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr. A key element of the Zeitenwende was the creation of a €100 billion special fund for an immediate increase in defence spending, as well as the promise to meet Nato’s target of spending 2 per cent target of GDP on defence by 2024. Two years on, with the dawn of the second Trump administration, it seems that Zeitenwende was only the