Politics

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can’t still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If they are, it rather makes a fantastic irony of the fact that these are the kind of people who often refer to the rest of us at Little Englanders. If – as so many of us hope – Durhamgate is finally fading away, now might be a good time to survey the wreckage. To look

One of the striking things about the government’s further easing of the lockdown is that it has focused on socialising rather than further attempts to get economic activity going again. At first blush, this is a surprising move. The blow that the public finances have taken from coronavirus means that it is imperative economic activity resumes soon.  But the thinking in Whitehall is that the big problem is getting people to be confident enough to resume normal life. The hope is that by allowing people to see some friends and family, they’ll make people more relaxed about sending their children to school and more prepared to go to clothes shops

Fifty years on from the Equal Pay Act, the world looks very different for women now than it did then. Women run their own small businesses, lead corporate firms, and last December a woman wrote herself a cheque for £341m, the highest corporate executive pay pack in UK history. A gender pay gap that was once ingrained in British working culture because of gender discrimination has diminished. Women in their twenties right through to their forties earn roughly the same as men. Women in part-time work earn, on average, more than men. By no means is the world equal yet. Women in many developing countries are denied basic freedoms. Even in

It would have to close down its factories. Thousands of job would be lost. Suppliers would be abandoned, and the local economy would be shattered for a generation. It was sometimes a little hard to work out why a few hardcore Remainers cared quite so much about Nissan. Its range of mid-market, family SUVs were not the kind of cars they would usually be seen dead in. But somehow the company became emblematic of the whole bitter debate about how the British economy would suffer if we left the European Union. If we weren’t in the Single Market, we were told again and again, the business was doomed. So today’s news

Danny Kruger, formerly Johnson’s political secretary and now the MP for Devizes, has – perhaps inadvertently – done the country some small service. In a note sent to newly-elected Tory MPs, Mr Kruger has reportedly advised his colleagues that ‘calling for Dominic Cummings to go is basically declaring no confidence in [the] prime minister.’ Well, yes, indeed. That is the point. Because, in the end, this is not a story about Dominic Cummings but, rather, one about the Prime Minister. Even if we concede the possibility that he has not fully recovered from his own recent illness and, by making that concession, are tempted to afford him a greater measure