Politics

A Russian man convicted of spying for Britain has mysteriously been taken ill due to an ‘unknown substance’ – I wonder who could be responsible? Of course one can’t assume at this point, and the Russians will express bafflement as to why they’re being accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. No doubt the London Embassy’s perky Twitter feed will make light of western paranoia in that surreal way international politics is conducted these days. But then the Russians are suspected of 14 assassinations on British soil, the most bizarre case involving the expert who discovered the poison that killed Alexander Litvinenko, who himself died after apparently ‘stabbing

It’s safe to say that Boris Johnson is not having a good day. As well as finding himself in a row over whether or not he suggested England could withdraw from the World Cup in Russia, the Foreign Secretary has received a ticking off from John Bercow. The Speaker took issue with Johnson after he arrived late for an Urgent Question on the suspected poisoning of a Russian double agent. Johnson’s timekeeping led the Speaker to take a swipe at the Foreign Secretary for his comments last week comparing the Irish border to Islington and Camden – suggesting that just as there is no hard border between the two borough there could be

Munroe Bergdorf has resigned as Labour’s LGBT adviser after just one week in the job. Her appointment looked quite promising until it emerged she had deployed ‘butch lezza’ as an insult, joked that she’d like to ‘gay bash’ a TV character, and described gay Tory men as ‘a special kind of dickhead’. ‘Ever find that sometimes you’re just NOT in the mood for a gay and their flapping arms,’ she once mused on Twitter. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest gay rights advocacy isn’t the career for her.  She has quit, citing ‘attacks on my character by the conservative right wing press’. Of course, there is no need to attack

Here we go. Last night Gary Oldman came away victorious at the Oscars – picking up the best actor gong for his depiction of Winston Churchill in the Darkest Hour. The film follows the attempts within government in 1940 to make a peace treaty with Hitler and Churchill’s refusal to do so. Only not everyone was cheered by the news of Oldman’s success. Jeremy Corbyn’s former adviser Steve Howell complains that Churchill had many dark hours and so he will ‘pass on any film glorifying a man who British voters rejected at the first opportunity’. Setting aside the small issue of Churchill’s legacy (see what The Spectator said in 1965:

It’s nice to get an election prediction right. Well, more or less right anyway. The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) – the drain-the-swamp-screw-everything protest movement founded by a comedian and run like a Scientology sect – has got many more votes in Sunday’s Italian general elections than opinion polls had suggested. According to exit polls conducted by Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, the M5S has got 31.5 per cent of the vote cast, which makes it, by a long way, the party with the most votes. Before Italy’s required opinion poll black-out two weeks before general election day the M5S remained consistently on 27 per cent. In my last post I predicted this – saying

A couple of years back, while writing my book Radicals, I secured an interview with Beppe Grillo, leader of the Italian Five Star Movement. M5S (its Italian abbreviation) is the radical anti-establishment party that’s on track to top next week’s general election. We met in the restaurant of the hotel he always stays when in Rome. There was a small crowd outside as I walked in, hoping to get a glimpse of the man. Beppe wandered in late – he enjoys daily siestas – waving his smartphone. ‘This,’ he said, as he sat down, ‘this is what changes everything!’ Then something weird happened. Before I’d even pressed ‘record’, he picked