Politics

After David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges kicked off her new career outside of No.10 with a blistering editorial in the Times criticising her former employer over a range of issues including the bedroom tax, doubts began to surface that she was not a true blue. Still, even Mr S was surprised to read in an interview with the Evening Standard that the Prime Minister’s old political advisor is ‘rooting for Jeremy Corbyn’. What’s more, the gesture is not simply part of the jovial #ToriesForCorbyn movement: ‘Foges lives alone in Archway where Jeremy Corbyn is her MP (she’s rooting for him because she lives in the area, not as part of a Tory plot).’ Foges —

As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor, an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected

Ukip’s deputy chairman Suzanne Evans has announced she is seeking the party’s nomination for the 2016 London Mayor election. Speaking to Iain Dale on LBC this morning, Evans said from the off she is very unlikely to become Mayor, but that she hopes to influence the race and offer Londoners a difference: ‘I have thrown my hat into the ring to apply to be Ukip candidate for Mayor of London and or an London assembly member. Let’s be realistic, I don’t think London is going to have a Ukip mayor any time soon. ‘But I think it’s time for London to have a different view, a different approach. I think there are a growing amount of

Mr Corbyn has a beard. If he becomes leader, he will be the first bearded leader of any main party since Keir Hardie. The beard as a fashion item is now back, generally in shaped and even waxed form. But Mr Corbyn’s one owes nothing to fashion. It is a 1960s political beard, already obsolete when he first brought it into the House of Commons in 1983. Like Lord Hailsham who, as Mrs Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, continued to wear a bowler hat long after it had disappeared from everything but hunt puppy shows, Orange parades and A Clockwork Orange, Mr Corbyn is undaunted by the passage of time. I must try not

It’s only lunchtime but the Guardian may have already reached ‘peak Guardian’ for the day. The paper has published an article penned by Chris Elliott chronicling an in-house investigation into their coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid. They decided to do this after a number of Corbynistas complained that the left-wing paper had shown bias against Corbyn, with one reader going so far as to claim that their reporting of his leadership bid was worse than the paper’s coverage of the Vietnam war: ‘I’ve been a regular reader of the Guardian (Manchester Guardian as was) since 1958. Despite the low point reached in the 60s when you supported the US war in Vietnam

Although Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to tackle her party’s ‘cybernats’ over the online abuse of those who do not support Scottish independence, the SNP leader may need to reassess her current efforts following this weekend’s events. After news broke that Michelle Mone is to be awarded a peerage by the Tories, the lingerie entrepreneur was besieged with insults online from SNP supporters. However, the ‘cybernats’ were not done there. Following the death of Cilla Black at the age of 72, while many rushed to tweet messages of condolence to her friends and family, others simply recalled the late singer’s support of the Better Together campaign — during which Black signed