Politics

Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would be banned from attending their match against Aston Villa next month, an outcome that Khan, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, had been lobbying for since September. That night, Khan took himself on a broadcast round to celebrate. Keir Starmer had said the ban was the ‘wrong decision’, but on Newsnight Khan told him to back off. ‘The Prime Minister should stay out of operational matters,’ he said. ‘That’s not a matter for him, sitting in No. 10.’ It has been a satisfying 15 months for Khan since his election.

In Silicon Valley there is a simple mantra that drives innovation: You Can Just Do Things. Wait for permission from the system, the bureaucrats or, worst of all, your lawyers, and nothing ever happens. Incumbents want inertia not challenge. Progress depends on movement. Nowhere does the PM seem so adrift than in the area he claimed to have made his own: law and order It is a lesson that seems lost on this government and this Prime Minister. They are a model of inactivity, none of it masterly. They proclaimed they would be a ‘mission-led’ government. In December last year, Keir Starmer promised that these missions ‘must be felt tangibly

In a week where political attention was on espionage and anti-Semitism, the cri de coeur from one Treasury official was notable. Recalling how Budgets were made during the years of Gordon Brown, before the 2010 coalition created the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the number-cruncher complained: ‘All they had to do was fiddle their own figures. That was a dream compared with this.’ Earlier this month, Rachel Reeves received the OBR’s first estimate of the state of the public finances, showing the depth of the ‘black hole’. She will shortly get another OBR report on how falling productivity is damaging growth. For every 0.1 per cent productivity growth is downgraded,

It’s been a funny old time for Nigel Farage in parliament. Elected to the House of Commons at his eighth attempt, the Reform leader has had to adapt to the weird and world of Westminster’s traditions. But in a parliament where you’re just five of the 650 MPs overall, getting barracked on all sides isn’t always much fun. One particular irritation is Prime Ministers’ Questions (PMQs) on a Wednesday when various Labour MPs get up to attack Reform, with no right of reply for Farage. For despite his commanding lead in the polls, the Reform leader rarely gets to speak at PMQs, with his next scheduled appearance not due until

There have been 14 cabinet secretaries since the post was established in 1916. The first, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, served for nearly 22 years; in stark contrast, there are now reports that the 14th and current incumbent, Sir Chris Wormald, will be gone by the New Year, having served just 12 or 13 months. The problem is leadership, or rather a glaring lack of it Wormald was appointed in December 2024 after eight-and-a-half years as permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, to replace the controversial Simon Case. Boris Johnson had plucked Case from the lower ranks of the senior civil service – he was at that point

Another week, another migration scandal. On Monday, the Times reported that Russian spies have been working with international human rights groups to ‘flood Europe with illegal migrants’. The revelations come from Daniel Mitov, Bulgaria’s interior minister, who claims to have evidence that the Russians are assisting people smugglers in finding weak spots along the Bulgaria-Turkey border and instructing migrants on how to avoid detection.  Mitov – as I’m sure you’ll understand – isn’t thrilled by this. Rather than regarding waves of new arrivals pouring through his country’s borders as just the injection of diversity that Bulgaria needs, the interior minister sees it as a naked attempt by Vladimir Putin to