Politics

There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. The late Virginia Giuffre has gone a step further by serving up her final helping of vengeance against Prince Andrew by publishing her sure-to-be-revelatory memoir, Nobody’s Girl, from beyond the grave this October. Giuffre collaborated with the American writer Amy Wallace on a 400-page book that is expected to divulge in no doubt excruciatingly painful and embarrassing detail, the various relationships that she had with the notorious likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and – of course! – the Duke of York himself. Announcing the book, her publisher Knopf claimed that it would offer “intimate, disturbing, and heartbreaking new details

If I had to summarise, in a word, the mood of the nation in 2025, I’d probably plump for fraught. There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from it, flicking through the pages of a history book, maybe. But it’s rather different to live through it. How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem People like me, and probably you, were socialised in a more stable and reliable world, where everyone and everything muddled along. So we find it very hard

The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum or faced with removal can appeal to a court, namely the Immigration and Asylum division of the First-tier Tribunal, and from there (with permission) to another court, the Upper Tribunal. Even the first appeal can take over a year; and since, with a few exceptions, a person cannot be removed while an appeal is pending,

Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Candy Brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not. Papers get to call it a ‘third home’ because she has the use of a ministerial apartment – ‘grace and favour’, obviously, to make it sound extra posh – in Westminster, but she’s not exactly going to be flipping the place in Admiralty House

Fertility rates in Britain are in freefall. The average number of children per woman is now 1.44, the lowest in recorded history. Among millennials, childlessness at 30 is no longer unusual but expected: half of UK women born in 1990 were still childless by that age, twice the rate of their mothers. Many couples will eventually have children, but later and fewer. We’re heading for a future without enough young people; a slow-motion societal collapse triggered by labour shortages, economic stagnation, declining public services and social isolation. It is a gloomy prospect, but a realistic one. Children blow your old life to pieces. Your weekends are no longer yours. But