Politics

It’s hard to think of any Prime Minister who has entered office surrounded by such low expectations. Liz Truss was backed by just over half of Conservative party members and secured barely an eighth of MPs in the first ballot. Her critics dismiss her as a lightweight, wholly unsuited to tackling the problems now facing the country. The presumption is not just for trouble, but calamity: the fastest drop in living standards in living memory, followed by prolonged recession and worse. So if Truss manages to send inflation into reverse and makes a noticeable cut to taxes by Easter, it will be seen as quite an achievement. She has also

Those of us on the right often sense a form of racism in the protests by some of those on the left who are suspicious of the racial diversity in the Tory front bench. Kemi Badenoch has often spoken about how black politicians who differ from the Labour narrative are accused of somehow betraying their race. Priti Patel has spoken about how much she hates the label ‘BME’ which lumps together all ethnic minorities as if they have more in common with each other than whites (she banned her officials from using it). James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, has said he has been told to ‘go home’ and referred to by

What do Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, the chairman of the BBC, Piers Morgan, and, er, me, have in common? The answer is that we’ve all been banned from Russia. For some of us, that’s a blow. For others, an irrelevance. But for all of us, it’s a strange accolade: somehow Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin thinks we’re significant, dangerous or hostile enough to need to be kept out at all costs. What level of insecurity does it take to worry that the screen Zoolander and Harvey Milk, respectively, represent a threat to the stability and integrity of the Russian Federation? And what desperation demands that this be done not quietly, if, as and