Politics

When you say the name ‘Andy Coulson,’ it’s hard not to think of the phone hacking scandal. The former News of the World editor served five months of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to commit phone hacking in 2014 but has now managed to rebound from Belmarsh to business success, with a PR firm making half-a-million pounds a year. According to company accounts, the one-time Downing Street aide’s new outfit Coulson Partners Limited – for which Coulson is listed as the sole director and owner of 100 per cent of shares – declared total equity of £496,000 at the end of 2021. It pulled in more than a million last

You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist. Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of international economics at the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, and co-author of anti-austerity book Angrynomics, was signed up to a new Scottish government economic advisory council last summer. The group, which had a remit to publish a strategy paper on turbo-charging Scotland’s economy, replaced a previous Council of Economic Advisors set up by

A year ago we scuttled out of Afghanistan. We abandoned the aim we and the Americans had proclaimed so noisily of bringing Afghanistan into the twenty-first century so that the Taliban could never triumph again. We left behind many Afghans who had helped us at the risk of their lives. To most of the world it was obvious that the Americans and their allies had been comprehensively defeated. Our own politicians, generals, diplomats, spies and aid advisers have been tumbling over one another to distance themselves from the mess. At first they tried to argue that it was too soon to reach such a depressing conclusion. After all, the Taliban