Politics

Politicians have a long history of embarrassing themselves on trips to foreign lands. Boris Yeltsin famously offended his hosts in Ireland in 1994 when he refused to get off his plane at Shannon airport. The Russian president suggested afterwards that he had simply ‘overslept’ – an excuse the Irish Press suggested should be taken with ‘a large measure of vodka’. But even if a legless Yeltsin was unable to meet the Irish Taoiseach that day, one hopes at least that he knew which country he was offending. The same cannot be said of Britain’s Africa minister, James Duddridge, who was in Zambia this week to attend the funeral of the

Robert Jenrick – We will have to ‘learn to live with the virus’ The Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick was the government’s chief spokesman today as England edges ever closer towards the planned relaxation of Covid restrictions on 19 July. Jenrick continued to make positive noises about this date, telling Trevor Phillips that data being examined by the Prime Minister was looking promising – and suggesting that another postponement of ‘Freedom Day’ was highly unlikely. However, Jenrick’s cautious comments did not rule out the return of restrictions in the winter, should cases continue to rise: RJ: It does seem as if we can now move forward… to a much more permissive

It’s not been a great week for James Dornan. On Saturday the SNP MSP was forced to apologise (again) for suggesting Lothian Buses’ decision to cancel travel services over anti-social behaviour was linked to St Patrick’s Day, with the implication that the company blamed Catholics for the problem.  Then on Wednesday Mr S showed the lengths the Hate-Finder General had gone to investigate the now debunked Tik Tok video of Rangers players allegedly singing a sectarian song, requesting information for his constituents which he then appears to have not subsequently disclosed. Now one of Steerpike’s readers has got in touch to point out Dornan’s comments made during the Holyrood election back in May. The

I am coming out of semi-retirement from writing about sex and gender to write this, because it’s about women in prison, a group that desperately need more attention from people interested in politics and policy. The High Court has been considering the question of transgender women (i.e. people who were born male) in the female prison estate. That’s after a legal action was brought by a woman in a female jail who says she was sexually assaulted by a trans prisoner. The prison service hasn’t denied that this assault took place. The claimant, was imprisoned between October 2016 and June 2020, argued that prison service policy in England and Wales