Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Best Buys: One year fixed rate bonds

If you’ve got a chunk of money that you don’t mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week’s picks of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment. Data supplied

Steerpike

Baroness Trumpington: Theresa May is terribly boring

Oh dear. Theresa May’s bad week just got worse. On top of Tory MPs taking to social media, the airwaves and the papers to criticise her, it now seems that Conservative peers are going public with their grievances. In the new issue of Tatler magazine, Baroness Trumpington – who retired from the Lords last year

Steerpike

John Humphrys has the last laugh at Oldie of the Year

John Humphrys has had a rough time of late. Not only has the Today programme anchor voluntarily taken three pay cuts – with his salary thought to have been cut from £649,000 to under £300,000 – he has received little credit for it. Humphrys has come under flak from all sides after a conversation in

Isabel Hardman

Are Labour MPs in line for their own Haringey-style showdown?

The centrist faction in the Labour Party has been pretty quiet since the snap election, with most MPs who opposed Jeremy Corbyn trying to focus either on Brexit or local issues and avoiding confrontations with the leadership at all costs. But today’s news from Haringey suggests that this isn’t likely to hold. The council’s leader

Trump’s State of the Union goodwill won’t last long

The real story about Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech today may not be what he says, but that Melania is showing up to attend it. Melania, left livid at reports claiming Trump paid porn star Stormy Daniels £90,000 ($130,000) in hush money on the eve of the 2016 election, skipped Davos and has stayed out

Brendan O’Neill

Feminists have a new target: working-class women

So this week two things have got feminists cheering and whooping. First, the coming together of BBC women to demand a hike in their already eye-watering levels of pay. And secondly, the erasure of the walk-on women from darts, the sacking, effectively, of these beautiful, usually working-class women who bring a touch of glamour to

Ross Clark

Trumponomics is working

As Donald Trump makes his State of the Union address this evening his many opponents have an increasingly large problem: the US economy. Whatever else you might say about the President it is becoming impossible to deny that the economy has done extremely well in the year since he became president. Growth accelerated from 1.5

Alex Massie

Tory attacks on the Brexit impact report will help Corbyn

The good news is that the latest civil service analysis of the most likely impact of Brexit is more optimistic than previous civil service estimates of Brexit’s consequences for the British economy. The bad news is that they’re still pretty gloomy. The best case scenario, modelled for officials at the Department for Exiting the EU,

Steerpike

Stepford students come for Jacob Rees-Mogg

Here we go. First the Stepford students at LSE submitted a motion to ban the university’s free-speech society, next City University students tried banning newspapers at the institution famed for its journalism school, then Lincoln University’s Student Union suspended the Conservative Society’s social media use after young Tories dared to suggest that the powers-that-be were intolerant of

Steerpike

What the BBC won’t tell you about the leaked Brexit forecasts

The leaked government Brexit forecasts have this morning been reported by the BBC just as its leakers intended: as embarrassing proof that Brexit is bad for the economy. If it had any vague interest in being impartial, perhaps the Beeb would have bothered to make the rather obvious point: not only have we seen such

Steerpike

Angela Merkel’s Theresa May jibe

Theresa May’s not having a good few weeks. With Tories scrambling to either criticise their leader or covertly campaign to be the next leader, May’s premiership appears to be on shaky ground once more. Add to this a backlash from Conservative Brexiteers and a government Brexit forecast leak and it’s safe to conclude things aren’t

China vs America: the espionage story of our time

Why aren’t spy stories sexy anymore? The revelations last year that Beijing destroyed America’s espionage ring inside China a few years ago, including executing a number of US informants, got a brief flurry of attention and then subsided beneath the waves. News reports of American bureaucrats arrested for passing information to the Chinese have also barely raised

Could Michael Gove be the one to fix Britain’s tax problems?

Sir:  Sir James Dyson is right (Letters, 20 January). We need big farming; that is where our food comes from. But the elephant in the room is tax — inheritance tax and roll-over relief — which of course he conveniently skirts. Farming at this level needs subsidy precisely because land is too expensive for food production

Steerpike

Philip Hammond loses power

Oh dear. After a weekend of on-the-record briefings against him, it’s safe to say that Philip Hammond has found himself on the wrong side of the Brexiteers. The Chancellor’s comments at Davos about close alignment and minimum change have led his colleagues to see red – with Nadine Dorries calling for him to be sacked.

James Forsyth

Don’t sweat the Brexit transition deal

There are many things to worry about with Brexit, but the terms of the transition should be pretty low down that list. The transition was always going to have to be off-the-shelf (if you could negotiate a bespoke transition, you might as well do the final deal) and as long as it is time-limited, it

The truth about Iran is now of little importance to Jeremy Corbyn

If any further evidence was needed about the disingenuousness of Jeremy Corbyn and the dangers a government led by him might pose internationally – not just for Britain but also for Britain’s Nato allies – it is worth watching Corbyn’s interview on Iran with the BBC’s Andrew Marr yesterday. ‘You’ve been very reluctant to condemn

Stephen Daisley

The one where millennials don’t get Friends

All progress is war on the past and millennials are particularly merciless combatants. The arrival of Friends on Netflix UK has had this neo-Victorian generation reaching for its fainting couch. Through woke eyes, the hit NBC sitcom isn’t a diverting entertainment but an artefact of racism, sexism and homophobia. If you were a twentysomething during

Katy Balls

Conservative MPs should be careful what they wish for

How much trouble is Theresa May in? Just three weeks ago, it looked as though the Prime Minister was at her strongest point since the disastrous snap election. Now, the BBC 10 o’clock news is leading on questions about her survival – with reports of irrepairable drift, Brexit rifts. The Sunday papers are filled with a

Steerpike

Toff sends Downing Street into a spin

Since Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo won I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, the Conservatives have been left with a dilemma over whether to utilise their celebrity supporter. A proud Conservative, Toff kindly volunteered to utilise her million followers for the party only for brains at CCHQ to block any such move over concerns she’s

Steerpike

Jeremy Corbyn’s short-term memory on Iran

It’s happened. Jeremy Corbyn has finally broken his silence on Iran. To be fair, he was rather forced into doing so when Andrew Marr raised the topic live on air this morning. Marr put to the Labour leader – who says ‘to stay neutral in times of injustice is to side with the oppressor’ – that

Charles Moore

Justin Welby is in a corner over the case of George Bell

It is quite unnecessary and truly sad that the Archbishop of Canterbury has painted himself into a corner over the case of George Bell, the heroic, long-dead Bishop of Chichester. Last week, several historians who have studied Bell wrote to him to say that the Carlile report (which the Archbishop had himself commissioned) had clearly

Roger Alton

Jamie Murray is wrong about doubles players’ earnings

Who doesn’t love the Murray family? Andy, a unique sporting hero; Judy, a magnificent coach and the best tennis mum. And, er, Jamie? Fine doubles player of course. But he’s now gone way off piste calling for vastly more prize money for doubles players, adding: ‘There’s a lot of excitement around the doubles game.’ Are

Defence cuts should trouble us all

This week, General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the General Staff, made it quite clear how he would like to fight the Russians should they invade Eastern Europe or start a war with NATO: We should identify Russian weaknesses and then manoeuvre asymmetrically against them. First and foremost, perhaps we should be in the business