All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Oh dear. The new Conservative party chairman has a job on their hands transforming CCHQ into a digitally-savvy campaign machine. So, it’s safe to say, that things haven’t got off to the best start for the new chairman. The CCHQ Twitter feed announced Chris Grayling as the new chairman: However, just moments later the tweet
Britain has a productivity problem – it lags behind Germany, France and the US, even Italy. But what, if anything, do we need to do about it? Over time, says economist Gerard Lyons, productive economies outperform less productive ones, but productivity statistics are not everything. Unskilled people who in Britain are working in less productive
Theresa May’s reshuffle is imminent. Although Cabinet’s big beasts are thought to be safe, Justine Greening and Greg Clark are among those in the hot seat. As for promotion, Jeremy Hunt is tipped to be appointed First Secretary of State. If this were to happen, a new Health Secretary would be needed. There has been
It’s reshuffle day – and the ministers thought to be in the danger zone include Justine Greening, Greg Clark, Patrick McLoughlin and Andrea Leadsom. So, with that in mind, one has to admire the decision by Leadsom to write an article for today’s Times’ Red Box on her priorities as Leader of the House of Commons
Theresa May’s reshuffle is underway. Here are the key points so far: Justine Greening has quit the government; Damian Hinds is the new Education Secretary David Gauke becomes the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Esther McVey becomes work and pension secretary Karen Bradley is the new Northern Ireland Secretary after James Brokenshire resigns due to ill
I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC. The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law
A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column – one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column
Given everything that happened to her in 2017, Theresa May could be starting this year in a far worse position. But that’s not to say that she hasn’t started in in the best position in the circumstances, either. That the Prime Minister and her team recognise this seemed apparent from her decision to pre-record her
The furore over Toby Young’s appointment to the board of the Office for Students (OfS) shows no sign of dying down. The Mail on Sunday splashes on a series of ‘sexist and obscene tweets’ sent by Young – reporting the Prime Minister’s apparent ‘distaste’. Now it seems that some can’t even accept Young’s work in education which contributed
A new art exhibition has recently opened in Paris and it’s caused a bit of a stir. Housed in the city hall, ‘Che in Paris’ is dedicated to the life and times of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary who was killed in Bolivia just over fifty years ago. Guevara had an affection for the French
The first challenge of 2018 was to provide a New Year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse. Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Friedrich Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he resolved
During the long interval since our pre-Christmas issue, Bitcoin has continued to generate crazy headlines — and crazy profits for those smart enough to sell at the peaks. The price tumbled from above $19,000 to below $13,000 but it did not crash out of sight, as sceptics continue to predict. Meanwhile, from Japan we hear
How ironic that it should take an invasion of the female-only pond in Hampstead by trans women to make luvvies realise the implications of allowing any old Tom, Dick or Harry who self-identifies as female into women’s spaces. Those virtue-signalling ideals are all very well around your fashionable dinner tables, but remember: it’s real women
Hamilton is the most exciting American cultural export in decades. It’s now showing in London every to large, delighted audiences — and we Brits love it. As a musical, it takes a dusty, distant slice of history and infuses it with excitement, intellect, lightning wit and an intoxicating whiff of sexual tension. I know this because I saw it in
I just exulted to my wife that Simon Evans had been on Radio Four’s The News Quiz. He’s a very funny man, Evans, but is also regarded as Britain’s only right-wing comedian. There are actually quite a few others – Leo Kearse, for example. Anyway, Evans was in excellent form, defending Donald Trump and describing
In The Sun today, I propose three New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May. She should be decisive on Brexit, bold on housing and try and fix social care. None of these will be easy; and all three of them will be made more difficult by her mistakes in 2017. But if the Tories don’t make
It’s just a few metres from Bartholomew Court, EC1, where a young man was one of four stabbed to death over the New Year, to trendy Hoxton, famous for its cereal bars and hirsute hipsters. It would be easy to say these two worlds – those of the trendy media types lampooned by ‘Nathan Barley’
Among the many new political maladies of our age, one has been left largely undiagnosed. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition whereby intense dislike of the 45th president renders sufferers unable to understand what he is trying to do or allow that he is capable of success. Trump is hard to admire, it’s true,
In Iran, women have had their lives dictated by ill-intentioned men for years now, as have homosexuals and anyone who dares oppose the hardline Islamic regime there. At last that nation’s downtrodden people seem to have found the strength and courage to rise up. No thanks, it must be said, to that self-styled champion of
Donald Trump is the most famous advocate of Twitter diplomacy but he is not the only high-profile politician to delight in using the site to wind up his enemies. In the Middle East, old opponents are also taking a leaf out of the Trump playbook. The latest spat is between the United Arab Emirates and Turkey,
We are famously a nation of animal lovers, so I suppose it’s not too surprising that one in two British households owning some form of pet. There are an estimated £20 million pets in the UK, so pet-related industries are not a bad area to be involved in. (This number, by the way, doesn’t include
Theresa May is expected to reshuffle her Cabinet early next week. Unfortunately for Theresa May, she’s been expected to do this since before Christmas – after she refrained from appointing a new First Secretary of State in light of Damian Green’s forced resignation/sacking. This means the reshuffle has dominated the news agenda for several weeks
Predictions of the death of the shop have become as much a ritual of New Year as fireworks and the singing of Auld Lang Syne. The two big retailers which have so far reported on their business over the Christmas period have provided the usual ammunition. Next reported sales up by 1.5 per cent in
The whose-fault-is-the-NHS-crisis game has taken some strange twists and turns this week, with the debate bouncing from patients costing the health service £1bn last year to Jeremy Hunt having to apologise to patients for cancelling their non-urgent procedures as a result of the increased pressures on hospitals. Political debate tends to prefer black-and-white and easily
The most piquant part of Michael Wolff’s gossipy new book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, is the ease with which he insinuated himself into the White House. Wolff explains that Trump initially thought he was interested in landing a job. When Wolff said he actually wanted to write a book about the
First blue passports. Now Brexit stamps. For some, these belong in the same file as the Royal Yacht Britannia and Big Ben’s bongs. See also: filament lightbulbs and fruit and veg sold in pounds and ounces. For some (repeat: some) Remain-voting politicians and observers, this stuff is ridiculous, old-fashioned nonsense, an attempt to drag Britain
A Martian visiting Britain in recent months might be a little confused as to the nature of human morality – not to mention as to where on the body we have our sexual organs. First the country becomes consumed by the wicked behaviour of man who lightly touched a woman’s knee. Then, a man who
It’s fair to say that Michael Wolff’s explosive biography of Donald Trump has caused a stir ahead of its publication. It’s a struggle to find a news site that isn’t splashing on its claims – from Trump’s supposed desire to lose the election to Steve Bannon’s comments on Russia. Despite the US President’s lawyer has issued
Yesterday, the Greater Manchester Police tweeted out the above picture claiming that that ‘the only legal place’ to put a SatNav is ‘the bottom right hand side of your windscreen… everywhere else is illegal.’ It was quite untrue. Deliciously, the picture showed a suspicious mark on the middle of the car windscreen that looked very
After Tony Blair’s call for a second referendum (and maybe even a third if that one didn’t work out) fell flat on Thursday, the campaign to stop Brexit looks on shaky ground. However, Newsnight have put forward an argument that could be just the thing to put life back in the campaign. In a film for
Time is running out to halt Brexit. That was Tony Blair’s dire warning on the airwaves yesterday, as the former prime minister once again waded into the referendum debate to say that: ‘2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided’. Unsurprisingly, his warnings have not gone
I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League
Gerard Coyne’s campaign team will reform in Birmingham this week, as the whisper spreads that control of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, and a sizeable share of influence in the Labour party, is up for grabs. By rights, Coyne should no longer have a ‘team’ or a career. Last year’s election for the general secretary of
In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed. We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to
