Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Freddy Gray

Mueller’s grand jury could bring down Trump’s presidency

Donald Trump has a yuge problem in special prosecutor Robert Swan Mueller III. The American president’s anger at having this legal thorn in his administration’s side explains much of his recent erratic behaviour, as Daniel McCarthy explained in the magazine this week. Now we learn that Mueller is using a grand jury – a group

Stephen Daisley

The pill-popping future of work looks terrifying

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia rules mankind in a way that renders the masses compliant consumers. The apex of medical mind control in the book is soma: a tranquilliser offering ‘a holiday from reality’. Huxley describes how its users’ ‘eyes shone (and)…the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in

The Yazidis’ desperate struggle is far from over

Three years ago, international attention was drawn to the desperate plight of Iraq’s Yazidis, a largely unheard of ethnic and religious minority. As Isis rampaged across their homeland of Sinjar in Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and taken hostage to serve as prized sex slaves by Isis members. Many

Isabel Hardman

Could a new backbench tribe help Theresa May fix social care?

This time a year ago, Westminster was trying to work out what Mayism was. Perhaps, we wondered, it was a way of getting things done: serious government by committee rather than the ‘chaterama’ politics espoused by David Cameron. Or at least a rather Brownite commitment to showing how different Theresa May was to her predecessor

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Riot chic

On this week’s episode, we talk about “riot chic”, the problem with electric cars, and how women’s sport won our hearts. Is rioting becoming fashionable? That’s what Cosmo Landesman thinks, in the week after Dalston was rocked by unrest. He believes that the middle classes are swarming to these disturbances to express some apolitical anger

Katy Balls

Bank of England: inflation blip is ‘entirely’ temporary

Although Mark Carney has earned a reputation for doom-mongering over Brexit, today’s Bank of England press conference wasn’t all doom and gloom. While the bank voted – at six votes to two – to keep interest rates at 0.25pc (see the leader in this week’s issue of The Spectator for why this isn’t such a great idea), its

Fraser Nelson

Italy’s patience with the migrant charities is wearing thin

What to do about the charities who send boats to bring asylum seekers to the Italian coast? Save the Children and seven others have been doing this for some time now, to the alarm of the Italian government. It suspects that some NGOs are colluding with the people-traffickers, and undermining attempts by the government to

Steerpike

Red Ken: Venezuela went wrong when they ignored my economic advice

Ken Livingstone caused a stir this week when he blamed Venezuela’s problems on the United States. Now, the former Mayor of London has a new reason for the country’s desperate state – and it isn’t the fault of the leader Nicolas Maduro. Instead, Red Ken said one of the explanations for Venezuela’s woes is simple: they

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Trump is good news for Britain

Jeremy Corbyn might be ‘on a high’ but he shouldn’t be allowed to forget his party’s ‘highly inconsistent, profoundly confusing’ position on the issue of the day: Brexit. Labour’s stance became yet more tangled yesterday, says the Daily Telegraph, with Keir Starmer saying the party wanted to keep Britain in the single market – ‘only 10

Steerpike

John McDonnell’s words on Venezuela come back to haunt him

As Jeremy Corbyn tries to enjoy his summer holiday, the Labour leader is under increasing pressure to speak out against the Venezuelan regime. With opposition leaders under arrest and mass protests ongoing, the Labour leader has so far kept shtum on the regime he previously lauded as showing a ‘better way of doing things’. So, why

Jake Wallis Simons

Venezuela’s crisis exposes the true depravity of the hard-Left

Which British politician would be loopy enough to defend the Venezuelan regime as it guns down protesters and arrests opposition politicians? Need a clue? Didn’t think so. This week, Ken Livingstone – once an adviser to the late Hugo Chavez – said that the reason for the country’s woes was that Chavez ‘did not execute the establishment

Why we need a better way of talking about ‘equal pay’

I’ve grown to dislike the term ‘equal pay’. Without doubt women deserve to be paid the same as men for the same job performance, but it is the argument that stands against them. ‘Equal pay’ has an underlying tone of ‘it’s not fair’ – which is a weak position from which to negotiate. I say

Steerpike

Corbynista MP asked about Venezuela – but condemns America instead

Well, this is going well. As chaos reigns in Venezuela with at least 100 protesters dead in recent months and opposition leaders under arrest, Jeremy Corbyn has come under pressure to speak out against the socialist regime he previously claimed showed a ‘better way of doing things’. While the Labour appears to have taken a vow of

Steerpike

Listen: Labour frontbencher’s Diane Abbott moment

Another day, another Labour frontbencher who comes unstuck when asked for a number in an interview. Today’s hapless shadow cabinet member is Andy McDonald – the shadow transport secretary – who took to the airwaves to talk about Labour’s ‘National Transformation Fund’ – a £250bn pot for public spending. So far, so good. But when BBC

Brendan O’Neill

I’m a ‘Brexit extremist’ and proud of it

We used to think it was noble when people made sacrifices for their beliefs, when they were happy to endure hardship in the service of a political goal or moral cause. Now we call it ‘extremism’. Now anyone who is so devoted to an ideal that he’s willing to see his own daily comforts diminished

Nick Cohen

The Brexit betrayal bandwagon is growing

It may not be this week. It may not be Boris Johnson. But eventually a minister will break with this tottering government and establish himself (or herself, for it could be Andrea Leadsom) as the leader of the diehard right. Brexit is crying out for its Ludendorff; the scoundrel who can blame his failures on

What we must learn from the tragic case of Charlie Gard

I teach bioethics, and the abiding temptation is always to design classes around rare, fiendishly complex cases. That’s how you grab the attention of bored undergraduates; the fodder you throw to budding lawyers. You jump from Tony Bland to Terry Schiavo to Karen Ann Quinlan. You ask your students to put themselves in the shoes

Farewell, the Mooch. It was fun while it lasted

How are things in your country? In mine, we’ve spent the last week and a half being governed by a mid-aughts buddy comedy named ‘Donald and The Mooch’. That latter sobriquet belongs to Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s erstwhile PR man who went on a 10-day profanity-laden bender across Washington proper before even the President realised

Ross Clark

Exports are booming thanks to the competitive pound

Remember George Osborne in his hi-viz jacket as he toured the nation’s metal-bashers and gromit-manufacturers in furtherance of his elusive ‘rebalancing of the economy’ away from services and consumers and towards manufacturing and exports? What a shame he is not still in office to witness his ‘march of the makers’ finally becoming a reality. This

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Philip Hammond must ‘belt up’

Philip Hammond, of all people, ought to ‘relish’ Brexit and the opportunity it will hand to Chancellors to set their own tax rates. But in ‘yet another blunder’, says the Sun, the current occupant of No.11 has told the French that Britain won’t lower taxes. ‘Has he gone made?’ the paper asks. Back in January, Hammond said

Anthony Scaramucci looked doomed from the outset

That was fast. Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director before he could even really begin communicating Donald Trump’s message. He was a kind of Trump mini-me, down to mastering his hand movements. But his wildly objurgatory language over the past week–directed primarily at former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and