All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
On Tuesday, Steerpike revealed that the hunt was on to find a new No 10 director of communications, with the BBC’s James Landale pipped against his Beeb comrade Robbie Gibb for the top job. After Landale dropped out of the race, the plum job has gone to Gibb, the head of live political programming at
It was better from Theresa May today. She was combative, prickly and forceful at PMQs. The ship is moving on a steadier course. And two toxic enemies have returned to the fold. In the days following the election, both Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan were ‘helpfully’ suggesting a possible timetable for Mrs May’s departure. Today
Now that Labour councils have been shown to be as much up to their eyeballs in the tower block cladding scandal as Conservatives ones the Left has subtly shifted onto a different target: the ‘neoliberalist’ war on red tape. Writing in the Guardian today, George Monbiot accuses the Government’s Red Tape Initiative – set up
The NHS is one year older, yet none the wiser. Having spiralled into perpetual crisis years ago, no one can pretend the gargantuan system is looking great for its age. Its fragile condition has all of us worried – not least because of the millions of lives that are forced to depend on our monopoly
Oh dear. Although Theresa May managed to get through today’s PMQs with a solid performance, she did fall short when it came to Scottish matters. The newly-elected Conservative MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine used a question to thank the Prime Minister for ‘taking time during the General Election to come up to Banchory and campaign
Ken Loach is no fan of Brexit. The veteran filmmaker and Corbynista luvvie warned last year that the referendum was a ‘dangerous, dangerous moment’ for the country. Now, Loach is dishing out even more doom and gloom, saying that leaving the EU could mean bad news for the British film industry. Loach said that a messy Brexit deal
During the general election campaign, Theresa May was strikingly reluctant to defend the Tories’ economic record. But today at PMQs, Theresa May sounded like the man she sacked as Chancellor as soon as she became PM. She defended the Tories economic record with vigour, pointing out how much progress the party had made in reducing
President Macron’s speech on Monday to the combined houses of parliament in the Palace of Versailles proved how stunningly different are the French from the British. Imagine our head of state promising to cut the size of parliament by a third. Imagine her, or even her prime minister, promising to renew the nation with ‘the
Much excitement from Labour this morning over the new IFS report on tuition fees. With research finding that students from disadvantaged backgrounds will graduate with debts in excess of £57,000, Labour’s shadow education minister has said it’s time to ‘deliver a debt-free education system run for the many not the few’. Conveniently, the party has not
What a forty eight hours it has been for Emmanuel Macron. On Monday, he gave his regal address to the National Assembly at the Palace of Versailles, a grandiose occasion during which the French president rivalled Tony Blair and Barack Obama for swaggering self-confidence. As Jonathan Miller said in the Spectator, it’s hard not to be
After days of ministers calling on Theresa May to scrap the public sector pay cap, the fightback has begun. But it’s not coming from the Prime Minister. Instead, it’s been left to May’s predecessor to make the case for fiscal discipline. After the Chancellor put his foot down in a speech to the CBI last
I suppose it says something about me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything funnier than this video – this brief video – of a man travelling to his target on a hoverboard.
While the Cabinet bicker among themselves – in meetings, media briefings and the FT letters’ page – about policy, behind the scenes chatter remains over who will be the next Tory leader. Handily, Conservative Home has today released its Cabinet League Table which shows where the various ministers lie when it comes to the party membership.
It is a mark of Britain’s estrangement from the European Union – and, at least for now, the country’s diminished standing on the international stage – that although Theresa May attended a memorial service to Helmut Kohl at the weekend, she was not invited to speak. Of course there are hierarchies of closeness on such
Although attributed to Milton Friedman, the assertion that ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’ had been around long before he took it for the title of an economics book in 1975. It has been used since by many who have never given monetarism a second’s thought. Physicists say the universe is a
Have the French belatedly realised the error of their regicide and decided to restore the monarchy? If so, will the regime of Emmanuel Macron, whose seizure of power must certainly be inspiring politicians around the globe with its brutal efficacy, end the same way? Macron’s glittering and symbolic appearance yesterday at the Palace of Versailles
Talks to form a new power sharing executive in Belfast have broken down again. Largely this is because James Brokenshire, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has been unable to impose a believable deadline after which he would enforce direct rule. This is a particular shame, because shaking the magic money tree in the direction of Northern
After Laura Kuenssberg was appointed political editor at the BBC and Robert Peston moved to ITV to head up the channels political coverage, James Landale – the former BBC deputy political editor – took to social media to praise those overlooked broadcast journalists who emit ‘quiet competence’ and ‘put the story first’. But is Landale’s
The deadline imposed on Qatar to agree to the demands made by the Saudi-led Sunni coalition has passed without Doha caving in. This was to be expected — the main stipulations, among the 13 made, had no chance of being accepted. The deadline has now been extended by 48 hours and the Kuwaitis are trying
Almost everything which is said officially about student finances is obfuscatory and contradictory, starting with Damian Green’s assertion at the weekend that we need ‘a national debate’ on tuition fees, only for former education secretary Michael Gove to say the opposite the following day. A week before the General Election was called, the Student Loan
Oh to be a fly-on-the-wall at today’s Cabinet meeting. After growing calls from ministers for Theresa May to ditch the public sector pay cap, last night the Chancellor put his foot down. In a speech to the CBI, Philip Hammond said that while the public are naturally ‘weary’ after seven years of austerity, now is not
‘Spare a thought for Philip Hammond,’ says the Times. The Chancellor once looked certain to lose his job – and yet while he might now be safe in his position, his role is only getting tougher. His Cabinet colleagues are queuing up to tell him that now is the time to lift the cap on public sector pay. In
It is 10 years since smoking in public places was banned in England. Ten years since officials decreed that we could no longer light up at work, in restaurants, in pubs and even at bus-stops. Ten years since you could follow your Tiramisu with the satisfying throat hit of a drag of nicotine. Ten years
Financial scams are big business in the UK. A report from Experian last year suggested that fraud could cost the UK economy as much as £193 billion a year – though these scams come in many shapes and sizes. Analysis from Which suggests there were around 264,000 reported cases of fraud last year. This, however,
Theresa May spent her first few months as Prime Minister reversing many of her predecessor’s policies. But there is one which she may well end up regretting that she failed to reverse: going ahead with the contract for French state electricity company EDF to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. Yesterday, EDF announced
What are we to make of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Charlie Gard, the desperately ill boy whose painful story has been in the news so much in recent weeks. Earlier today, the President took to Twitter – where else? – to say: If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends
In what I promise won’t become a regular feature, I thought it worth issuing an update under the heading ‘I told you so’. It relates to two recent, connected pieces of news. The first comes from Italy where the government is now threatening to close its ports. The ongoing influx of migrants from Africa is
To say that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s relationship is a complex one would be an understatement. The Vote Leave comrades fell out spectacularly when the former education secretary turned on BoJo during the last Tory leadership campaign – opting to launch his own (doomed) bid for No 10 at the expense of his so-called
A certain sort of person likes to show how relaxed he or she is about sex. The current vehicle for such displays is Love Island, a reality show in which supposedly attractive young people are nudged to pair up, swap partners and so on. These people claim to find it refreshingly frank, anthropologically fascinating, harmless fun, a
Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him. I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed
Of all the mistakes in the Conservative election campaign, possibly most grievous of all was the promise to maintain a public sector pay cap of 1 per cent until 2020. It was one thing to maintain such a policy in the 2015 election campaign – when the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) stood at 0.4 per
One of the consequences of Theresa May’s disastrous election campaign is that the balance of power has swung firmly away from the PM towards her Cabinet. This change of fortunes means that ministers can now speak their minds freely in a way that would have been foolhardy just a few weeks ago. Boris Johnson is
‘The unexpected appeal of Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto has thrown the Tories into panic’, says the Sun. With Damian Green suggesting a ‘debate’ may be needed over tuition fees and other ministers ‘piling in every day with demands for more spending’, the Conservative party seems to be making the assumption that the best way to tackle
Over the weekend, the Conservatives appeared to suffer a crisis of confidence. As calls for Theresa May to scrap the public sector pay cap grew, many Tories appeared to give up on the long term economic plan altogether. Damian Green called for a ‘public debate’ on tuition fees and Justine Greening ‘demanded’ £1bn to protect school