All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Everyone in London seems to be fuming all the time — although, to be fair, fuming has become the default setting of our time. Historically, it’s the sexually repressed, swivel-eyed Daily Mail reader who fumes hardest, but ever since last June 23, when the glorious chaotic dawn of Brexit was revealed, liberals have been fuming
Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently,
For a body supposedly committed to eliminating inequality between the sexes, the Women and Equalities Select Committee don’t exactly lead from the front. Only three of the 11 members are men. To some, this will be a welcome corrective to the still male-dominated House of Commons. To others (such as Philip Davies, one of the
Labour’s famously vocal moderates have been awfully quiet today, given one of their number – Jamie Reed – has just been replaced by a Tory in a hugely embarrassing by-election defeat for the party. The centrist wing of the party, now almost exclusively a backbench club, has taken a vow of silence because it doesn’t
Even now, even following their historic thrashing in Copeland, Labourites still cannot face the truth. Sure, there are Twitter tears this morning. I’m sure the vibe in Corbyn’s office is skittish and fearful. There’ll be an explosion in ‘What now for Labour?’ articles. But they still do not get the yawning, abyssal depth of the
Labour is doing its share of soul searching this morning following its disastrous defeat in the Copeland by-election. There are many reasons being put forward for why the Tories were able to snatch the seat from Labour. But Emily Thornberry thinks she knows exactly why Labour lost: fake news. Lady Nugee suggested that the ‘big
So what went wrong for the Labour Party in Copeland last night? There’s no understating the scale of the defeat – the worst by-election performance by an opposition since 1878 by some measures. It lost a seat it has held since 1935 to the Conservatives because the local MP, Jamie Reed, quit politics for a
Labour’s defeat in Copeland is nothing short of a disaster – but you won’t hear that from the shadow chancellor. Instead, John McDonnell said the fact that the Tories snatched away the seat – becoming the first Government to win a by-election since the 1980s – was a ‘disappointment’. His biggest concession to those who
It is hugely important, if you are someone as insecure as myself, to say ‘I told you so’ whenever the opportunity arises. So, on 28th January this year I wrote a piece about the Stoke and Copeland by-elections and took a bit of stick on here for its thesis. This was the crucial bit: ‘And Copeland
Although the Conservatives can celebrate an impressive victory in Copeland last night, over in Stoke things look less rosy for the party. Despite Theresa May’s visit to Stoke-on-Trent this week, the Tory candidate Jack Brereton finished third, 79 votes behind Paul Nuttall. To make matters worse for Brereton, he appears to have made little impression
Isabel Hardman discusses the by-election results with Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth: The Tories have won the Copeland by-election with 13,748 votes – a clear 2,107 votes ahead of Labour. The Tories needed a 3.3pc swing to win: they got double that, making this the best by-election performance by a governing party since 1966. And
James Forsyth discusses the by-election results with Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman: Labour has avoided total electoral disaster and held the Stoke Central seat with a relatively comfortable majority of 2,620. The Labour vote share in the seat was only marginally down on the 2015 general election, which while not good for an opposition party
Yesterday, my dream died. After the euphoria of last season and being crowned Premier League Champions all I dreamt of was staying with Leicester City, the club I love, for always. Sadly this was not to be. I wish to thank my wife Rosanna and all my family for their never ending support during my
‘Inexplicable, unforgivable and gut-wrenchingly sad’, ‘nobody can delete the history you wrote’, ‘Shocked after last night’s display!’. No, these aren’t reactions to Paul Nuttall losing in Stoke, they’re the commiserations of Gary Lineker, Jose Mourinho and Rio Ferdinand after Claudio Ranieri, the title-winning Leicester manager, was sacked yesterday evening. Having led his team to the
When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year
This week’s Best Buys, provided by Moneyfacts, are 0% Introductory Purchase Rate Credit Cards. For more information on how these cards could work for you, read this Spectator Money article.
Every time I suggest on social media that the Queen is Britain’s most inspiring Christian leader, there’s a chorus of agreement – with Catholic voices among the loudest, interestingly. Churchgoers in this country have noticed that Her Majesty is quietly uncompromising about her beliefs; her Christmas message doesn’t skate over the teaching that the infant
Royal Bank of Scotland dominates the business news this morning following its announcement of a £7 billion annual loss. According to the BBC, the deficit is more than treble 2015’s loss of £2 billion. It is the ninth year in a row RBS has failed to make a profit. Over the next four years, the taxpayer-backed bank
Well, on the bright side, it seems that the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London are forgiving people, at least concerning offences that don’t concern them personally. Amber Rudd and Sadiq Khan have, as was universally predicted, decided that Cressida Dick should replace Bernard Hogan-Howe as head of the Met, the biggest policing appointment
The most important statement from the new administration. Clear, concise, simply and devastatingly expressed. Exactly what many of us have been saying for years – and always upbraided and denounced for so doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the UN, who has called out the organisation’s anti-Israel bias: Well
Polls have closed in the Copeland and Stoke by-elections. It is too early to say with any certainty what the results will be, but we’ll be with you on Coffee House until the results are declared. In Copeland, it is a two horse race between Labour and the Tories. The Tories aren’t predicting they’ll take
I guess the hate crime epidemic that gripped Britain after Brexit hasn’t put that many people off, with new figures showing net migration of 273,000 in the three months to September 2016. That represents a decline of 49,000, of which 12,000 is due to an increase in eastern Europeans heading home (39,000, as opposed to
Never in recent years has a party deserved to lose an election, to be demolished by people’s ballots and fury, as much as Labour does in Stoke. The way Labour has treated this northern constituency is a microcosm of the metropolitan contempt it now feels for all the rough-handed, gruff-voiced non-Londoners who once made up
For an exercise in popular sovereignty, which was meant to take decisions away from the hated ‘elite’, the Brexit referendum has, inevitably, produced Britain’s greatest outbreak of political lying. Yesterday’s liars look pale and wan in comparison with the latest models. It is as if the long-awaited singularity has occurred. But rather than advances in
We now know that the video of a cyclist confronting a catcalling driver, which spent much of yesterday being circulated on social media and covered in the national press, was staged. Barely had viewers finished cheering on the woman as she tore the wing mirror off the side of her harasser’s van than the truth
Today is Storm Doris’s day. A woman called Helen Chivers, not Shivers as she should be, from the Met Office was on Radio 4 this morning telling us that giving human names to gusts of wind is a really good thing because it makes everyone aware of the dangers of bad weather. We must keep our
If you’ve had enough of battling to get the kids a doctor’s appointment, or don’t want them waiting months to be seen by a specialist, there is an alternative. You could take out children’s private medical insurance that will pay for some or all of the diagnosis and treatment your child may require. Such policies
On this week’s Spectator podcast, we discuss Theresa May’s Third Way, whether we could have an Uber for social care, and look at Mies van der Rohe’s unrealised plans for a Mansion House skyscraper. On the cover of this week’s magazine, Theresa May plots a course through the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, as she
In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the philosopher Daniel Dennett — whose new book takes on one of the biggest and most intriguing problems of all: consciousness itself. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Prof Dennett makes the case that consciousness itself is a sort of illusion — and that the same evolutionary
The row over a sharp rise in business rates rumbles on – but now the government has bowed to sustained pressure and announced help for small firms. The Guardian reports that Philip Hammond will announce new measures in the budget on 8 March following comments by the communities secretary that more should be done ‘to
Ronald Fiddler doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as Abu-Zakariya al-Britani, which perhaps explains the British Isis fighter’s decision to change his name. Either way, Fiddler’s death during a car bomb attack in Mosul has sparked an almighty row. It’s emerged that Fiddler is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was paid compensation –
As Emmanuel Macron stood on the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday urging Britain’s ‘banks, talents, researchers, academics’ to move across the Channel after Brexit, security services in France were dismantling yet another Islamic terror cell preparing to launch a terrorist attack. That makes three this month, a clear indication that the Islamists are itching to
The so-called leader of the so-called opposition gave another so-called performance today. Jeremy Corbyn seems to have challenged the Labour party to a slalom race. Target: rock bottom. Go Corbo! his enemies cheer as they watch his hapless figure slithering and shimmying down the ice-floes of public contempt. Today he came to the Commons with
When Ed Miliband was asking the questions at PMQs, we didn’t think we were living through a vintage age of parliamentary debate. But every week, Miliband’s performances looks better by comparison. Jeremy Corbyn went on the right topic today, the NHS, but his questions were all over the place and lacked coherence. Indeed, at one