All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
No amount of reports in the press that Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet-making is farcical and his party is divided should distract us from the fact that he is winning. I don’t mean that he will become prime minister, or even (though this seems quite possible) that he will survive as leader until the general election.
If anyone is feeling pleased about the slide on the stock-market today, it is probably Andrew Roberts, the RBS analyst who hit the headlines this week with a note advising everyone to ‘sell everything’. Probably rather sooner than he expected, and before any of his clients even had time to panic properly, prices have started
Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter,
The Today programme often has one choking on one’s porridge, but this morning’s edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April’s Hatton Garden raid - in this case acquitted - was invited onto the show to speak of his ‘grudging admiration’ for the men who
Ross Douthat’s 10 points about immigration is recommended reading for anyone sitting on the fence or who tends towards the open border position; even if you disagree, you’ll at least have an idea of what the opposition believe. Personally I agree with it all anyway and my opinions on the subject are as frozen in aspic
My line on the Anglican crisis is a bit eccentric. I think there are now grounds for hope that the Communion can survive – and the reason is the recent rise of gay marriage as the central issue. Lazy punditry says that gay marriage is the bone of contention. But it’s actually a new issue
The pre EU referendum skirmishing stepped up a notch today. Chris Grayling became the first member of the Cabinet to start making the case for Out. While Vote Leave and Stronger In tangled over the question of a second referendum. As I write in the magazine this week, Vote Leave is increasingly keen on the
It’s not been a good week for the Corbynistas of North London. First Lord Watts took aim at them for their taste in pastries during his maiden speech in the upper house. The Labour peer said that the party leadership should take less notice of ‘the London-centric hard left political class who sit around in
It must come as a relief to many Labour MPs worried about their party’s electoral chances that the official report into why Labour lost in May will finally be published. But will it really make much of a difference? The BBC reports that the document, compiled by Margaret Beckett, will identify four key reasons for
I’ve never had much time for Chris Patten, generally disliking the Tory Europhile and late Roy Jenkins impersonator. But the whirligig of time brings in strange revenges and none is odder than Chris Patten emerging as the only adult in the room. In the great Cecil Rhodes debate at Oxford – a debate which like
Pity the poor correspondents who set up a reshuffle ‘live’ blog to cover Jeremy Corbyn moving around his frontbench team last Monday. The Labour leader has, a week and a half in to the slowest shuffle ever, just made a few more appointments. Imran Hussain, Kate Osamor and Thangam Debbonaire are all new MPs, and
Few think tanks have been as associated with the Cameron project as Policy Exchange. Its alumni are dotted in various positions around government, with a particularly strong presence in Downing Street. So, it is interesting that Policy Exchange’s director Dean Godson has today announced that he has hired David Goodhart, the former editor of Prospect
A number of Labour MPs have become increasingly riled with Jeremy Corbyn this week over the much-delayed Beckett report on Labour’s General Election loss. Despite calls from Dan Jarvis and Caroline Flint for Margaret Beckett’s investigation into the reasons Labour lost the election to be published, Corbyn has so far refused even though he has
In this week’s diary, Tristram Hunt puts his money behind Jerusalem as a new English National Anthem. ‘God Save the Queen’ isn’t going anywhere as the United Kingdom’s theme, but there’s room for a local melody when Team England take to the field (as the MP Toby Perkins pointed out, it’s hard to square English
One of the things that repeatedly comes up with David Bowie fans talking about their hero is how much he meant to people living in small towns or suburbs. For adolescents who felt confined by stuffy suburban mores and maybe felt themselves a bit different, Bowie must have felt like a lifeline. Personally I grew
In this week’s issue, James Forsyth reveals the strategy that David Cameron will use to campaign for Britain to stay in the EU. He’ll campaign not just on the economics, but on security – arguing that Britain is safer as part of the EU collective: safer from the Russians, safer from terrorism. Isabel Hardman, the new
Should we sell everything because Andrew Roberts (not the historian but an analyst at RBS) tells us to in the expectation of crash? Before you press the ‘sell’ button, it might just be worth reflecting on the fact that there has always been a time when some analyst somewhere has been handing out the same advice.
Cameron has a dream. And Jeremy Corbyn wants to destroy it. Our belligerent prime minister has declared war on those inner-city council estates that foster poverty, despair, unemployment, truancy, social exclusion, (and an aversion to Tory candidates). His hope is to replace these crime-ridden concrete citadels with frondy low-rise dream-homes. It sounds like Syria organised
I love the new politics. It warms my heart even on cold and gloomy winter mornings. The novelty of the always-new, freshly-minted, happy-shiny, more-decent-than-thou new politics will never fade. Consider this stirring tale from beyond the wall. The Scottish Asian Women’s Association (SAWA) was launched amidst what tradition dictates we must refer to as great fanfare at
Will the Tory party be able to come back together again after the EU referendum? Well, today’s PMQs suggested the reason why it should be able to. The Cameron/Corbyn clash was a classic left/right affair and by the end of it, Eurosceptics were cheering Cameron as loudly as anyone else on the Tory benches as
David Mundell, the Secretary of State for Scotland, is gay. And you know what, so what? Of course Mundell is not the first gay Tory cabinet minister, merely, it’s believed, the first to “openly” acknowledge the fact. He did so in typically low-key fashion, writing on his website: Having taken one of the most important
Dawn Butler was one of the Labour MPs who helped to get Jeremy Corbyn onto the ballot paper in the Labour leadership race. While Butler ultimately wanted Andy Burnham to be leader, she has been supportive of Corbyn since his election. Alas Butler now appears to be struggling when it comes to getting to grips
‘Thy choicest gifts in store / On her be pleased to pour.’ The prospect is upon Twickenham and Wembley regulars of the end of that second tricky verse. This week, Labour MPs packed into the Commons Chamber to support Toby Perkins’s English National Anthem Bill, which proposes replacing ‘God Save the Queen’ with an English
Although it may have seemed as though the majority of MPs had enough on their plates over Christmas with floods, revenge reshuffles and the war on terror, it turns out that they also had time to edit a magazine. This week’s edition of the women’s weekly Stylist is ‘made by politicians’. The issue includes a recipe for cinnamon buns
Today’s report that Len McCluskey plans to warn Jeremy Corbyn against changing Labour policy on Trident is not a surprise after the GMB’s Sir Paul Kenny used pretty fruity language to do the same on Monday. But it is significant as it shows that the plan of those in the party who do not want
Over the weekend a number of strange tweets were emitted from Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account. The Labour leader appeared to be taking his call to attack the Tories — and not other members of Labour — to new heights when he tweeted ‘Davey Cameron is a pie‘ along with ‘Here we… here we… here we
Today, one of the greatest political journalists of my lifetime retires: Phil Webster, former political editor of The Times, is leaving the newspaper after 43 years. He has been overseeing its online political coverage for the last few years and (until a few days ago) getting up at the crack of dawn to write its morning political
Although Quentin Letts has made it clear that his new novel The Speaker’s Wife is fictional, the satirical tome has set tongues-wagging in Westminster. Chris Bryant wrote in his Guardian review that ‘the person who is most recognisable from today’s Westminster’ is the novel’s clerk of the house — Sir Roger Richards — ‘whose real-life counterpart Sir
The Prime Minister was in a pretty ratty mood at the Liaison Committee today, taking exception especially to questions from the dry-as-sandpaper chair, Andrew Tyrie. At one point Cameron told Tyrie that ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ if he was suggesting that there weren’t people in Raqqa who were plotting to damage Britain.
As junior doctors exercise their right to strike today over government plans to change their contracts, Jeremy Hunt has been keeping a surprisingly low profile. In fact the Health Secretary has declined interview requests, instead sending his senior clinical advisor Norman Williams to field questions from the media. Alas, there are some questions that are not
Have Labour MPs who oppose Jeremy Corbyn just given up? Given many of them have chosen to stay on the frontbench after the reshuffle in which the Labour leader made clear that it was his way or the highway, and also that he does want to change party policy on Trident after all, it looks
Junior doctors are now on strike over their new contract, with recriminations between the two sides continuing as the picket lines fill up. It is clear that there has been a fundamental breakdown of trust between the BMA and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, to the extent that both sides seem to be talking about completely
There is no way that Anglican attendance falling below one million for the first time is good news for the Church of England. The figures, released today, put Sunday Anglican congregations in 2014 at 764,000, down 3 per cent on the previous year. When weekday and Saturday services are included, the figure is still only 980,000. The
The advice of Andrew Roberts, head of European Economics at RBS, has today gone around the world: its time to sell, ahead of a stock market crash. The RBS European rates research team said that things all “looks similar to 2008.” It seems to cap a bearish round of forecasts: Standard & Poor’s, the credit ratings agency, has more companies on