All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
At the Golden Globes ceremony, Meryl Streep attacked Donald Trump because he ‘imitated a disabled reporter’. ‘When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose,’ she added. It has not been explained over here that hers is a disputed version of what happened. The controversy began in November 2015, when Trump, campaigning,
Ah, January. The month when the nation’s gyms are full of red-faced newbies looking confused on the cross-trainer or baffled by the battle ropes. According to new research by American Express, the most popular New Year’s resolution for 2017 is to achieve a healthier lifestyle, with a third (33 per cent) of Britons planning to
Why, do you suppose, are people getting worked up about the nepotism angle of Donald Trump appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior policy adviser, with particular responsibility for the Middle East, when there’s so much else to worry about it? The one thing that should concern us is that it means that a
Today the world awoke to the news that intelligence chiefs allege Russians have compromising personal information on Donald Trump. Buzzfeed, the news website, has published an unsubstantiated report on Trump’s purported behaviour in Russia — with a helpful disclaimer that they do not know if the claims are true as the documents contain errors and are ‘unverified
Supermarkets continue to reap the benefits from our Christmas spending with two major retailers reporting record sales today. Sainsbury’s said it witnessed Christmas sales of more than £1 billion across the group, adding that like-for-like sales increased 0.1 per cent in the 15 weeks to January 7. According to the BBC, this surpassed analyst expectations. It
Disastrous decisions by Fifa are nothing new. But yesterday’s announcement by football’s governing body that it will expand the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams in 2026 marks another depressing low. The logic is that more teams will now get an opportunity to play on football’s biggest stage. A noble sentiment, perhaps, but this
Jeremy Corbyn’s botched relaunch yesterday was successful in only one way: it kept the Labour leader in the headlines throughout the day. Unfortunately his various u-turns on immigration – as well as his unexpected maximum pay cap, which he also rowed back on – ensured this blanket coverage was for all the wrong reasons. And today’s
Barack Obama’s farewell address was not one for the ages. Like his presidency, it was full of hope yet ultimately disappointing. When Obama rode into office eight years ago, he had two mandates from the public: to right the economy after the Great Recession and to end the wars that George W. Bush had started
When Donald Trump steps from his golden elevator in Trump Tower to address the assembled ranks of the world’s media later today, it will be 167 days since his last press conference – the one, you’ll remember, when he encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. After November’s election he did say he would announce how
On Sunday evening, the BBC presenter Chris Packham took to social media to tell the world that they should support his anti-shooting campaign because declining populations of lapwings are ‘still being shot’. Unfortunately for him, this is utter tosh. No one is shooting lapwings, as Packham acknowledged five hours later in an apology on Twitter.
For a man prepared to stick to his principles over decades, no matter how unpopular they make him, Jeremy Corbyn has changed his mind a remarkable number of times today. His latest stance on freedom of movement is as follows: ‘Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of
Clare Hollingworth, the veteran British war correspondent who broke the news that World War Two had started, has died at the age of 105. In 1991, Tom Pocock recalled the nerve of his colleague in The Spectator: It’s odd to think that Clare Hollingworth turned 80 last week. She is for ever briskly middle-aged in the
Listen to the whole speech here: Whether you voted to Leave or to Remain, you voted for a better future for Britain. One thing is clear, the Tories cannot deliver that. So today I want to set how Labour will deliver that vision of a better Britain. This government is in disarray over Brexit. As
Jeremy Corbyn will shortly give his speech on Labour’s position on freedom of movement, hopefully clarifying whether that is his pre-briefed position that the newspapers published this morning, or his position as set out in his Today programme interview. It was initially briefed that he was ‘not wedded’ to the idea of freedom of movement,
What’s it like being old? Rotten, says Professor John Sutherland in his latest book The War On The Old — and it’s made worse by what he sees as a systematic and malevolent conspiracy to airbrush the elderly and their problems out of public life. He’s not just complaining about the NHS’s niggardly rationing of
‘Populism’ is a useless word. By definition, anyone who wins an election is more popular than his or her opponents are. According to this logic, John Major and Barack Obama must have once been ‘populists’, which does not sound right at all. When we use ‘populist’ today, we should mean something more than popular. The
Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can’t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And
It now seems obvious that Northern Ireland’s power sharing executive has fallen. Because of the way the country’s devolved government is set up, when deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness fell on his sword (or semtex) yesterday, the First Minister – Arlene Foster – goes as well. So the two-headed monster tumbles down and Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State
The reliably irritating Women and Equalities Select Committee under its unfailingly irritating chair, Maria Miller, has come up trumps again, with a proposal for increasing the number of women MPs. The committee initiated an inquiry in the summer of 2016 into gender representation in the Commons and it has now concluded that all political parties
Food waste is on the increase. British households are throwing the equivalent of 500 meals into the bin every year. Understandably, there has been a lot of hand-wringing. Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokeswoman (the party has so few MPs its environment spokeswoman sits in the Lords), declared: ‘We need legislation to make real
Today Jeremy Corbyn 2.0 has taken to the airwaves to bring home his newly-revamped populist message. Of his new policies, the one that has caught the most attention is his call for a maximum wage cap. This would involve a maximum wage for the UK’s highest earners — in order to prevent the UK post-Brexit
Back in the 1980s, when I was embarking on a lifetime of sweat, toil and tears in order to bring home the bacon, I lived in a pensions desert. I couldn’t see, feel or feed one (a pension, that is) for miles around. During this decade, against a backdrop of privatisations, a rampant Prime Minister (Margaret
As Donald Trump’s inauguration draws near, the race is on to find musicians to perform at the event. While Barack Obama had a long list of artists lining up to perform at his, Hollywood is yet to take a shine to the president-elect. In fact things have got so bad that Trump’s team have reportedly
It’s a mistake to think of Donald Trump as a protectionist, as Boris Johnson will have discovered during his recent visit to New York. Theresa May has said that some protectionist instincts are starting to creep in and that the UK should be a champion of free trade. Her remarks are widely interpreted as a reference
Ahead of a scheduled speech later on Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn appeared on the Today Programme to outline the ideas he would be presenting in the afternoon. The Labour leader, however, veered somewhat off message, stating his support for a ‘maximum earnings limit’ and replacing the party’s new line – that they are ‘not wedded to
In a move that is guaranteed to stir up opinion, Jeremy Corbyn said this morning that he would like to see a cap on the amount that people earn. Speaking on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme, the Labour leader said he thought introducing the limit would be ‘the fairer thing to do’. He added that he
Jeremy Corbyn tends to avoid interviews, and we were reminded why this morning. Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, he suggested that Britain should be the first free country with a ‘maximum earnings limit’, portrayed immigration as a kind of corporatist scam where Poles and Czechs are ‘grotesquely’ exploited (by working on a minimum wage vastly
Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the
One of the supposed rules of modern politics is that you shouldn’t tell the voters they are wrong. So, Jeremy Hunt saying that a large part of the problem at A&E is people turning up who shouldn’t, is going to come in for some criticism. One can almost hear Labour readying its denunciation of the
‘When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose,’ announced Meryl Streep at last night’s Golden Globe awards. This has received the most attention today. However, it was a subsequent remark in her speech which was perhaps more telling. ‘An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are
Think of the scandals of the last two decades; think of who exposed them. That’s why we need to protect press freedom and why, if you haven’t already done so, you should email to register your objection to the notorious Section 40 of the Crime & Courts Act. The consultation ends at 5pm tomorrow. If
Martin McGuinness is to resign as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. McGuiness’s resignation is designed to embarrass the First Minister, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, over the hugely over-budget renewable heat incentive scheme. McGuinness walking out effectively collapses the power-sharing executive and will lead to fresh Assembly elections. McGuinness going puts further pressure on the
It’s approaching D-Day for the government’s public consultation on press regulation and whether to trigger Leveson 2 with just hours to go until the deadline for submissions. Should the government decide to activate section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, any publication not signed up to Impress — the press regulator largely funded by
Is Theresa May’s ‘shared society’ speech just a rather empty rebranding exercise, or something serious that will shift social policy in this country? The Prime Minister today set out more of her thinking on domestic reform and defined what her ‘shared society’ will look like. It’s something we have only caught glimpses of up until now,