All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The SNP appears to be on the verge of changing one of its core beliefs – full membership of the European Union. Senior party figures have revealed, in a piece in the Times today, that there is a desire in the higher echelons of the SNP to ditch this long-standing tenet of party policy. Instead,
Oh dear. After Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, Lucy Powell was labelled a mean girl thanks to her decision to take to social media and declare that she had never, ever met the man. Now the Labour MP is in the naughty corner once again. Only this time it’s the Labour sisterhood she’s managed to offend. After the former
1. Can you tell us what your first wine revelation was? That life always looks rosier with a decent glass of wine at hand and the promise of more in the bottle. 2. You’re an infamous observer of ‘Dry January’. What wine do you miss most in abstinence? A crisp, clean, zesty, aromatic, refreshing, slightly
Donald Trump is not a patient man. Even his inaugural address lasted for only 16 minutes. Still, the message was clear enough: ‘The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.’ The slow-burning chit-chat of the Washington elite is the stuff of the past, a hangover of the ‘American carnage’ that came to an
We have to talk about Harriet again, I’m afraid. Usually I get into trouble when I talk about Harriet. Ah well. Harriet claims that when she was at university a professor offered to bump up her grade if she slept with him. Harperson was studying politics at York University and says that the offer came
America’s new visa policies are shocking, everyone agrees on that. Even Donald Trump’s administration calls its US entry vetting ‘extreme’. But before everyone calls Trump a fascist again, before everyone reaches once more for the Hitler and the Nazis comparisons, consider this: Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism is defensive, not aggressive. It may be clumsy, it
Theresa May’s visit to Washington to meet President Trump last week was seen, before it happened, as being beneficial to both sides. The Prime Minister’s allies in government thought this was an excellent opportunity for May to show the new President how it was done – and to send a message to the world that
So now Theresa May knows what it’s like to be Tangoed. Her visit to Washington, hailed a ‘triumph’ by friendly newspapers, has become a liability. Life comes at you fast, especially when you launch a diplomatic initiative on a wing and a prayer, not in response to a clinical evaluation of its likely outcome. Because who
This weekend Theresa May discovered why it is a prime minister most fears events. After a well executed two-day charm offensive in America cementing the UK/US special relationship, the Prime Minister was plunged into a row over President Trump’s decision to stop travellers and refugees from seven Muslim countries gaining entry into the US. May’s sluggish response to condemn
President Trump’s inaugural rant prompted me to reread Let America Be America Again by the black poet Langston Hughes, who is said to have been an inspiration to Martin Luther King. Writing in 1936, Hughes spoke for the immigrant and ‘the poor white, fooled and pushed apart’ as well as his own people, ‘the Negro
The politics of climate change will eventually turn, partly because the policies are often so un-Green in their effects. Wood-burning is not good for the environment. Nor is diesel. The government paid people to switch to diesel cars to help save the planet, thus damaging the breathing of thousands. At the Global Warming Policy Foundation
We’ve been filling in our son’s school application form this week. Below his name, date of birth and gender – which I’m horrified to see only has two options, despite the form clearly stating that it is indeed 2017 – is ‘ethnicity’. I suppose I’m meant to put ‘White British’ although I dislike the phrase.
On the wall behind my desk hangs a picture of Alexander Chancellor when he was editing The Spectator, with cigarette and telephone in one hand and looking very much the hero that all of us in the magazine have long regarded him. His death, announced earlier on this morning, is awful news: we have lost not
Alexander Chancellor, who died this morning aged 77, created the modern Spectator. Since 2012, he has also been a weekly columnist with his Long Life column – which darted from the vagaries of growing old, to memories of his time as editor of The Talk of the Town in the New Yorker, to the wicked
Theresa May’s team will be basking this morning in the write-ups of her successful visit to Washington. As I say in The Sun this morning, the big prize for her is a US / UK free trade deal. Government ministers think that, given the political will on both sides, the deal could be negotiated in
Visiting Northern Ireland last autumn, I met a very prosperous man who enthused to me about the Renewable Heat Incentive in the province. It paid him to install wood-pellet boilers and heat his rural business. After the political scandal broke, I understood why he was so happy. The RHI, as managed in Northern Ireland, had
The offensives against Uber are coming thick and fast. In October, a UK court ruled against the ride-sharing giant in favour of two drivers demanding minimum wages and vacation pay, even though Uber is a platform, not an employer. At the moment, the company is on trial in the EU, where judges are trying to
What do we believe in, in our largely post-religious culture? The pursuit of individual happiness, obviously. A vague humanism, thankfully. But something more dramatic is needed too. Something for Hollywood to chew on. La La Land reminds us what it is – the myth of the risk of art. The myth of creativity being a
Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to
The Chinese New Year is almost upon us, and perhaps its animal for 2017 is timely in our current political climate. According to astrologers, the Rooster is cocky, opinionated and attention seeking – sound familiar? China, one of the powerhouse economies of the world, is entering an uncertain New Year now that Donald Trump rules
Well, Theresa May managed to lay on the praise towards Trump without seeming too sycophantic, which made their press conference a reasonable success. May congratulated Trump on his ‘stunning’ electoral victory while describing Britain’s future as ‘open to the world’. May seems to be presenting herself as a reassuring ‘third way’ leader between the frightening
The Trump / May press conference went as well as the Prime Minister’s team could have hoped. The new president was effusive about Brexit saying it was a ‘wonderful thing’, a ‘fantastic thing’ and declaring that it’ll be a ‘tremendous asset’ for the UK. He was also warm about May personally, predicting that their relationship
We are in Imbassai in the state of Bahia. It’s lush, beautiful and green. I am escaping the London winter gloom. For Fixyá of the Fulni-ô tribe, covered in body paint, he is escaping a desertified region in Pernambuco state. He lives by a town called Aguas Bellas (Beautiful Water) which is ironic as there
This week in the books podcast, we’re taking on some big issues. John Hands, the author of Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution From The Origin of the Universe, is in the grand tradition of ambitious gentleman amateurs. His book attempts to answer the fundamental human questions – who are we, why are we here, and where are
Another day, another front-bench resignation from Labour. After Tulip Siddiq quit the front-bench over Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote, Jo Stevens has today followed suit. The shadow secretary for Wales has resigned from her post after coming to the conclusion she could not reconcile herself to voting
Can there be a bunch of more self-serving individuals than the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which annually presents its assessment of global politics in the form of its ‘Doomsday Clock’? Yesterday, the organisation announced that it was moving its clock forward by 30 seconds so that it now stands at two
Just in case European Union leaders were in any doubt over President Trump’s feelings towards them, his rumoured pick for ambassador to the EU has been giving some pretty strong hints. Appearing on This Week, Malloch — who visited Trump Towers earlier this month to discuss the potential role — was open about his Euroscepticism. This led Andrew
I didn’t go on the women’s march last weekend, and it’s not the kind of thing I’d go to. However, Trump’s previous form with regards the female sex is a reasonable cause for at least registering a protest. This is not to deny there are things I wish would be protested more, such as Rotherham, but
The taxman’s failure to properly pursue the UK’s richest people risks undermining confidence in the entire system, according to parliament’s spending watchdog. The Guardian reports that the Public Accounts Committee has concluded that Britain’s super-rich appear to receive preferential treatment from HM Revenue & Customs. The MPs’ report, released this morning, scrutinised HMRC’s specialist unit,
Last week, Lily Allen became the subject of much mockery online after she claimed to have discovered the flaw in Theresa May’s plan for a global Britain. The pop singer said Brexit was unlikely to be a success as the ‘world still hates us’ because of… slavery. While Allen has refrained from offering any further Brexit analysis this
On Thursday afternoon, huge numbers of ministerial Range Rovers swept into Parliament after government whips got whiff of an SNP plot to mess with the government’s Brexit plans. Believing the SNP were planning to call for a last-minute vote on next week’s business involving the Brexit bill, Tory MPs came back to make up the
There are some strange goings-on in Rome at the moment. Two of the world’s smallest sovereign states, both headquartered there, are having a spat over who is in control. The head of the Knights of Malta, the former Guards officer now Grand Master, Fra’ Matthew Festing has announced he will step down. He has been
Theresa May mentioned Donald Trump only once in her speech to the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia tonight, but its centrepiece was a gift to him. In his inauguration speech, he said that the US was now out of the business of liberal interventionism. She told Republicans that the same applies to Britain. Here’s the key quote:-
Freddy Gray and Gabby Morrongiello, White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner, analyse the first days of Trump: I defy any person to travel to this great country at any time and not to be inspired by its promise and its example. For more than two centuries, the very idea of America – drawn from