All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
All over the world, people are dressing up as clowns to scare unsuspecting members of the public. Sightings began in South Carolina but quickly spread to Canada, Australia and the UK. Not everyone is happy about this craze: the Met Police are the latest to pour cold water on the so-called ‘killer clowns’, warning people ‘to
Jonathan Ray encounters his new favourite drink. The other night I had a drink I’d never had before and I positively lapped it up. Indeed, I don’t think my life will ever be the same again. I’m completely smitten. What so unexpectedly seduced me was a kümmel and soda. Actually, to be honest, it was
Being half-Norwegian, I can rarely find anyone in Westminster to discuss the Norwegian papers with. But Monday’s front page of the Norwegian business paper Dagens Naeringsliv has been the talk of the town. Why, because its main headline trumpeted Norway said no’ (in Norwegian, of course). The other lines clarified the story – ‘Brits wanted
There was a sombre mood in the chamber this afternoon as MPs gathered to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. After Russian planes dropped bombs that destroyed a UN aid convoy, Andrew Mitchell called for the Commons debate — drawing parallels between Russia’s disregard for international law today and the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy
Today it was a case of the ghosts of governments past as George Osborne, Michael Heseltine and Vince Cable were hauled before the Commons Business Committee to discuss the UK’s industrial strategy. What followed was a bit of a love-in as Heseltine commended Osborne for his time in the Cabinet – praising Cameron’s government for
Can someone please tell HM Treasury that the referendum is over? During that campaign, it made history by producing a claim that Brexit would make people £4,300 worse off per household. It was nonsense, debunked here at the time. It was not just a porkie, but a historic porkie: polls showed just 17 per cent
The Tories want to turn us against migrants by dividing people between ‘us’ and ‘them’; well, let me tell you about another bunch of guys who believed in ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the Nazis. Radio presenter James O’Brien made near enough this exact parallel when he quoted from Mein Kampf to show the eerie similarities
I could recite the standard advice on instructing an estate agent in my sleep. Always invite three to do a valuation, don’t go for the one who quotes the highest asking price, and haggle on commission. However, it’s not until you sell your own house that you realise this mantra doesn’t even begin to prepare
It’s not going well for Germany at the moment. Their largest bank is on the verge of collapse while their second largest bank is laying-off staff. And Frau Merkel is having to cope with the political fallout of her open-door immigration policy – not least a rise in populist nationalism and a dip in her own
On 15 September 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner, was arranging flowers outside his family business in Arizona. He had just returned from Costco, where he purchased some American flags and donated money to a fund for victims of 9/11. Moments later, he was shot dead. Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh, goes down in history
Is that a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 in your pocket, or are your pants on fire? The Korean manufacturer has halted sales of its latest smartphone and advised anyone already an owner to switch off immediately, lest the thing’s battery explodes — as one did on a Southwest Airlines flight in the US, forcing the
How did mocking Islam become the great speechcrime of our times? Louis Smith, the gymnast, is the latest to fall foul of the weird new rule against ridiculing Islam. A leaked video shows Smith laughing as his fellow gymnast, Luke Carson, pretends to pray and chants ‘Allahu Akbar’. Smith says something derogatory about the belief
Many travellers buying foreign currency at the UK’s airports are now receiving less than one euro to the pound. The continued fall in sterling’s value means that the average rate available at 17 airport bureaux de change is now just 99 euro cents to the pound. The BBC reports that the worst rate is currently
Donald Trump probably won the second presidential debate tonight, overall. But overall probably doesn’t matter. The clash between him and Hillary Clinton over the lewd sex-bragging tape will be what people talk about, and he did not come out well on that score. The Donald maybe did enough to stop the Republican Party deserting him en masse,
Although Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman described tonight’s meeting of the PLP as barely registering on the Richter scale in terms of hostility, it could hardly be described as an hour of sweetness and light. While the meeting appeared to get off to a good start with loud cheers that could be heard from the corridor, it
David Davis batted away demands for parliament to be given a vote on the timing of Article 50 or the government’s negotiating stance. Whenever his opponents—who included Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg—brought up how Davis himself had previously said there should be a white paper on the government’s negotiating stance, Davis side-stepped the issue. He
After voting for Brexit earlier this year did you come over all homophobic? I mean after you did all the obvious stuff like beat up a few ethnic minorities and burn a Torah. A piece in the Guardian at the weekend explains that ‘Homophobic attacks in UK rose 147 per cent in three months after Brexit vote.’ It
With the latest ICM poll putting the Tories on a 17-point lead over Labour, it seems as though Jeremy Corbyn’s beleaguered party are in a bit of a jam. But fret not — they have a plan. Today Momentum have released details of its new initiative ‘Concerts for Corbyn’. The plan is to inspire the nation
Today’s ICM poll makes grim reading for Labour MPs. The poll – based on samples taken from Friday to Sunday – shows that the Conservatives have received an impressive post-conference bounce, opening a 17-point lead over Labour: Conservatives: 43pc (up 2) Labour: 26pc (down 2) Ukip: 11pc (down 2) Lib Dems: 8pc (down 1) Greens: 6pc (up 2)
The only thing to be said for Shami Chakrabarti’s stance on selective education – she’s against the reintroduction of grammar schools because it’s tantamount to ‘segregation in schooling’ but her own son is going to Dulwich College – is that she’s not alone. Emily Thornberry, shadow foreign secretary, sent two children way outside her constituency
Since that moment in the early hours of June 24 when David Dimbleby said ‘The answer is: we’re out’, Brexit has been compared to many things. The Reformation. The Corn Laws. Weimar’s collapse into Nazism. Prohibition. The French, Russian and American Revolutions. But I think I’ve got a better comparison: first-time parenting. Scrolling through Twitter,
Royal Bank of Scotland secretly tried to profit from struggling businesses, leaked documents show. The bank bought up assets cheaply from failing businesses it claimed to be helping, the confidential files reveal. Staff could boost their bonuses by finding firms which could be squeezed in what it called a ‘dash for cash’. RBS said it had
Amber Rudd’s proposal to make companies publish lists of how many foreign workers they employ inflicted significant damage to one of Theresa May’s oldest aims: to shake off the Tories’ ‘nasty party’ image. And it also drew expressions of disgust from across the board, with Steve Hilton – David Cameron’s former aide – saying it
On Sunday, Shami Chakrabarti was forced to use an appearance on Peston on Sunday to claim that she was not a hypocrite after the topic of grammar schools was raised. The issue? Although the shadow attorney general is vocal in her opposition to selective education in the state, she sent her own son to a
In my Dispatches documentary on the generation wars, which has just aired on Channel 4, I interviewed Iain Duncan Smith about the pensions triple lock. He thinks it has turned into a monster, and discussed how it led to his resignation. He cut working-age benefits and believed that he had cut to the bone. But he was
Congratulations to Shami – sorry Baroness! – Chakrabarti for joining the exciting, ever-growing pantheon of ultra-left wing metropolitan Labour hypocrites. Her dameship was appearing on the Godawful Peston on Sunday show. Asked why she opposed selection and grammar schools while at the same time sending her brat to the selective, £18,000 per year, Dulwich College, she
We hear a lot about a “crisis of masculinity” these days, but nobody seems to be in agreement about what it consists of. On the one hand, we hear of “rape culture”, absent fathers and everyday sexism; on the other, complaints of the feminisation of society, political correctness and the disappearance of traditional male role-models.
Right at the start of filming for Dispatches on the generation wealth gap (8pm on Ch4 tonight), we were working around a striking claim: that the young were so shafted that people in their 20s are earning less now that they were 20 years ago. I asked the Office for National Statistics to check this
Consolidation. It’s a word used widely in financial circles. Consolidation of debt (translation: combining lots of different credit cards into one seemingly simple yet unmanageable whole). Consolidation of assets (translation: combining liabilities into one seemingly simple yet unmanageable whole). You get my drift. So, consolidation is not always a good thing. I wonder if this
The Donald Trump story and the Jeremy Corbyn story are same tale told by different countries. A political party reinvents itself in the 1990s, wins power, but then dishonestly drags its nation into a terrible war in Iraq. It becomes widely reviled. The party is still in power a few years later when the financial
How are we to explain the Trump phenomenon? A good friend (well to the right of me) who lived in Houston for many years went back recently to look up old friends, all wealthy and successful. He was astonished to find that many of them seemed to think they were victims of oppression, living under
Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New
People attack the whole business of having an EU referendum, but one of its pluses was that it invited millions of people who had never before been asked to form an opinion on the European question to do so. They responded thoughtfully — perhaps more thoughtfully than people do in general elections when a sizeable
The branches on Jeremy Corbyn’s olive tree appear to be experiencing a case of stunted growth. The Labour leader had joked that he would grow one as part of his efforts to tempt moderates back and assemble a full frontbench team. However, since he unceremoniously sacked Rosie Winterton as Chief Whip in the first move of his reshuffle last week, relations between the Corbynites and