All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
This morning Jeremy Corbyn has woken up to find his face plastered across the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Times following ‘traingate‘. After Corbyn appeared in a video calling for the railways to be re-nationalised while sitting on the floor of a ‘ram-packed’ Virgin train, the company hit back. On Tuesday, Richard Branson’s team released a press release and
Investors took £5.7 billion out of UK-based stock market funds and a further £470 million from property funds last month in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, according to latest market figures. The Guardian reports that statistics from data company Morningstar show that some of the money appears to have been redeployed to
Jeremy Corbyn’s embarrassing train row is a gilt-edged opportunity for his rival to try and make up ground in the party’s leadership contest. Instead, Owen Smith is more intent on alienating Labour voters by setting out how he wants to block Brexit. It’s a foolish move on Smith’s part. So why has he done it?
What follows is an appeal to Jeremy Corbyn supporters to think again. It’s from Chris, a Labour party member, who does not want to give his full name for fear of abuse. He has compiled a vast, but by no means exhaustive list of the moral and political failings of the Labour leader. He told
This time last year, as images of refugees fleeing Syria dominated the news, a host of charitable figures offered to do their bit and take refugees into their home. Exasperated that David Cameron was not allowing enough refugees into Britain, Sir Bob Geldof, Yvette Cooper and Nicola Sturgeon were among those who publicly vowed to lead by example.
When Donald Trump hired Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the right-wing media site Breitbart, to head his campaign last week, Breitbart’s former editor Ben Shapiro declared, ‘The Breitbart alt-right just took over the GOP.’ Yet most of Trump’s supporters probably don’t even know what the alt-right is. It’s entirely plausible that Trump himself doesn’t know what it is. So
As the internet goes into meltdown over the news that Jeremy Corbyn may have had a seat after all when he filmed a video claiming he did not, it appears that the Labour leader hasn’t done much to help his cause. While his campaign team claim that Virgin Train’s CCTV footage is a ‘lie’, Corbyn can at least
Last week, a video of Jeremy Corbyn sitting in the hallway of a crowded train on the his way to a leadership debate went viral. The footage appeared to show the Labour leader sat on the floor for an entire three-hour train journey after he valiantly declared that it would be unfair for him to
If you thought the Brexit vote marked the end of ‘Project Fear’, you’ll be saddened to know it’s back. This time it takes the form of a warning from Nicola Sturgeon about what leaving the EU might cost Scotland. The Scottish Government report into the ‘economic risk’ to the country of Brexit, on which Sturgeon’s prediction is
Theresa May was once seen as the continuity candidate to succeed David Cameron. However, since becoming Prime Minister she has gone on to sideline or backtrack many of Cameron and George Osborne’s pet projects. As well as delaying Hinkley Point and leaving the Northern Powerhouse’s future up in the air, she has provoked anger this week over
Unseemly as the public blood-letting between stand-up comic Joshua Howie and his apparently less-than-absolutely-fabulous mother Lynne Franks undoubtedly is, it nonetheless sheds light on a powerful tension at the heart of many of the nation’s families. Because whatever you think about self-proclaimed ‘Golden parent’ Howie’s motivation for decrying his ‘awful parent’ mother (not very much if
In England and other places there can still be surprise when discussion of football in Scotland segues too smoothly into the discussion of religion. And vice versa. It can also get entangled with toxic politics too. The sectarian divide between Celtic and Rangers doesn’t need to be rehearsed, but the tribal hinterlands behind this ancient
When I was a child a woman visited our home every Friday night. My mother gave her money fresh from my father’s pay packet and the woman, smiling, wrote in small neat handwriting in a little book. This was how my parents bought their modest terrace home in Leeds, West Yorkshire. They never had the
Women who return to work part-time after having a baby continue to earn less than men for many years afterwards, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The wage gap between men and women becomes steadily wider in the years after babies are born, the IFS says. Women miss out on promotions and
It’s no surprise that Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi chose to host a press conference with Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande on an aircraft carrier; this was a piece of theatre designed to show the EU is fighting back. ‘Many thought the EU was finished after Brexit,’ said Renzi. Not so, he claimed. Instead, Britain’s
His comeback is being called ‘Sarko 2’. Now, four years after the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost out to Francois Hollande, Sarkozy has announced he will be running again in the country’s 2017 Presidential election. The announcement was not much of a surprise: Sarkozy has made no secret of his political intentions and has done
Although Jeremy Clarkson had to leave the Beeb last year following a ‘fracas’ with a producer over a cold meat platter, in his time there he had already developed a reputation for getting himself into tight scrapes. In one such incident, the former Top Gear presenter caused a furore after he called the then prime minister Gordon
After Britain ended the Rio Olympics in an impressive second place in the olympic medal table, many Brexiteers claimed the result was a good omen for the country as it prepares to branch out alone. However, not everyone appears to have got the memo. Today the European Parliament Twitter account has released a graphic showing that
It’s been over a month since Theresa May stood on the steps of Downing Street. And yet the process of finding out what will define her government is moving slowly. We’ve had snippets of the direction in which it won’t be heading: her decision to put the brakes on Hinkley Point, at least for the
It is fair to say that I am never one to take the Polly Toynbee approach to things – or indeed, that of this magazine’s cover article this week – that in the sunlit uplands of secular liberalism, Things Have Never Been Better. But some news strikes me with greater force than most as being proof
When I think about love, that old line by William Goldman about Hollywood comes back to me: Nobody knows anything. It seems that as we grow franker about sex (witness the Naked Attraction TV show, recently described as ‘Blind Date in a brothel’) love reveals less of its mysteries. Just as we’ve all now seen
For weeks there have been reports of simmering tensions between Theresa May’s three Brexiteers. After the Prime Minister appointed David Davis as the Brexit Secretary, Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary and Liam Fox as the International Trade Secretary, the group have developed a rivalry over who does what. In particular, Fox is thought to be
When I moved to Manchester from London a few years back, I hummed and hawed over what to do with my VHS collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With seven series and a total of 144 episodes, carting them more than 200 miles north was no small undertaking. In the end, I took them with
I love Clare Balding. In line with just about everyone else, I think she is a class act. And having known her since university days, I can vouch for the fact that not only is she a very nice person, but also – rather marvellously – completely unaffected by her very well-deserved status as a
Britain’s biggest estate agent expects UK house prices to fall 1 per cent in 2017 before recovering in 2018 because of economic weakness caused by uncertainty following the referendum decision on 23 June. Countrywide says that the Brexit vote will have an impact on the economy generally, which will feed into household incomes and possibly delay decisions to move
After Sadiq Khan declared that he would not get involved in the Labour leadership contest, the Mayor of London had a change of heart over the weekend and penned a piece for the Observer endorsing Owen Smith. Corbyn’s supporters have not taken this well — even re-circulating Mr S’s story about Khan attending Rupert Murdoch’s summer drinks party
It won’t come as much as a surprise to many that Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, has backed Owen Smith in the party’s leadership contest. In July, Dugdale said that with Jeremy Corbyn in charge Labour faced being wiped out at the ballot box. As if that wasn’t a clear enough indicator of who
Jonathan Ray gives a heartening update on the campaign to bring back the imperial pint of champagne When the Spectator urges so things start to happen. You might recall a despatch of mine a week or so ago concerning a Spectator Winemaker’s Lunch we held for readers in our boardroom, hosted by James Simpson MW,
Sadiq Khan’s endorsement of Owen Smith is rather handy for the ailing Labour leadership contender, given Khan is one of the few Labour politicians who has actually won something: that something being the largest personal mandate of any politician. This enormous mandate is rather handy when Jeremy Corbyn starts waving his own huge mandate about,
Throughout our holiday, reports from Rio rippled in — last thing at night, first thing in the morning — a regular golden swoosh of heartwarming news. We are only an averagely sporty family, but these Olympics made us all happier. Across the media, there’s been a mild controversy about whether the remarkable achievements of Team
The Twelfth of August was heralded for me by an email from the RSPB. ‘RSPB warns driven grouse does not have a future without change’. Jeff Knott, the head of the society’s nature policy, goes on to say that ‘The illegal killing of birds of prey like the hen harrier must end, and sadly this
This year, every single student at King’s College London Mathematics School achieved an A or an A* in A-level maths, and every single one of them is going to either Oxbridge or another Russell Group University. Last year, Alison Wolf wrote about what she’d learnt in the process of helping to found this specialist free
The biggest puzzle of Theresa May’s premiership so far is why someone who pioneered laws against modern slavery and was so tough on stop-and-search should take such an extreme and heartless position on EU migrants. Her declaration – that she’d use them as bargaining chips in Brexit talks – struck many who would otherwise support
What, though, are we to call the followers or policies of Theresa May? Assuming, obviously, that there one day are some. At least one columnist last week used ‘Mayist’, which seems to me a terrible, boring waste. Surely we can do better than that? On Twitter, I idly suggested ‘Mayan’ which I still feel is