All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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
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
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)
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.
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
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
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
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,
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
I’ve spent the last few weeks making a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on what I regard as one the biggest new arguments of our times: the generation wars. The idea that (as David Willetts famously put it) the ‘baby boomers took their children’s’ future’ – and ‘should give it back’. I’ve been talking to various experts,
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
The invitation to take the title of a short story by Ted Hughes, How the Whale Became, substitute another animal or fish for ‘whale’ and provide a tale with that title brought in oodles of well turned entries bursting with charm. The comp was an absolute delight to judge, so well done, one and all.
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
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
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
The funniest thing about the lewd Donald Trump tape is how unshocking it is. It’s less of an ‘October surprise’ more of an ‘October of course’. Everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he is, to use a Donald favoured word, braggadocious about his sexual exploits. The newly unearthed video of him boasting of
Jeremy Corbyn is taking Labour ever further away from its traditional working class voters in the north and the midlands. As I say in The Sun today, the party now has a leader who didn’t sing the national anthem at St Paul’s, a shadow Chancellor who has praised the IRA, a shadow Home Secretary who
The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this
Mrs May’s plain style may well come to irritate people in a few months, but just now it is extremely popular. The lack of glamour, soundbites, smart clothes, and ministerial overclaiming is a blessed relief. I can’t pretend that I find Mrs May an endearing figure, but when she said in her speech that Britain
What is to become of Barack Obama when he retires from the US presidency at the age of 55? I have a suggestion. There is a vacancy on the US Supreme Court, which the Republican majority in Congress has blocked him from filling. Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is ideally qualified. And he might have more
What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore. I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my
It’s almost 60 years since Ghana became independent from Britain. The world celebrated as the sun began to set on the age of European imperialism. ‘African Nationalism’, in the form of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, entered the stage and all cheered the breaking of a golden dawn as the colonial shackles were broken and ‘liberation’ belatedly
Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle is a clear show of intent. Having won re-election as Labour leader, Corbyn is shoring up his authority and sending out a message to critics by ousting some of those who may have helped placate the Parliamentary Labour party. Unsurprisingly, his ongoing reshuffle isn’t going down well with everyone. Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop had this
On Tuesday night, Conservatives for Liberty, which I co-founded in 2013, hosted our annual Freedom Fizz reception. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young joined us, along with 400 party delegates, most of whom identify as right-wing libertarians. So like a lot of Conservative Party Conference delegates, I woke up with a hangover on Wednesday morning, with
Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet reshuffle is all about strengthening, and demonstrating, his control over the party. Jonathan Ashworth, a Corbyn-sceptic, has lost his place on the party’s National Executive Committee and is replaced by Corbyn backer Kate Osamor. The word in Westminster is that Ashworth was told he could take shadow Health and lose his seat
Did you see the news? Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in to win the election. OK. No-one is saying it quite yet. Certainly not the TV channels in the US, which have their eye on Super Bowl-esque viewing figures for this Sunday’s presidential election debate. Calling it now would put a bit of a dampener on the final month of
Remember how Brexit was going to cost jobs and investment? At times, even Leave campaigners struggled to find the confidence to persuade themselves that European companies would continue to invest in the UK, falling back instead on the argument that Brexit would provide an opportunity to attract investment from elsewhere in the world. How long
Oh dear. After the Guardian ran a story claiming Jeremy Corbyn was unable to find a seat on a Virgin train journey, a media storm shortly ensued when the train company responded by releasing CCTV footage to the contrary. Since then, it’s been revealed that the freelancer behind the story was actually a campaigning Corbynista who wasn’t
It’s day three of Ukip’s latest leadership contest and the party has found itself splashed across the front pages of today’s papers for all the wrong reasons. Following the bust-up in the European Parliament which left Steven Woolfe in hospital, Nigel Farage has promised to launch a Ukip investigation into what happened. That hasn’t stopped the debacle from
It’s been a difficult week for Amber Rudd. After the Home Secretary used her speech at Conservative conference to call for companies to declare the number of non-British workers they employ, Rudd found herself in the firing line — with one presenter even comparing the speech to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Now, her brother has joined the