All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The big question in Labour’s leadership contest is not whether Jeremy Corbyn will win, but how much he’ll win by. There is, it seems, an inexhaustible supply of Corbynistas standing ready to join the party – so the moderates who had hoped that a formal leadership challenge would be a vehicle of deposing him have
Pope Francis has just given implicit permission for many divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion. But he’s done so surreptitiously. Effectively, Francis has pulled a fast one on conservative cardinals who didn’t want the rules changed. Very fast, in this case. On 5 September, he received a copy of draft guidelines, written by the bishops of Buenos Aires, on giving
As Brexiteers begin to worry that Theresa May could be leaning towards a soft Brexit, a number of Remain-ers are keen to make sure that Brexit doesn’t occur at all. The latest issue of the New European — the pro-Remain newspaper — claims that these die-hard Europhiles now need a figurehead to lead the charge. So, who could
You know the figures: seven per cent of children in the UK attend fee-paying schools but they win 42 per cent of Oxbridge places and 70 per cent of jobs in private equity banking; they also make up 30 per cent of places in the cabinet. This is a significant decrease from previous cabinets –
We crumblies hail from a sporting era when a Scottish rugby captain could stub out his fourth fag of the day before leading the team out on to Murrayfield. When a one-handed slip catch would receive a brief nod of approval from the captain. And when a goal could be scored without a mass bromance
The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in its wake. One concerns Mrs Clinton’s apparently serious medical problem. Another concerns her opponent Donald Trump, who appears eager to run her campaign for her while she convalesces. When felled, Mrs Clinton was two weeks
Diane James, Ukip’s new leader, did her first major TV interview as Ukip leader this morning. And very revealing it was too. When Andrew Neil asked her who her political heroes were other than Vladimir Putin, she did not deny that the Russian leader was one of her heroes. She said that neither Clinton nor
What’s happening with HS2? The high-speed rail project has now lost its chief executive, Simon Kirby, headhunted by Rolls-Royce at an unspecified multiple of his £750,000 HS2 salary. Rumour-mongers say the true final cost of the project is now closer to £80 billion than the official figure of £55 billion, and that chairman Sir David Higgins
Before the Brexit vote, the majority of economists forecast economic doom for Britain outside the EU. But the economy has, so far, been doing significantly better than expected. Will Britain continue to thrive? Or will the anticipated economic consequences of leaving the EU catch up on us? And how will Theresa May’s new government help
Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy
On Thursday, the Cabinet’s Economic and Industrial Strategy committee met. There were, as I write in The Sun this morning, controversial issues on the agenda: new rules on foreign takeovers of British companies, executive pay and workers on boards. May made clear her views on these questions in the last speech of her leadership campaign.
Sunday is the second anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum, the second ‘Here’s what you could have won’ day of thanksgiving. Or, if you prefer, atonement. The referendum is only over in the purest, most technical, sense. The campaign continues and it is clear to everyone that, at some point, on some day, Scotland will
It was Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet-about-the-sonnet ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’ that prompted me to invite a poem about a verse form written in that verse form. But there are other similar examples — Robert Burns’s fine ‘A Sonnet upon Sonnets’, for one: ‘Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;/ What magic myst’ries
Even now, I’m not sure I can believe it has actually happened. The Spectator Book of Wit, Humour and Mischief was conceived, possibly over lunch, as a belated follow-up to Christopher Howse’s 1990 volume The Wit Of The Spectator, and as the first of a putative series of themed books using the vast and rarely
There are two articles in yesterday’s Guardian that are critical of something called ‘liberalism’. Giles Fraser vents his irritation at an advertisement for a hotel chain, aimed the global business elite. It celebrates the idea of the individual’s freedom from boundaries, constraints – be a ‘beautiful nomad’ it urges. This epitomises the worst sort of ‘liberalism’,
At the height of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the dead and dying lined the streets, locals too scared to remove the bodies or aid the stricken for fear of contracting the virus. Entire communities were wiped out as aid organisations came under fire for lacking a sense of urgency in the face of
After just eight weeks in the wilderness, George Osborne is back – and wants to put the pressure on Theresa May to use the phrase ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and the agenda that goes with it. Here’s an edited transcript of his BBC Today Programme interview this morning with Nick Robinson. NR: We want to talk about
Grammar schools remain one of the most highly-charged issues in domestic politics. There is bound to be controversy about how to boost social mobility and educational standards. But grammar schools bring to the surface other deep undercurrents as well. Were things better in the 1950s? What was Margaret Thatcher’s role in closing so many of
Nigel Farage has just delivered his speech at Ukip conference, in which he declared that he had put ‘absolutely all of me’ into Britain leaving the EU. ‘I literally couldn’t have worked any harder, or couldn’t have been more determined – it’s been my life’s work to get to this point. I want my country back, but now
I felt for the first time on Sunday that Donald Trump might actually win the US presidential election. I’m not the only one moving in that direction. Hillary Clinton looks in bad shape, and while it’s one thing to be seen as dishonest, to be dishonest and sickly is not a great combination. More mostly bad news
Interest rates are on track to be cut for a second time before Christmas despite the economy’s surprising resilience since the EU referendum, the Bank of England has indicated. The Bank’s message that stronger growth may not dissuade rate-setters from a second post-Brexit vote cut was made in the minutes to this month’s meeting, when
Diane James is the new Ukip leader. The party’s home affairs spokesman won with 8,451 votes. She beat Lisa Duffy into second place by nearly 4,000 votes. Bill Etheridge came third, Phillip Broughton fourth and Liz Jones fifth. James was the frontrunner and her victory was expected given that Steven Woolfe and Suzanne Evans were both barred from running. But James
Community share schemes are becoming an important weapon in the long-standing fight to save our communities. Numbers of local pubs, shops and schools continue to decline as they have for many years. But the rapidly increasing use of community share schemes to save such assets is striking a new, positive note among the usual stream
The leaking – accidental or otherwise – of a list of Labour MPs allegedly guilty of abusive behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn is yet another illustration of quite how divided the party is, and quite how messy things are going to be when Corbyn tries to reassert his authority following what looks certain to be his
Here is one of those stories that matters even though it preoccupies the Guardian. Last week the celebrated novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane book festival. It was heralded as being about ‘community and belonging’ but ended up being about ‘fiction and identity politics’. In particular Shriver (the author, most famously, of We Need
Ukip’s autumn conference kicks off tomorrow in Bournemouth. With the new leader set to be announced, there had been hopes the two-day event would mark the beginning of a new exciting post-Brexit era for the party. Instead, the party faces questions over whether there should be a second chapter at all. Steve Stanbury, Ukip’s former director, has appeared on
At the moment, the consensus is that Brexit will be Cameron’s legacy, that the thing people will remember about his premiership is that he called a referendum on the EU and lost it. But I don’t think this will necessarily be the case. As I argue in the magazine this week, if Brexit — to
Today’s decision to give the go-ahead for Hinkley C after a six-week review seems to confirm what was indicated in July: that Theresa May’s problem with the project was mostly concerned with security issues. What has been announced today is that the government will take a special share in all future nuclear power projects to
The chances of another Bank of England rate cut today are close to zero after some recent upbeat economic data, although further action is expected later in the year, according to Thisismoney. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, which announces its latest interest rate decision at midday today, cut the base rate from 0.5 per cent
It’s been a difficult week for Hillary Clinton. Not only was she diagnosed with a bout of pneumonia but she also found herself under fire for labelling half of Donald Trump’s supporters as ‘a basket of deplorables’. Those so-called deplorables are the subject of Christopher Caldwell’s cover piece, in which he argues that Trump’s pandering
In recent months, Derek Hatton has been taking to the airwaves to wax lyrical about Jeremy Corbyn. Although the former deputy leader of Liverpool Council’s request to rejoin the party 29 years after they expelled him was turned down, he remains a supporter of the Corbyn regime. So, with this year’s party conference in his home
You can, I maintain, get the Brits to agree to almost any biomedical advance – I use the word in its neutral sense – no matter how repellent, on the basis that it helps sick kiddies or the infertile. So we now have a situation whereby you can actually create human embryos for the purpose
Remember how it was? Many fans of Westminster still recall with fondness the happy afternoons when the Tories used to greet Ed Miliband at PMQs with a storm of ironic contempt. Nowadays the Labour-shambles is barely worth a half-hearted jeer let alone a burst of orchestrated scoffing. When Corbyn stands up at the despatch box,
Although Alex Salmond is Scotland’s First Minister no more, luckily the public still have a chance to hear the SNP politician’s thoughts on a weekly basis thanks to his LBC phone-in. Today Salmond led the charge for Nicola Sturgeon blocking Brexit: ‘If Scotland could block Brexit, then I think Nicola Sturgeon should do that. I think