All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
After yesterday’s furore over Treasury warnings about exactly what Brexit will cost British families, today it’s Michael Gove’s turn to hit back. The Justice Secretary is set to accuse the Government of ‘treating voters like children who can be frightened into obedience’. It’s extraordinary just how quickly the war of words seems to be intensifying,
During last night’s BBC mayoral debate, Zac Goldsmith was asked whether he had run a racist campaign against Sadiq Khan — following negative press surrounding the Labour candidate’s links to extremists. After Khan found himself under fire for sharing platforms with characters like Suliman Gani, as well as for his work for Louis Farrakhan — the man who claimed Hitler
The Telegraph reports this morning that British Gas owner Centrica is attempting to shrug off a sharp drop in customer numbers with a range of new tariffs. In the first three months of the year, Britain’s biggest energy supplier lost 224,000 customer accounts – more than in the whole of 2015 – as customers turned to rival companies. The
As the European referendum campaign gains momentum, the London mayoral election has had to take a backseat in recent weeks when it comes to setting the news agenda. Tonight the mayoral candidates had a chance to turn this around as part of the BBC’s London’s Mayor debate. While Respect candidate George Galloway was left out of the line-up, the five
Although the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party is a private affair, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman offers journalists lurking in the committee corridor outside a briefing as soon as it has concluded. Today he had to take questions from hacks on whether or not his boss goes to McDonald’s – prompted by the news that the
Nobody should be surprised that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has instituted effective blasphemy laws to defend himself from criticism in Turkey. But many of us had assumed that these lèse-majesté laws would not yet be put in place inside Europe. At least not until David Cameron succeeds in his long-held ambition to bring Turkey fully
George Osborne’s warning over what Brexit will cost the UK economy has dominated the headlines for much of the day. But how have the Treasury figures gone down in Westminster? Based on the number of Tory MPs queuing up to slam the Chancellor’s claims, it would seem not very well at all: Kwasi Kwarteng said
Departmental questions in the House of Commons are generally an opportunity for backbenchers of all parties to hold the government to account. But a strange pattern is emerging at Defence Questions, whereby the backbenchers of each of the two main parties pour their efforts into making life uncomfortable for their own frontbenchers, even though Labour’s
Holborn station has today started a six-month trial of ‘standing only’ escalators. As anyone who has travelled on the London Underground will know, standing on the left of the escalator is an inexcusable crime, which will attract tuts from many angry Londoners running late for work. However, if the trial is successful, this could become the norm
George Osborne’s claim that the Treasury thinks Brexit would make you £4,300 worse off has gone down like a cup of cold sick with the Leave camp. While many Brexiteers have hit back in less than polite terms, it’s Leave.EU who win the award for ‘most blunt response’. In light of the claims, Arron Bank’s
Sometimes, the internet is just the worst. To use the hyperbolese that is common in internet culture, especially in the arch, self-satisfied, Buzzfeeding world of meme-makers and tweeters’n’shakers for whom everything is either ‘literally the worst thing that ever happened’ or ‘everything you need in your life right now’, the internet is the absolute pits sometimes.
So good to see Boris Johnson making the obvious case for Brexit, namely that the Turks are at the door. And it’s not just the imminent prospect of visa-free travel for 75 million of them as part of the deal that Angela Merkel struck with that problematic individual, Recep Erdogan, that we’ve got to worry
One of the more significant constitutional innovations of recent times is the assumption that the government must get parliament’s permission before committing British forces to military action. This precedent, set with the 2003 Iraq vote, has been upheld by this government; it famously resulted in Britain not bombing Syria in 2013 following the use of
Another interesting change of tack in the EU referendum campaign comes from the Leave camp today, with Priti Patel warning about school places. The employment minister warns that EU migration is putting ‘unsustainable pressure’ on schools, saying: ‘The shortage of primary school places is yet another example of how uncontrolled migration is putting unsustainable pressures
I first heard of Asad Shah’s murder through a WhatsApp group. Its members are mainly prominent, respected Sunni Muslims. When it was reported that the Glaswegian shop owner – whose final message on Facebook was to wish Christians a happy Easter – had been killed, the group expressed its outrage. ‘This is what happens when the
George Osborne has warned today that Brexit will cost each household in the UK around £4,500. The Chancellor also said leaving the EU would make Britain ‘permanently poorer’. But is there any truth in Osborne’s claims? In this Spectator Coffee House podcast, Fraser Nelson joins Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth to discuss the figures and
Sometimes, George Osborne’s dishonesty is simply breathtaking. Let’s set aside the way he has positioned himself over the years (if he believed that leaving the European Union ‘would be the most extraordinary self-inflicted wound’ he might have told us – and his constituents – earlier, rather than proceeding with the farce of renegotiation). But it’s his maths, today,
Savers were hit with a double whammy of bad news last week. On Tuesday it was revealed that inflation had climbed to 0.5 per cent. Then on Thursday, to little surprise, the Bank of England kept interest rates on hold yet again. They’ve remained frozen at record low levels for more than seven years now. With the average
George Osborne harnesses the might of the Treasury machine today in the EU referendum campaign, publishing a weighty tome that tweaks 200 pages to warn of the consequences of Britain leaving the EU. He also warns of a ‘profound consequences for our economy, for the living standards of every family, and for Britain’s role in
The Times reports this morning that Britain will be poorer by the equivalent of £4,300 a year per household if there is a vote to leave the European Union. In an article for the paper, George Osborne says that a Canadian-style post-Brexit deal with Europe, an approach advocated by Boris Johnson, would cause Britain’s economy to shrink
As CCHQ try to gather momentum behind Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign, they are hoping that they can count on Tory supporters to do their bit. On top of leafleting, voters are being invited to take part in phone bank sessions at the Connect call centre. In the event that this alone would not be enough to entice would-be volunteers, they
With the outcome of the EU referendum predicted to be on a ‘knife edge’, there are growing concerns that David Cameron may have misplayed his hand. So, in order for the Remain camp to reclaim a lead in the polls, they need some solid media performances from names the public can trust. Alas, they may
‘This happens to other people.’ The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead says she had heard the phrase countless times, interviewing the survivors of random disasters, and the idea had always puzzled her: ‘Why would they think other people are any different from them?’ But when her partner of ten years drowned while rescuing their small son
Jeremy Corbyn’s eye-swivelling about-face on the EU – he once wanted to leave, now he wants to stay – has become a source of mirth for Eurosceptics and a sign of hope for Europhiles. To the anti-EU lobby, the fact that Corbyn voted against staying in the common market in the 1975 referendum and against
The US President flies into town next week to wish the Queen a happy 90th birthday and to encourage Britain to stay in the EU. Obama’s will be the most high profile, foreign intervention in this referendum yet. His message will be that it is in the interests of Britain, the US and the West
In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all. ‘Join the pitchfork wavers on tax, Mr Cameron, and you end up skewered.’ The column had something of an 18th-century ring to it, conjuring in my mind’s eye an elegant London dinner party, with men-about-town
I’ve always been slightly jealous of people with unusual names. It’s the sort of envy that happens when you miss out. Which I did, in 1989 when my parents decided to call me Charlotte. Little did they know it would become the most common name for girls that year. Even in 2016, Charlotte is the
With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’ on Newsnight just before my older brother published his tax returns showing the impressive sums he’s made in journalism and publishing. I can only imagine how the antlers of rival 12-point stags such as Niall
Quietly, patiently, tentatively, scientists are revolutionising the way we see human nature, a breakthrough that may be as earth-shattering as Darwin’s discovery 150 years ago. Or to put it this way, scientists went looking for genetic influences on human behaviour – and what happened next will blow your mind. Last month psychologist Oliver James published
The latest competition invited you to submit a review of a well-known work of literature that has been written by a comically inappropriate reviewer. Some of you chose well-known individuals for the job; others provided reviews written by anonymous writers but penned in a comically inappropriate style. Honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone and John
To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or follow us on SoundCloud. After the row over tax returns, are political scandals not what they used to be? Richard Littlejohn asks in his Spectator cover piece this week whether we’ve come a long way from the days of Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair.
It’s been a good week for Vote Leave after they were given the official designation to campaign for Brexit in the EU referendum. Despite this, they still have a few problems they need to overcome. One of these comes in the form of Rick Astley, the eighties singer. A Belgian expat by the name of Mario
If you’ve never watched ‘Citizen Khan’, then count yourself lucky. It’s a sitcom in the loosest sense of the word and a prime example of a comedy show which would only ever appear on the BBC: achingly unfunny, contrived and featuring entirely unbelievable characters. Crucially, though, if the show is one thing, it’s politically correct,
Ahead of the upcoming EU referendum, Julian Fellowes used an appearance on Question Time to put forward the case for Brexit, before giving an interview on the topic to the Mail on Sunday. Now, however, the Tory peer has decided to take a backseat after growing tired of famous people telling the public what to