All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Has Jeremy Corbyn jumped the shark already, or have we witnessed the first Fleet Street ‘smear’ against him? Today’s i newspaper has splashed with ‘Corbyn backs women-only train carriages’, which at first glance sounds like a divisive policy. The story has come from Corbyn’s new End street harassment document, which includes a ‘Consultation on public transport’: ‘Some women have raised with me that
MS Queen Victoria, 38°N 19°E I’ll do my best, but I’ve got to be honest: being surrounded by shining Ionian waters and convivial Spectator cruisers isn’t helping me channel the panic that has gripped global markets. So forgive me if this dispatch doesn’t have the apocalyptic tone you’re expecting. I’m as irritated as anyone that
Northerners are easy to stereotype: working class, beer, flat caps, Labour, trade unions and football. In the same way all southerners aren’t stuck-up opera-goers and every Scot isn’t a miserly chip-guzzler, this portrait of a typical northerner is insultingly inaccurate — but it is one that some love to propagate. One of those people happens
Despite becoming a Cybernat target during the Scottish referendum after she donated £1 million to the Better Together campaign, J.K. Rowling has not been deterred from putting Scottish Nationalists in their place. Such an opportunity arose today, after a Yes voter came up with a rather tenuous reason as to why they would continue the fight for Scottish independence: liberating Scotland from
The summit on the integrity of the Labour leadership contest is over and interim leader Harriet Harman described it as a ‘routine’ and ‘useful’ meeting. Although she is ‘confident that there won’t be questions over the integrity of the result and there aren’t any bases for legal challenges’, some of the numbers released on the number of infiltrators
Some years ago, I sat with an old China hand in a Beijing teahouse sipping oolong. An American director at a local education firm, his face was grey, creased by decades of pollution and office politics. But when talk turned to the country’s first spacewalk, recently completed, his brow furrowed. ‘Have you ever noticed that
ComRes has released a new poll which outlines Labour’s present plight (as with all post-election opinion polls, treat these numbers with some caution). Just 20 per cent of the public say they would be inspired by any four the leadership candidates to vote Labour. Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham coming joint top on 22 per cent, Yvette
Andy Burnham’s leadership bid hit a stumbling block this morning. Burnham — who bills himself as both the anti-Westminster candidate and the candidate who can unite the party in Westminster — made a slip when asked whether he agreed that it would be great for the party to have a female candidate. Speaking on Radio 5
Concern about how the Labour leadership contest has been run is spreading throughout the party. The former home secretary Charles Clarke, who has voted Kendall 1st, Cooper 2nd and Burnham 3rd, told Newsnight he was very disappointed in the contest and raised the prospect of legal challenges to the result: ‘I think it’s been a disaster unfortunately.
Andy Burham’s rally this evening had only one similarity with Jeremy Corbyn’s last week: it was held in a place of worship. At the St Pancras Parish Church in London, close to 1,000 people turned out to hear Burnham and take part in a Q&A session. There was no socialist magician, folk singer or rock band
Gordon Brown has announced he is backing Yvette Cooper in the Labour leadership contest. In a statement on his website, the former Prime Minister has revealed Cooper will be his first preference vote, while Andy Burnham will be number two and Liz Kendall number three. It’s a surprising move, given that Brown delivered a barnstorming speech on the
Labour is holding a meeting tomorrow morning with the different leadership camps to discuss how the party is dealing with infiltrators into its membership. The campaigns are particularly keen to find out the scale of the infiltration from each side – Tory and hard left – and how local parties are dealing with it. I
With reports starting to claim that the next global financial crisis is on the horizon, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s all doom and gloom. So Steerpike was cheered to see that Labour’s former king of spin Damian McBride is on hand to put everyone’s minds at rest. McBride says that he has been preparing for the day
One-party states are rarely any good at admitting to any form of blunder. It is certainly the case with China’s prickly political leaders, who love to flood domestic media with jolly tales of fashion shows and bamboo-chomping pandas – anything to divert people’s attention from a flagging economy and rising unemployment. This makes today’s main headline
Quelle surprise, Jeremy Corbyn has come out against a third runway at Heathrow. The Labour leadership favourite has indicated in an interview with the FT that under him, the party would not support expansion at Heathrow: ‘I think the third runway is a problem for noise pollution and so on across west London…I also think
The latest challenge, to submit a thriller in three text messages, seemed straightforward enough but it turned out to be a tough assignment that stretched veterans and newcomers alike. As in all forms of micro-fiction — the mini-masterpiece attributed to Hemingway, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’, springs to mind — it’s all about the
Philip Hammond is the first Foreign Secretary to visit Iran in over a decade as he returned to reopen the Britain’s embassy in Tehran yesterday. But what has prompted this change in government policy? On the Today programme, Hammond explained that Britain needs the influence of a ‘very important country’ in the region to help with the fight against the Islamic State: ‘We’re trying to
Corbynmania has unleashed a great feeling of hope and change in the British public, especially among people hoping to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Whether or not Jezza can be blamed for his links to activists with fascinating, esoteric views of the second world war, the accusations have focused attention on one
Charles Moore asks in this week’s Spectator what the ‘right looks’ are for a leadership contender, comparing Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to Tory backbenchers to the appeal of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the Labour contest. The obvious answer, of course, is that the ‘right look’ involves wearing clothes for working in the House of Commons,
A hidden reason for Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1975 was that lots of older Tory backbenchers fancied her. She was 49 and made the best of it without obvious strain. She was not disturbingly sexy, and she behaved with absolute propriety throughout, thus preventing any filthy old wretch from taking liberties, but she appealed to
Jeremy Corbyn has hosted over 70 rallies as part of his Labour leadership campaign. Yesterday evening, the bearded one returned to Islington to speak at a four hour fundraising event — the first in his local patch. I went along to find out more about the ‘movement’ that has sprung up around his candidacy. The event was
The success of school reform in Britain seem to be worrying the private schools’ spokesmen. They’ve taken the unusual step of releasing a statement in response to my Daily Telegraph column yesterday, where I show that the top state schools outperform top private schools in A-Level league tables. I’m not sure why they’re so upset; I didn’t
Louise Mensch has once again become the subject of much ridicule online over something she has tweeted. The incident occurred last night after the former Tory MP claimed Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters — who have recently been accused of being anti-semitic — were insulting Corbyn’s Labour leadership rival Liz Kendall. Mensch claimed that Twitter’s autocomplete function showed that the most common
If the man with the dull beard does win, where will Labour stand in the European Union referendum? Jeremy Corbyn, being a hard leftist, is theoretically against the EU, but eurosceptic Labour friends tell me that he is not to be relied on when the going gets tough. I expect he will adopt the conventional
Although Tatler received a boost to its readership following the BBC’s ‘Posh People: Inside Tatler’, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the magazine, for some ‘posh people’ the society bible has long been essential reading. One such man who fits this description is none other than the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thanks to Tatler‘s Bystander archive, Mr S
Whoever wins the Labour leadership contest, questions will be raised about how it has been run. If Corbyn loses, his supporters will become even more angry about the ‘purge’ of the Corbynites. For Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, entryism is their chief concern and Team Burnham have decided to publicly raise the issue. Michael Dugher, Burnham’s campaign
Have you been duped by the cult of clean eating? In this week’s Spectator, Lara Prendergast and I delve into the murky world of ‘clean’ diets and Instagram goddesses. These diets are often based on a noble desire to eat more fruit and vegetables and cut out processed food. But they also involve a lot
Moaning about private education is an ancient British tradition; how can there be fairness in society when the rich can afford such great schools? Let’s count how many privately-educated judges there are, or Olympic athletes, or MPs! Open a cupboard in Cameron’s No10 and an Old Etonian falls out! What, is then asked, should be
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Willie Horton and Michael Dukakis. That’s what Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to prominence will do to a fellow. Horton, you will remember, was the convicted murderer who never returned from a weekend furlough granted to him while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, and subsequently kidnapped a couple in Maryland, stabbing the
Aping Isis, trans activists have defaced a historical monument to make a political point. They blacked-up — seriously, with spray paint and afro wigs — the Christopher Street Gay Liberation statue in New York, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Their beef? That the monument and a
If you thought Corbynmania was limited to female obsession and male politicians growing their facial hair, it’s time to think again. It turns out that Jeremy Corbyn is also inspiring poets everywhere. Steerpike has been sent a copy of a new collection of poems edited by Russell Bennetts, which includes poems by 22 authors who have been
Tories are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour leadership contest. Two stories that have broken this morning show precisely why. Returning to the Iraq war — always a comfortable topic for Labour — Corbyn has told the Guardian he would apologise to the British people for the ‘deception’ of the war: ‘Let
Greece has already had one election and a referendum this year. Now it’s going back to the polls again with Alexis Tsipras announcing his resignation and snap elections. Tsipras says he has a moral duty to go to the polls after securing Greece’s third bailout, arguing that ‘we did not achieve the agreement we expected before
On the Swedish election before last, there was shock that the populist Sweden Democrats ended up with a foothold in parliament. Even more shock when they did well enough in last year’s election to topple the conservative-led government. Sweden’s parliament works on coalitions, but no party wants to do any kind of deal with Sweden Democrats. They’re regarded as