All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Although much has been made of Andy Burnham’s admission in an interview with GQ that he owns an Armani suit, perhaps the most embarrassing revelation lies further down. When asked for the Gentlemen’s Quarterley’s September issue who he would like to lead the Labour party if he doesn’t win the leadership election, Burnham plays it safe
All across the country this afternoon struggling club sides could cheer themselves with the thought that once their batsmen had survived for 112 deliveries they were doing better than Australia managed in their first innings in Nottingham this week. Australia’s capitulation in 18.3 overs – a Nelson of deliveries – might just be the most
Iran uses cranes to hang citizens for offences such as ‘waging war against God’ and ‘crimes against chastity’. These cranes are often made in Europe. Now, with sanctions against the Iranian regime lifted, European companies are are clamouring to get back into the Iranian market. The CEO of the Austrian construction giant Palfinger last week
How do the Tories win over low-income workers for good? That’s the question occupying the mind of anyone seriously thinking about the 2020 election, rather than assuming that Jeremy Corbyn will win it for them. Today Boris Johnson turned his hand to answering that question in an eloquent and detailed speech which set out his
Mr S couldn’t help but notice that the Times made for familiar reading this morning. A leader titled ‘Ending the Exodus’ suggested that the government ought to ‘Give Syrian refugees the right to work and they will stay close to home’: ‘It is the apparent hopelessness of life in these camps that is propelling Syrians
Kids Company staff and service users have been protesting outside Downing Street today after the charity announced it was closing its doors. But the Prime Minister isn’t there: he’s on holiday. He did, however, give this clip to broadcasters in which he defended his ministers’ decision to overrule officials’ concerns and give the struggling charity
Since Karen Danczuk announced her split from her husband Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP, she has been embroiled in a bitter row with him over the reasons for their parting of ways. Happily, in recent weeks this has cooled, as they try to put their differences aside for the sake of their children. Not that this means
Only a couple of years ago the Labour Party was criticised for its silence over the summer recess, with complaints that Ed Miliband’s team had failed to take advantage of the traditionally quiet period to get some much-needed media coverage. Well, never let it be said that Labour doesn’t learn from its mistakes: this year’s
The moment Edward Heath sat down in the first class seat next to me on the flight from Scotland to London, shook my hand and said ‘Jonathan, it is a pleasure to meet you’ I determined to flirt with him in order to find out whether the rumours that he was gay were true. I
Yesterday for the first time I trended on Twitter. Apparently I had been busted registering as a ‘supporter of the Labour Party.’ It seems one of the many people I had told over the previous week had ratted to the Guardian that I had paid my £3 and signed up online entitling me to vote
David Cameron should be in real trouble over Calais. It goes to the heart of two of the central issues by which British voters judge governments: are you competent and can you control immigration. Judging by the unstoppable growth of the chaotic ‘Jungle‘, the increasing number of assaults on Eurotunnel staff and the rising number
There was no stand out candidate in the first debate of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election last night. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush remains the most likely candidate to receive the GOP’s nomination (by default), while Senator Marco Rubio from Florida put in a better than expected performance. Rand Paul, the libertarian Senator from Kentucky,
From ‘The End of the First Year‘, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: Terrible as have been the sufferings caused by the war—the agonies of the body for those who have fought and fallen wounded, and the agonies of the mind for those who have seen husbands, fathers, and sons go to their deaths or return
Every age has people protected by a certain ‘halo effect’? At points in the past members of the clergy might have been said to enjoy the advantage. More recently it would appear that celebrities were the ones who could get away with anything. We like to think we are beyond all this now – and
In an interview with Sky News Australia, David Cameron’s former election strategist Lynton Crosby has today offered his thoughts on the Prime Minister’s rivals. Unsurprisingly, his conclusions are hardly flattering. However, the man who has taken the brunt of Crosby’s ire is Nigel Farage. Crosby claims that Ukip does not have ‘a long-term future’. Furthermore, instead of
Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they’re not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the ‘sceptics’ are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though
Without wanting to dispel the utter euphoria that Tories are feeling at the current state of the Labour party, they do have a tricky autumn to get through which they don’t seem to be thinking much about. In today’s Times I set out some of the looming Tory rebellions on a range of different policies
As the MP for Tooting, Sadiq Khan represents a constituency that is home to the largest Chicken Cottage in Europe. Not that he seemed proud of this fact at last night’s Evening Standard Labour mayoral hustings. While the candidates debated how to deal with the spread of high street gambling shops since Labour brought in
Until February 2015, when The Spectator published my article on Kids Company, not a single bad word about it or its chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh had appeared in the mainstream media. This may seem surprising now, as the scale of the scandal surrounding the now-defunct charity unfolds, but for the best part of 20 years
Last week Diane Abbott was caught in a sticky situation after her campaign sent out a text to supporters that was allegedly from Jeremy Corbyn. It claimed that the Labour leadership favourite is backing her to be the Labour candidate to run for Mayor. Although Corbyn and Abbott are close, Corbyn’s team were quick to distance themselves,
Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public-health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and
Turn-up. Eat lunch. Swap a few pleasantries with the other people in the room, leave interest rates on hold, and then collect a cheque on the way out. I am starting to wonder why I can’t have a job on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. It certainly doesn’t look terribly difficult. This week,
Tories tend to think that Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader will be fabulously useful for their party, returning them an even bigger majority in 2020 and pitching his own party into such turmoil that it struggles to work as an effective Opposition. But one benefit of his leadership to the existing Tory majority has been
To listen to Camila Batmanghelidjh on the Radio 4 this morning, you’d think that her upstanding charity had been mysteriously assassinated by a vicious media – and by nothing else. This sounded like a very different Camila Batmanghelidjh to the one who telephoned me after The Spectator first blew the whistle on the irregularities at
Are there any immediate solutions for fixing the refugee crisis? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Paul Collier discusses this week’s Spectator cover feature on this topic with Douglas Murray. Are there any easy political solutions to this crisis? Where in the world should concerned politicians look to find solutions? What can the Jordanian authorities do to
Oh dear. This week the Bow Group sent out invitations to members and supporters announcing that Zac Goldsmith would give the speech at the Conservative think tank’s summer party. ‘Our keynote speech will be from Zac Goldsmith, the Member of Parliament for Richmond Park who is currently seeking the Conservative Party nomination to succeed Boris Johnson MP as
Another week, another appalling boat disaster in the Mediterranean, another round of the same tired row on migration. Yesterday a boat carrying 600 people sank off the coast of Libya; 400 people were rescued, the rest are feared dead, trapped in the belly of the boat. This morning the same round of cliches are being trotted out. The
Have you been microaggressive recently? My guess is that in some way or another, you have, you bastards. If you are not sure that you have been microaggressive, here’s a very good piece indeed by Brendan O’Neill which delineates the sort of thing that might be considered microaggressive by some third-rate academic or the sort
The Evening Standard hosted a hustings for Labour’s mayoral candidacy last night and it appears the contest is being fought more over clichés than anything else. The six candidates opened by extolling their love of London: Diane Abbott (Stoke Newington MP) claimed London has suffered from ‘too much social cleansing’. Tessa Jowell (former Olympics minister the bookies’ favourite to win)
From ‘The End of the First Year‘, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: What of the future? Shall we be able to make as good a show in the second year of the war as we have in the first? We believe we shall make a far better show. The willingness to make sacrifices in order
Yesterday, Miles Goslett revealed on Coffee House how the beleaguered charity Kids Company was dealing with the allegations against it. His cache of emails revealed that it was using the £3 million grant it had received from government to pay staff, a direct violation of the terms of the donation. This evening, the charity has
Last month, in Stanford, California, I had lunch with Robert Conquest, poet, historian, literary editor of this paper in the early 1960s, exposer of Soviet totalitarianism. After Conquest’s book The Great Terror (1968), it became impossible for all but the most crazed fanatic or fool to deny that Stalin had arranged the greatest system of
Labour’s verification process has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent weeks as more and more Tories have claimed they have successfully joined as a supporter of the party in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and ‘condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness’. Labour insist that they have a crack team successfully
In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible —
