All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Last month, the government’s Counter-Terrorism & Security Bill became law. One provision is the legal obligation it places upon ‘specified authorities’ to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. ‘Specified authorities’ includes universities, whose vice-chancellors made several interventions as the legislation made its way through Parliament. The Education (No.2) Act of 1996 places a duty on
Rufus Sewell’s turn in Josie Rourke’s production of Patrick Marber’s Closer at the Donmar Warehouse has won rave reviews. Still, the A Knight’s Tale actor confides to Mr S that not everyone has been so enamoured by the play, which examines the cruelty of modern relationships. ‘We had a performance on Valentine’s Day which probably wasn’t the most romantic thing for an audience
Are the Conservatives beginning to pull ahead of Labour? Two polls out this week suggest this might be the case. Today’s YouGov/The Sun poll puts the Tories on 36 per cent and Labour on 34 per cent — a two point lead for David Cameron’s party and its highest poll rating since March 2012. Monday’s
It was a bit rich of George Osborne to tease Nigel Farage for ‘a novel approach to policymaking’ for dumping Ukip’s previous commitment to a 50,000 cap on the number of migrants arriving in the UK each year live on the Today programme. George Osborne found this rather funny, even though he and his colleagues
With Richard Desmond’s Express Newspapers currently considering another round of redundancies in order to hit a £14m cost savings target, his remaining staff are making sure they are prepared for the worst. Mr S hears word of a chapel meeting scheduled for this week which will feature a very special guest. Desmond’s nemesis Tom Bower is set to appear before the troops at
From ‘A Plea for Posterity’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: A good many people have latterly argued that as posterity will enjoy the advantages of a successful war, so posterity may honourably be left to pay for those advantages in the shape of yearly interest upon a swollen National Debt. This is always the argument
Tonight Norman Baker leads the Commons adjournment debate on international endangered species. Speaking ahead of the event, the Liberal Democrat MP explained to Politics Home why the subject is so close to his heart: ‘I normally try to keep my day job, my role as MP, separate from my music, but this week I made an exception. I
The Iraqi military’s attempt to retake Tikrit from Islamic State tells us several things about the current politics of the region. First, the Iraqi state is heavily reliant on the Iranians for military assistance. The Iranian Fars News Agency has reported that this assault is being backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard including the commander
In the 1970s it was called ‘Radical Chic’: the toe-curling tendency of well-heeled liberals to consort with revolutionaries in the hope that the glamour of violence would rub off. The phrase was coined by the journalist Tom Wolfe in a satirical article he wrote for New York magazine about a fundraising party hosted for the Black
Phew! I was worried that the smear campaign against Cardinal George Pell mounted by the pigs at the Vatican trough would persuade Pope Francis to water down Pell’s plan to impose proper accounting procedures on the Curia. But today Francis published the legal framework for the reform and – well, I can’t improve on the reporting
You almost have to admire Justin Forsyth’s brass neck. He is a former Gordon Brown spin chief earning a Prime Ministerial £138,000 for running Save the Children. Or, rather, transforming it into Save the Labour Party with various attack ads claiming that kids need to be rescued from wicked Conservative austerity. Here’s an example of its handiwork: You’d think
Nothing like a bit of Argie-bargie to get the Tory backbenchers going. Mr S has been passed a letter and booklet sent by the Argentine Embassy in London to all MPs concerning the ‘Malvinas’. According to the ambassador Alicia Castro: ‘The book provides and overview of the actions that we have been carrying out with regard
While researching Taking its Toll, a report written with Policy Exchange on the regressive impact of property crime, some troubling facts became clear. In the year to March 2014 there were an estimated 6.85 million victims of theft in England and Wales, representing 1 in 10 of the population. Yet a significant proportion of property
Economists have for some time spoken of a ‘great inversion’ of London, whereby property price hikes in inner London, often linked to gentrification, has made suburbia comparatively more affordable. These changes, marked in the five years since David Cameron became Prime Minister, could have a profound effect on how the general election result pans out
Why is Theresa May doggedly sticking to the Tory net migration target, even when it has failed so badly in this Parliament? Her Tory colleagues might be asking why she’s even talking about it when immigration is not one of the key campaign priorities for her party. It is supposed to be talking about housing
From ‘The New Naval Measures and the United States’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: Britain proposes to stop all German imports and exports by the general pressure of her naval strength, whereas the United States says that we ought to use this pressure only in accordance with what have hitherto been regarded as the laws
Given the Tories are the party of Macmillan, it seems quite right that they’ve picked housing as one of their six key election priorities. David Cameron gave a speech on it today, promising 200,000 ‘starter homes’ – properties sold to first-time buyers at a discount – by 2020. There have been some complaints today, notably
You know the Conservative campaign is well underway when there’s a new Saatchi poster about. Today, Conservative HQ has released a new campaign to remind the public that Labour pose a threat to Britain’s economic recovery. The message in the poster (above) warns voters ‘don’t let Labour wreck it’. I understand this poster was created by M&C
The murder of Boris Nemtsov, even more than previous assassinations of journalists and other figures deemed unhelpful to Vladimir Putin’s regime, feels like a moment of grim significance. It represents a watershed, dividing Putin’s past from his future. It is true, for sure, that Putin has rarely bothered to conceal his darker side. True, too,
Isis has a new bête noir: Twitter. Employees at the social media company have received death threats, as has Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. Why? Because the site has been blocking accounts linked to the group. In retaliation, Isis members posted an image on the website JustPaste.it which warned that Dorsey and co had ‘Become a target for the soldiers of
The Conservatives believe they have fixed their beleaguered campaign database, VoteSource, after increasing complaints from MPs. Coffee House understands that a number of MPs in marginal seats complained to party co-chair Lord Feldman after they started to tire both of finding that their data wasn’t being saved properly and of being told that everything was
It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves.
Has Ukip found a set of credible economic policies? In the latest Mini Election video, I discuss the party’s spring conference with Patrick O’Flynn, MEP for the East of England and Ukip’s economic spokesman. As the man responsible for producing a plan of spending and cuts for the party, how does he intend to ‘hold the Tories’ feet
The Ukip spring conference was somewhat overshadowed by a publicity stunt from a local theatre group in Margate, which saw dancers dressed as Nazis high-kick their way through Springtime for Hitler to publicise their production of The Producers. Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage’s party were none too thrilled by the manoeuvre given the racism allegations that continue to haunt the
It’s supposed to be the Tory housing week, with David Cameron setting out plans to double the number of discounted starter homes to 200,000. It’s an important, salient issue to make election promises on. But more salient is immigration, and somehow the Tories are having to talk about that again today. Today’s Times contains a plea
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: THE advance made during the week by our naval force in the Dardanelles has been most satisfactory. As we write our ships are engaged with the great group of forts at the Narrows, while in the Gulf of Saros, opposite the neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula,
One of the things that even its critics, such as myself, have to concede that the European Union has been good at is making clear what it has funded. By contrast, in this country there’s little to tell you that the taxpayer has paid for something. But this is changing. The government will tomorrow, as
Pope Francis, is, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper – a Swabian formerly responsible for ecumenism – neither a traditionalist nor a liberal – “both of which categories have become rather timeworn and hackneyed” – but rather a radical who wants to advance a revolution of forgiveness. Well, that’s what Christians are kind of for, even
The number of people sleeping on the streets has risen by 55 per cent in the last five years. New statistics show that London had 742 rough sleepers on the streets on an average night last autumn, which is about 200 more than the same period in 2013. Governments have tried various tactics to get
Was Nigel Farage ‘absent on the job’ this week, addressing a conference in America instead of focusing on the immigration figures and Ukip’s spring conference? He defended the trip on the Sunday Politics today, arguing that he recorded plenty of radio and TV interviews from Washington. ‘I did quite honestly as much media from Washington as I would have done had I
From ‘On Commas’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: I CAN picture the development of the misled reformer who introduced the comma into the languages of men. His laborious finger lost itself time after time among the elaborate pothooks of his generation; time after time he declared in a hissing voice that script was a fiend
Boris Nemtsov signed his own death warrant when gave an interview earlier this month to the Russian newspaper Sobesednik saying that he was afraid he was going to be killed on Vladimir Putin’s orders. Perhaps he thought he was safeguarding himself from the possibility of such an attack by talking about it openly. Perhaps he did
All the election forecast models agree, the next election result is going to be remarkably tight. On these models, neither Labour nor the Tories are going to come close to winning a majority. They would both be about 40 seats short. Now, events could intervene to change things. But, as I argue in the magazine
It was Samuel Pepys’s birthday this week and for the latest competition you were invited to imagine him let loose on the streets of 21st-century London and to provide a diary entry chronicling his impressions. Pepys’s candid and minutely observed diary entries hum with a seemingly inexhaustible lust for life and your attempts to capture