All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Two party election policies, two failures to think things through. Or, at least, to engage with realities. First, Labour announces a cut in university tuition fees to a maximum of £6,000. Why? The sum itself isn’t important. For a potential student, £6,000 and £9,000 – or £18,000 and £27,000 – are much of a muchness.
This week Sol Campbell was named as a bookies’ favourite to be the next Tory candidate for Kensington after Sir Malcolm Rifkind stepped down following a cash for access scandal. While Rifkind’s resignation has sparked a debate over whether MPs should be allowed to have second jobs, the former Arsenal footballer thinks there is a simple solution. When
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
Ever since Cardinal George Pell was appointed by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican’s finances, I knew a hit job was coming; and I was doubly certain when he spoke up for orthodox cardinals when their views were being trashed by the liberal organisers of the chaotic ‘Carry On Synod’ on the Family. The Sydney Morning
From ‘Pages of War’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: With its darkened lights and sparse traffic, its khaki-dotted clubs and restaurants working at half-pressure, its transformed shop-windows, where everything is “for the front,” London was yet never so absolutely, so intimately itself. All the distilled essence of the Empire is concentrated here under these foggy
The historian Tom Holland tweeted this morning: ‘What #ISIS are doing to the people & culture of #Assyria is worthy of the Nazis. None of us can say we didn’t know.’ What #ISIS are doing to the people & culture of #Assyria is worthy of the Nazis. None of us can say we didn’t know:
Today has been ‘Nigel Farage Day’ in Margate. Although many of the party’s other prominent characters addressed its spring conference, it was the leader who entirely stole the day with a speech lapped up by the crowd. If there was ever any doubt that Ukip is built around the personality of Farage, today proved it.
Nigel Farage’s speech to the Ukip conference was fine. Not a bad speech, but not his best speech, either. It was just fine. Activists seemed happy, ecstatic, even when he came on, and were joyful chanting when he left the stage too. But Farage clearly wanted to answer a number of questions about his own
While the Tories scrabble around for a candidate for the 2016 London Mayoral election, Mr S hears one millionaire is already eyeballing the 2020 race. Barely an edition of the Evening Standard fails to feature either an interview by (or with) their proprietor Evgeny Lebedev. His face is regularly found across the pages of both his publications the Standard and the
Nigel Farage has now arrived at the Ukip conference. He strode through the bar area, followed by an entourage larger than the one that accompanies the Prime Minister. Delegates clapped as he passed them. He will be speaking shortly, and it does feel as though he’s got rather a task. The mood of the conference
Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education, has announced the closure of the Durham Free School, following scandalously one-sided Ofsted reporting about the school. Closure would lead to less choice for parents in disadvantaged ex-mining villages here in the north-east. Local Labour MP, Mrs Blackman-Woods, says that there are surplus places available, so no free schools
You might think that Ukip’s immigration spokesman Steven Woolfe had the easiest portfolio in the party. After all, as the ComRes/ITV poll showed yesterday, Ukip is already the most trusted party on immigration. It doesn’t sound like much hard work, does it? But Woolfe sees his job as being to articulate what the party doesn’t
Is Nigel Farage having any more luck in South Thanet? According to a new poll from Survation on the eve of Ukip’s spring conference, Farage has pulled ahead of the Tories and Labour in his target constituency. The poll has Ukip on 39 per cent, Labour on 28 per cent and the Conservatives on 27, giving Farage
I’ve just seen a poster from the NASUWT teaching union at a stall they have taken at this year’s Welsh Tory conference in Cardiff (where I am today). It suggests that the poor have it easier getting to university in Wales than in England because of the wicked ‘Westminster Coalition Government.’ This is an utterly dishonest poster. The poor, in
Nigel Farage’s gallivanting around in America has resulted in a casualty. Mr Steerpike hears that Raheem Kassam, senior adviser to Farage, missed the flight back home last night. Farage’s right-hand man therefore won’t make it back in time for the leader’s big speech in Margate this afternoon. As the founding editor of Brietbart London, Kassam was key in arranging the
The Ukip spring conference is underway in Margate today, with the party starting the two days of speeches and fringes with a pledge that it will match the Tory plan to eliminate the deficit by 2017/18. Nigel Farage has said that this support is conditional on the Tories keeping their promises, but it will be
Ukip has put all the journalists in a special balcony above the main auditorium at its spring conference. It’s quite thoughtful of the party, as the gallery is right next to the press room where hacks can file, but it also means that they’re a little apart from the delegates. Sitting on the floor of
As the devoted Ukip followers arrive at this weekend’s party spring conference in Margate, they can now show their support in a variety of ways. Rather than a basic rosette, Ukip HQ are also selling branded jewellery. Surely the perfect gift for that special lady in your life?
So, ‘Jihadi John’ is Mohammed Emwazi, a young Kuwaiti immigrant from Queen’s Park in north-west London, another first-rate product of the British education system. Queen’s Park is one of those very mixed areas of London; the expensive Victorian properties are filled with people who 10 years ago might have lived in Notting Hill and 10 years before
Nigel Farage is becoming a jet setter. Yesterday evening, he addressed the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) of Republicans in Maryland. Later today, he is delivering the final speech at Ukip’s spring conference in Margate. It’s a tough life, but why did he bother going 3,000 miles for a 20 minute speech? His friendly style appeared
It’s probably not the news everyone wanted to hear, but Mr S feels a duty to let readers know that Alastair Campbell is considering a return to politics. Furthermore, this could involve the former Labour spinner standing as an MP. Speaking to India Knight for the April issue of Red magazine, he comments that a friend recently
For over 30 years, dietary fat has been seen as a major cause of heart attacks, strokes and cancer. This has been a health catastrophe. Ancel Keys’s ‘Seven Countries’ study, first published in 1970, brought about the widespread idea that we should all eat a low-fat, high-carb diet for optimal health. Had Keys used the
Last weekend I used the Northern Line at Tottenham Court Road station for the first time since it reopened. Oxford Street is not my favourite place in London but perversely for a tube station that was cramped, overcrowded and cavernously deep, Tottenham Court Road used to lift my spirits. That was wholly due to the wonderful
Poor Mohammed Emwazi. One day he’s your average ‘beautiful’ young man, nose buried in his computer studies books, looking for a job and looking for love. The next he’s being harassed by the security services, so intensely that — BOOM — he weeps and wails his way to the deserts of Syria where he changes
Islamic State allows its adherents to be both cultists and psychopaths: an L. Ron Hubbard and a Fred West rolled into one. The reasons why young men want to travel across the world to fight its wars and lend a hand to the murder of its victims ought to be brutally and boringly obvious. Psychopaths
So the identity of ‘Jihadi John’ appears to have come out. And surprise surprise he is a man associated with the group Cage (formerly Cage Prisoners). The leaders of this group – Asim Qureshi and Cerie Bullivant – have been filling the airwaves ever since the naming of their friend Mohammed Emwazi. Qureshi even appeared
From a letter to the Editor, ‘The Channel Tunnel’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: [To the Editor of The “Spectator’] SIR,—Many of us must be wondering what the promoters of the Channel Tunnel enterprise think about the matter now. To those of us who are of the “Island” school it has always appeared that there
Oh dear. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is not going to be pleased. Natalie Rowe, the former dominatrix who enjoyed a friendship with George Osborne in the early nineties, is planning a book to follow her autobiography. Further still, judging by the fact she is toying with the idea of calling it ‘Budge it’ –
Which party does the public trust the most to control immigration? ComRes/ITV News have released a new poll revealing it’s not the Conservatives — unsurprisingly given today’s figures. 36 per cent trust Ukip the most to tackle immigration, compared to 19 per cent for the Tories: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/isCLx/index.html”] The poll also reveals that over half of the public
There are still some unhappy mutterings about the possibility that the Tories won’t commit to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence in the next Strategic Defence and Security Review. Treasury sources have been pouring cold water on the suggestion that George Osborne has told David Cameron that spending will fall below that target,
Are the SNP poised to become Westminster’s kingmakers? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Alex Massie discusses this week’s cover feature on the role the Scottish nationalists could play after the next general election. If the SNP wipe out Labour north of the border, will questions about the future of the union be back
The three British girls who packed their bags and took a flight to Turkey have apparently crossed the border into Syria. Their intention seems to be to join the Islamic State and it looks like they may have succeeded. It emerged over the weekend that there had been contact between one of the girls and Aqsa Mahmood, a Scottish
Half a million people. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, half a million here, half a million there, why, soon you’re talking a million, which is even more of a nice round figure. But that’s the statistic we should be talking about when it comes to the migration stats today from the Office
Have you heard of galanthomania? It’s an affliction that can rob people of their money – and, it seems, their senses. They’re so desperate to get hold of some small white stuff that they’ll part with hundreds of pounds at a time – or even resort to theft. Galanthomaniacs are people who collect snowdrops, often