All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
From ‘The Running Fight in the North Sea’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: THE splendid success of the battle-cruisers under Admiral Beatty in the North Sea last Sunday means much more than that they sunk the German armoured cruiser ‘Blücher,’ as well as a light cruiser, and very seriously damaged two German battle-cruisers. It means
In the run-up to the Greek election, European figures were adamant that there wasn’t as much to worry about as people thought. They argued that Syriza wouldn’t come close to winning a majority and that it would have to do a coalition deal with Potami who would end up moderating its demands. This complacency was
While the behaviour of the Westminster mob at PMQs is often reminiscent of playground bickering, the women of Scotland are taking a more civilised approach as they prepare for First Minister’s Questions. Far from any hostilities between their opposing parties, Nicola Sturgeon has been joshing on Twitter with Ruth Davidson, Leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, and Kezia Dugdale, Deputy
In the last few years alcohol has become the leading cause of death in men under 50 years of age, and it will soon achieve a similar deadly status in women. Alcohol-induced liver deaths have quadrupled in the past 40 years whereas deaths from heart and lung disease have halved. The reasons for this are
The coalition helped bury an enduring and dangerous myth in a major report into the country’s chronic housing crisis released this week. The year-long probe rubbishes the idea councils are stopped from building new homes by Treasury ‘caps’ on their borrowing powers. As research published on Coffee House revealed last year, the idea caps hold them
After Mr S’s disclosure that a Tory MP plotted to knock over a BBC cameraman to cease filming for Inside the Commons, speculation is rife as to who the backbencher could be. Steerpike was curious to hear the show’s presenter Michael Cockerell deny that the culprit was Bill Wiggin. The Tory MP had very publicly lost his
Michael Cockerell’s new documentary series inside the House of Commons saw the reporter gain unprecedented access to parliament. However, while many MPs were keen to be involved, a group of Tory MPs plotted to knock over a BBC cameraman in order to stop them filming. The astonishing claim was made by Cockerell at a press screening today of
The Greens may be in the middle of a national ‘surge’, with more than 50,000 members, but in one part of the country, their brand isn’t particularly trendy. In Brighton, the Greens on the council aren’t the best advert for the party – something our leading article picks up on this week. Indeed, such are
Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, Roman Kent, who was 12 when he was sent there, wept as he implored the world not to allow anything like that to happen again. ‘How can one erase the sight of human skeletons – just skin and bones, but still alive?’ he said. ‘How can I
Who will benefit from Syriza’s victory in Greece? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Sebastian Borger discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the impending European revolt. How will David Cameron make political capital from the rise of the anti-austerity party? What are the challenges facing Angela Merkel? Will similar parties be
Isabel Oakeshott has gone to such lengths to get close to David Cameron for the biography she is helping Lord Ashcroft write that she has even been pictured following him on his jogs. Now David Cameron’s nemesis Ashcroft has given an insight into what readers can expect from the tome. Speaking at the Political Book
It’s been a tough few weeks for Chris Bryant since he claimed that ‘we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk’ in an interview with The Guardian. Privately educated Blunt didn’t take kindly to the comments and responded by calling Bryant a ‘classist gimp’ in an open letter. If that
John Bercow got more than he bargained for last night when he presented an award at Paddy Power’s Political Book Awards. Appearing on stage alongside Rory Bremner to giveaway the gong for ‘Polemic of the Year,’ the Speaker of the House of Commons was grilled by the impressionist on the rising cost of the Westminster gym upgrade. Bremner said, ‘Can I
From ‘What is Wrong With Germany?‘, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: If the inquiry is to be pushed to the ultimate point, what is wrong with the Germans is their dreadful, their slavish devotion to Logic— to the “Absolute” and to Abstractions. When Englishmen create an Abstraction they do not call upon all mankind to
With The Spectator and Coffee House you are already used to getting the very best gossip and news. Can I interest you in the perfect accompaniment?It is a new service called CapX. I’m its editor and we have been trialling the site since last summer. The new version, looking rather nice we hope, launched today.
Last week it was seven. This morning it stood at nine. By the end of PMQs it had climbed to 12. The statistic everyone is yawning about is the number of shimmies Ed Miliband has performed while failing to admit that he once vowed to ‘weaponise’ the NHS. The only source for Ed’s gangster talk,
Q: When is a meatball not a meatball? A: When it’s vegan. Nothing is sacred to the killjoys over at Peta, not even the honest Ikea meatball. Just about the only tolerable aspect of an afternoon spent at the Swedish furniture giant – the meatball –has come under attack from the left, with the introduction
David Cameron ran down the clock very effectively at PMQs. With only a few sessions left between now and the general election, Cameron blocked Miliband’s questions on the health service by demanding that the Labour leader apologise for apparently saying that he wanted to ‘weaponise’ the NHS in this election campaign. Despite Cameron now using
A cretin writing in this morning’s Telegraph doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘cretin’. Just about every writer writing about Benedict Cumberbatch in every paper yesterday failed to understand that Cumberbatch was not a racist because he had said ‘coloured’ rather than ‘person of colour’. Poor fool that he was, Cumberbatch had wanted to use his appearance
The government’s Work Programme, launched in 2011 to help long-term unemployed people into work, has been widely condemned in the media. It has been portrayed alternately as greedy, cruel or incompetent, and sometimes all three. Yet one of these providers, Ingeus, helped me. Many journalists, who have no experience of such places, have maligned this
Ian Liddell-Grainger has been branded unfit for purpose by local Tories. The Conservative MP is facing calls to be deselected as a Tory candidate for the general election, with Conservative councillors in West Somerset passing a vote of no confidence in him. The Tories on the council are cross because he’s allegedly made ‘gratuitously derogatory and
There’s a belter of a scoop in today’s Daily Mail. James Chapman, the paper’s political editor, reports that the Ministry of Defence is examining plans to move Trident from Scotland to Wales. I’m particularly confident that this story is correct because I had heard something very similar from Whitehall sources. There is understandable concern that a second independence
The papers are full of Blairite warnings to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham about the way Labour is campaigning on the NHS at present. Alan Milburn’s World at One interview gets a great deal of coverage, and just to twist the knife a bit further, the former Cabinet minister joins John Hutton to write in
If Labour is weaponising the NHS, maybe it needs to sharpen its tools. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham had a difficult and ill-tempered interview on Newsnight yesterday about what he actually thinks about private sector involvement in the NHS. When asked about the role he sees for the private sector under his reshaped health service,
From ‘Reprisals’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915 THERE has been a tendency among some newspapers, and perhaps still more among private persons, to demand that the murder of non-combatants on the East Coast by German ships of war and Zeppelins should be visited with reprisals. “Murder is murder,” they say in so many words, and
To London Zoo, where Mr S caught up with Sir David Attenborough at the launch of his new UKTV series Natural Curiosities. The 88-year-old broadcaster gave party goers pause for thought when he revealed what his least favourite animal was. ‘Rats. I don’t want to put you off your meal but when I was in India, I was by
Nicky Morgan has launched a rather strident defence of the government’s ‘British values’ agenda this evening, after fears that it is being used to punish schools unfairly. The Education Secretary recently announced that the Christian Durham Free School would close after Ofsted inspectors said teachers were failing to challenge ‘racist words and sexually derogative and
What do the British public want from their government after 2015? Well, unless things are really going to shift in British politics in the next few weeks, they still want the impossible: a Labour majority government led by David Cameron. According to a poll from ComRes/ITV News out this evening, 55 per cent said their favoured
Senior Tories yesterday protested the removal of Theresa May’s special advisers from the candidates’ list, Coffee House understands. There had been talk of mounting a ‘rescue mission’ to reinstate Nick Timothy and Stephen Parkinson after they were struck off the list before Christmas, but at a board meeting of the Conservative party yesterday, MPs representing
The V&A has recently decided to remove an historic image of the Prophet Mohammed from its website. The image remains in the collection and will be made available to scholars and researchers by appointment. I am not sure it is a very uplifting example, this censorship of the past, but they are certainly not alone in doing this. Indeed over the
While Cabinet members grumble about the way the government’s plain packaging announcement was snuck out last week, those Tories opposed to the measure have been counting up the number of colleagues who will vote against it.I understand that they are expecting at least 80 Tory MPs to reject the introduction of plain packaging in the
The Duke of York attended the World Economic Forum last week in what was his first public appearance since he was accused of abusing an under-age ‘sex slave’. While Prince Andrew chose to speak out in Davos to deny the allegations, members of his family appear to be lost for words. Mike Tindall, who is married to Prince
The Commons is pretty quiet at the moment, draining of energy earlier and earlier in the week as MPs head out to their constituencies. So quiet, in fact, that Labour seems to have given up on using departmental question times as a forum for making government ministers uncomfortable or piling any political pressure on their
Another day, another hack. This morning, Facebook and Instagram went dark. Facebook has blamed a technical glitch; ‘Lizard Squad’ celebrated another successful attack: Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015 Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for defacing the website of Malaysia Airlines. One of the more active of many mysterious