All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Why are the Conservatives so serene after losing the Clacton by-election and seeing their vote collapse in Heywood and Middleton? It is not that the party has finally decided endless fighting is no longer a good idea, but that it is holding its breath for the Rochester and Strood by-election. If Mark Reckless, the second
Talking to people in Clacton-on-Sea this week, there was a sense that, as much as they thought there were too many people in Britain, they felt politicians had it too easy. Over and over again people told me that MPs in Westminster didn’t understand working people. Politics is becoming less about policy and more about empathy; voters
The United States faces a very difficult task in Syria. It is trying to use air raids to contain and weaken ISIl. But, at the same time, it is trying to prevent the Assad regime from turning this intervention to its advantage. However, as the Washington Post reports today, the Assad regime have taken advantage
Jonathan Powell is a British diplomat who served as Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1997 to 2007. During this period, he was also Britain’s chief negotiator for Northern Ireland. These days, Powell runs a charity called Inter Mediate, which works as a go-between among terrorist organizations and governments around the globe. David Cameron appointed
Since the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez earlier this year, I have been meaning to set a comp with a magical realist twist and I finally got around to it with this latest challenge — to take something mundane (a parish council meeting or the weather forecast, for example) and filter it through the lens
From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: AN old explanation of the phrase “at loggerheads”—whether true or not we do not attempt to say—runs as follows: When two armies met in what we should now call entrenched positions, those positions were spoken of as leaguers. The leaguers were pushed on, from both sides just as the
The Tory whips are busy today, but not necessarily with fallout from the Clacton by-election. They have sent a message round to MPs saying the following: ‘There is a possibility that there will be a business statement on Monday which will also affect whipping next week.’ Some MPs have read this as a suggestion that
Al Gore is an unlikely source of inspiration for Ukip – in fact the party once pledged to ban the former Vice President’s controversial climate change documentary from schools, calling it dangerous global warming ‘propaganda’. But might they have more in common than either of them would care to admit? During the count for the
It turns out the house really does always win. The BBC reports: ‘Professional poker player Phil Ivey has lost a High Court battle against the owners of a London casino over his £7.7m winnings. Crockfords casino in Mayfair accused Phil Ivey of cheating by using the “edge-sorting technique” in card game punto banco. Edge-sorting involves
listen to ‘Podcast: Ukip’s Clacton victory’ on audioBoom Labour are doing their absolute best to put a positive spin on their result in the Heywood and Middleton by-election, despite coming within a whisker of losing their once-safe seat to Ukip. With Ed Miliband duty-bound to congratulate his new MP Liz McInnes in person, a hurried
How are the two parties reacting to their bruising night in the two by-elections? David Cameron – after telling us, helpfully, that ‘there were two by-elections last night’ – went on to say repeatedly that the results spoke to a ‘wider truth’, that if you vote Ukip, you’re in danger of getting a government led by Ed
The successful transplantation of a uterus represents the last major surgical goal in the field of reproductive gynaecology. This feat has recently been achieved by a team at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The 36-year-old patient was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome. The condition occurs in one out of every 4,000
Spare a thought for the authors in the running for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: the announcement of its shortlist yesterday was somewhat overshadowed by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the nation’s literati stampeding as one to frantically Google ‘Patrick Mondiano novelist’. The clash is rather a shame, as this
Chest x-rays have been around for 100 years and are still widely used in health care. According to the government’s ongoing National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative (NAEDI) a chest X-ray might be suggested for individuals with possible symptoms of lung cancer. The NAEDI website also states: `This is a standard procedure and nothing to
Ukip has arrived at Westminster. Douglas Carswell held his Clacton seat after defecting from the Conservatives, and in Heywood and Middleton Ukip came just 617 votes short of victory. Which was the more startling result, and what does it all mean for the parties’ chances at the general election? Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss in
Last night’s by-election results were bad for both the main Westminster parties. The Tories did not manage to make significant inroads into Douglas Carswell’s majority, and their vote collapsed in Heywood. Their main saving grace is that the Rochester by-election has united the party in fury and is a fight they think they can win.
listen to ‘Podcast: Ukip’s Clacton victory’ on audioBoom
Ukip has won its first by-election: Douglas Carswell is the party’s first elected MP. In a stunning night for the party, it also ran Labour mighty close in Heywood and Middleton—coming in just 617 votes behind. listen to ‘Douglas Carswell’s Clacton victory speech’ on audioBoom
Heywood and Middleton is a far worse result for Labour than for the Tories: we can agree on that, surely. Clacton is grim for Dave, of course, but I’m interested in what happens in the rotten Labour heartlands. Here’s something else for Ed Miliband to worry about: the SNP. Loathsome party, humiliated last month, but so
Moazzam Begg’s lawyer once said that the former Guantanamo Bay detainee was ‘an extremist all right – he believes passionately in charity and justice for all.’ Many seemed to agree. Despite Begg signing a confession at Guantanamo admitting his links to al-Qaeda and terrorism-related activity (which he says was coerced), Amnesty International promoted the terror
From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: As we go on in life we do, as a rule, learn our place more or less truly, and we find it is not the one we should have chosen. It may not be lower, but it is almost certainly different from what we expected. As we look over
2.50am Douglas Carswell’s victory speech, after winning a 12,404 majority, was not triumphalist: there was no tub-thumping. Instead, he said that Ukip must be the party of 1st and 2nd generation Britons, that its passion must be tempered by compassion and argued that the era of dominant cartel was coming to an end in everything
Calm down, dears: the strange coughing noise that was heard across Britain at around 8.30 yesterday morning was not the last gasp of an exhausted Mother Earth, nor was it the harbinger of a country-wide Ebola outbreak. No, it was simply the sound of nation’s middle-aged, middle-class men choking on their cornflakes while listening to
When Norman Lamb warned his fellow Liberal Democrats against doing a deal with Labour, there was no uproar at the party conference. Instead, the private assessment was that Lamb was right that a coalition with Labour would be far more problematic—and far less preferable—to a second one with the Conservatives. There are three reasons advanced
Douglas Carswell is not like normal politicians; he’s authentic, genuine and in touch with real people. Or so the spin goes. So what was today’s by-election-day stunt at a polling station in Clacton all about? Emerging with his thumbs up, Ukip’s soon-to-be-MP for Clacton looked every inch the candidate, taking part in the usual election-day
Winter is coming. You can tell because the days are drawing in, the light has that autumnal greyness, and the first bloody advent calendars are in the shops. Also, those of us who are old, pregnant or still in nappies are reminded reminded to take our flu jabs. The Telegraph, among other outlets, is reporting
I see that London is now the ‘childbirth capital of Europe’, with the highest birth-rate on the entire continent. London, and the UK generally, previously enjoyed very low birth-rates, among the lowest in Western Europe (together with the other law-abiding, sexually restrained, protestant people of the North West). The cause of this change is, of
Consuming certain foods and drinks may help reduce one of the main risk factors for heart attack and stroke. Who knows, you could find you don’t need medication after all – but let your doctor be the judge of that. 1. Gorge on guacamole. Avocados are high in potassium, which lowers blood pressure. Most of
In this week’s issue, Fraser Nelson and Nick Cohen examine how police are using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to run wild in the public’s mobile phone records. Like many curtailments of British liberties, this started off in the name of fighting terrorism. It has now emerged that police forces used these anti-terror powers
Tonight Clacton is set to return the first elected Ukip MP to the House of Commons. The Conservatives have already tried to factor in Douglas Carswell’s defection as something they can cope with – and this has been made quite a lot easier by the tribal anger that Mark Reckless provoked when he announced he
From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: IT would be a base act to try to bribe or to threaten a neutral Power like Italy into joining the Allies. The notion of taking up the attitude that she may find herself in the wrong box when the peace is made is one which must be utterly
The Liberal Democrats might be in the single digits in the polls, but they were distinctly chipper this week. There’s one simple explanation for this, the political landscape gives them hope that there will be another hung parliament and they will be in government again after 2015. But I think there is another factor behind
There is something depressing about the fact that it has taken a sick Spanish nurse to put Ebola back on the front pages. Since the summer, some 3,400 West Africans have died, but interest in the story here had waned. So long as the disease did not make the nine-mile leap across the Straits of
Nick Clegg delivered an aggressive speech this morning. But will it be enough to keep the Liberal Democrats in government? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss it in this View from 22 podcast special. James’s write-up is here, and Isabel’s is here. listen to ‘Podcast: Nick Clegg’s speech’ on audioBoom