All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country as a whole. It was, however, a very close-run thing, and the affair is still highly worrying. A Northern Ireland Assembly law that came into effect last
The parties are gearing up for their first full week of campaigning since parliament was dissolved on Thursday. This means one-time MPs are now just candidates, and the spending limits are on. Both parties revealed their battle buses over the weekend – Labour’s is emblazoned with ‘Change’ while the Tories have gone for a three-point
More than 30 years after the Berlin Wall came down, leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s long-time ruling party, still refer to each other as ‘comrade’. Unless, that is, you’re seen as a problem. ‘Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa will be here,’ ANC secretary general Fikile Mbabula told journalists on Sunday morning as he
We have different approaches to tidying up, my wife and I. It bothers her very much that the house we share with three chaotic children is so untidy. Over the years unsightly, useless, out-of-date items accumulate in every room: incomplete jigsaws, dried-out paints, barely-played boardgames, broken furniture, too-small and obscurely stained clothes, collections of shells
The Tories have continued their habit of making a big election pledge at 10:30 p.m every weekend. Last time, it was the reintroduction of national service; this week it is their plans to overhaul the Equality Act. Yes, that’s right, after 14 years in government, the Conservatives have finally decided that it might be worth
Oh dear. It seems that Diane Abbott has outmanoeuvred Keir Starmer once again. Week one of Labour’s much-vaunted election campaign has been overshadowed by the row over the status of the Hackney North MP. Having lost the Labour whip in April 2023 for her ill-judged Observer letter, Abbott’s status was still unresolved when the campaign
Election day on 29 May was a tumultuous, wonderful day for South Africa. 30 years of corruption and ruin under the sole rule of the African National Congress (ANC) party came to an end. The ANC, which won 63 per cent of the vote in the first democratic election in 1994, and 70 per cent
One of the country’s most cherished footballers, and one of its most irritating right-on social media commentators, Gary Lineker, has been at it again. In a post on X on Friday night the former Barcelona striker declared his support for their arch-rivals Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Why? Because, citing an account that
In 2017, the Polish government set out to build one of the largest airports in Europe on the outskirts of Warsaw. The project, known as the Central Communication Port, or CPK, was meant to combine a new international airport with a high speed railway network, connecting the Polish capital and the country’s peripheral regions. With
Questions over whether Diane Abbott had been banned from standing as a Labour candidate were a distraction for Keir Starmer’s campaign this week, eventually ending with Starmer confirming that Abbott was ‘free to go forward’ for Labour. Some in the party are unhappy with Starmer welcoming Tory defectors while suppressing left-wing candidates such as Lloyd
It seems barely five minutes ago that Mr S was writing up the last exchange between Camilla Tominey and a Labour frontbencher on their plans to put VAT on independent school fees. Back in January, it was Bridget Phillipson, the Shadow Education Secretary, who scored an ‘F’ for her failure to answer Tominey’s questions. Today
Standard & Poor’s downgrading of France’s credit rating on Friday is a hammer blow to President Macron’s reputation. The ratings agency has reduced France from AA to AA-, putting it on a par with the Czech Republic and Estonia and one notch below the UK. It is the first time S&P has downgraded France’s debt
To turn Keir Starmer, of all people, into someone who can credibly promise to bring immigration down is an act of perverse genius by the Tory party that is unparalleled in the modern political era. Presented with an open goal, the Labour leader has today stuck the ball in the net by telling readers of
The Diane Abbott saga rumbles on. After questions over whether the former shadow home secretary would be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in the election dominated the news agenda this week, Keir Starmer sought to end the media circus on Friday by declaring that the Corbyn ally was ‘free to go forward as
In his first speech of this election campaign, Keir Starmer made what is likely to become an extremely familiar claim. Focusing on the concerns of those who abandoned Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019 he argued that voters could trust him with the economy as well as Britain’s borders and security ‘because
Franz Kafka is one of a handful of writers whose names have become an adjective. First coined in the 1940s, the ‘Kafkaesque’ was originally used as a byword for state-sponsored terror, whether fascist or Soviet, but since then its scope has vastly expanded. Today’s uses range from the more trivial frustrations of daily life to
Indiana When Joe Biden directed a review into the classification of cannabis two years ago, no one – not the stoners nor the industry – expected a volte face from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the agency with the last word on the drug’s status. It has, after all, rejected countless attempts in the past.
‘There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine’. This is a quote from the novel Butter by Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, which was published in translation last month to great acclaim. It’s billed as ‘a novel of food and murder’, inspired by the true story of a gourmet chef/serial killer and the
In spite of his conviction for falsifying business records, Donald Trump is still expected by many to make a remarkable political comeback in November’s US election. Could we see an equally remarkable comeback this side of the Atlantic, too, with Liz Truss returning to the stand for the leadership of the Conservative party? It’s possible
A red dawn had just broken when Stephanie Sathege joined the queue to vote at her local polling station in the Johannesburg township of Alexander on Wednesday. The voting booths hadn’t yet opened, but she and dozens of other people were enthusiastic enough to be there ahead of time. A 62-old black South African, this
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The news that Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies meant that the Labour leader faced questions about the former president on Friday morning, rather than the Diane Abbott selection storm. On his visit to Scotland, Starmer told the BBC that a Labour government would be willing to work with ‘whoever’ was elected in
Threats to freedom of speech in Britain today typically stem from a combination of two ways of thinking. First, the kindly authoritarian view that it should be the job of the state to protect its citizens from ‘harmful’ speech – and to censor and punish those who cause offence. And second, woke ideology, which means
Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement
When I was a kid in the music business, I became aware of a funny phenomenon whereby visiting American bands would suss out which British punk groups were good and which were bad – and then hire a bad one as their support band, with the ignoble purpose of making the headline act look better
17 October 2019 will forever be etched in the memory of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico, as Black Thursday. That afternoon, two convoys of soldiers knocked on the door of a safehouse hiding Ovidio Guzmán López, son of drug baron ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and scion of the Sinaloa Cartel, to execute an arrest
The Prime Minister of France has warned his people that any form of Frexit would leave them weeping into their pastis. ‘Don’t be like the British who cried after Brexit,’ said Gabriel Attal, in a radio interview on Thursday. ‘A large majority of British people regret Brexit and sometimes regret not turning out to vote,
Another day brings another devastating poll for the Tories. The first MRP polling of the election campaign is out and it makes for grim reading for Rishi Sunak. A 10,000-strong survey by Electoral Calculus for the Daily Mail suggests that the Conservative party could receive just 66 seats – its worst result in history –
If you put the Diane Abbott row to one side, it has been a very successful week for the clique who control Labour’s candidate selections. Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an election eight days ago means that the National Executive Committee can now impose who they want on constituencies across the country. More than 100
This week, the Edinburgh Book Festival has joined the Hay Literary Festival in abandoning its sponsorship deal with the investment group Baillie Gifford, due to the firm’s investments in the oil industry and its supposed links to the war in Gaza. The decision to ditch Baillie Gifford comes after a campaign by Fossil Free Books, whose leading
They say a week is a long time in politics but in the Labour party just three days is enough. On Tuesday evening, the Times reported Labour sources saying Diane Abbott would be blocked from standing as a Labour MP at the election. An outcry followed from Abbott who was backed by the Labour left,
David Cameron publicly said it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to use British weapons to strike targets on Russian territory earlier this month. But nothing has happened since then: no Storm Shadow missiles have flown over the Ukraine-Russia border. Last night, Volodymyr Zelensky explained why: the UK had not given ‘100 per cent
Keir Starmer really is a lucky general. The news that Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies helped ensure that the Labour leader faced questions this morning about the former president, rather than the Diane Abbott selection storm. On his visit to Scotland, Starmer told the BBC that a Labour government would be willing
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Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. The Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver joins Freddy Gray to respond to the news. Was it a fair trial? What could it mean for the 2024 presidential election? And what are the wider implications for American democracy? Produced by Megan McElroy, Oscar Edmondson and Patrick