All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Of all the people who might come forward to attack the memory of the late, lamented Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Ian McKellen – a CBE and Companion of Honour, no less – would not be high on the list. Yet in a candid interview that he has given to the Times, McKellen has labelled the
Another day, another drama. This time Ed Miliband is in the firing line after his opposite number took aim at him in parliament on Thursday. Shadow net zero secretary Claire Coutinho pulled no punches as she attacked Labour’s Energy Secretary over his government’s controversial pensioner palaver, Sir Keir Starmer’s much-lauded GB Energy proposal and exactly
The sounds of protracted artillery battles boom and echo over the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk with a nerve-wracking consistency. From morning until night, the Ukrainians and Russians fire endlessly upon one another from the suburbs. Billboards with a simple message, ‘Evacuate’, daubed in giant red lettering line most of the major routes through the city.
There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a
In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents
The last two and a half years have seen a dramatic revival in trade union militancy, with working days lost through strikes reaching their highest level for more than thirty years. The arrival of a Labour government has already seen markedly more generous settlements than the Conservatives offered – and the new administration has committed
Over to the Mayor of London and his minions. While the Prime Minister has been busy giving pay rises to train drivers, it seems London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan continues to employ Amy Lamé as his night czar on, er, £132,846 per annum – after already receiving, as Mr S revealed, a 40 per cent pay
Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to the Commons – which was presented today and will have its first substantive debate at second reading later in the autumn – is simple: it essentially ends the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords, tying off what some will see as a
Back to Whitehall, where the row over civil service appointments continues to gather pace. It transpires that the Conservatives have called for a watchdog inquiry into recent perks awarded to Labour donors – after one was offered a civil service job and another received a pass to No. 10. It certainly doesn’t seem like this
Michel Barnier is the new prime minister of France. Best known in Britain as the EU’s chief negotiator during the Brexit negotiations, the 73-year-old is the oldest premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and he was unveiled sixty days after the parliamentary elections that threw the Republic into chaos. Le Pen appears satisfied
To the Lords, where this afternoon an urgent question was granted on the subject of hereditary peers. It follows today’s news that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government will remove the remaining 92 seats in the second chamber reserved for the hereditary position in 18 months, meaning these peers will be unable to both sit and
Are you ready for SDS40? You might need to be if you’re unlucky enough to live in a high crime area. This is the anodyne descriptor for the government’s emergency release of an estimated 5,000 offenders this month and next, having served only 40 per cent of their sentence in prison custody. This is the
Japanese dancer Junko Hagiwara has become the first non-Spaniard to win one of Spain’s most prestigious flamenco competitions. Yet when Hagiwara went on stage to collect her prize, in La Union in the southeastern region of Murcia, not everyone welcomed her victory. As well as applause, there were whistles and boos from the audience. The Telegraph
All is not well in Holyrood. The SNP announced its programme for government on Wednesday – but it hasn’t left many impressed. And now it transpires that the governing party is set to face further problems in passing its budget, as it continues to fail to work with its political opponents. Not like the Nats
Only hours after twelve migrants drowned attempting to reach England from France another group set out. This time they were intercepted by police before their small boat could be launched close to Dunkirk. Two alleged smugglers were arrested and three policemen were injured as they came under attack from a mob of around 100 angry
Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is said to be planning on watering down the right-to-buy scheme which enables council tenants to purchase their homes from local authorities at a significantly reduced price. The policy, famously introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, has helped many thousands of families become home-owners, giving them greater security and a stake
Barack Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope. The Kamala Harris story of 2024 could be called The Audacity of Desperation. Her brief candidacy has been an awesome display of chutzpah. With just weeks to go before the election, a panicked Democratic party pushed aside their failing Commander-in-Chief and replaced him with Harris, the distinctly unpopular vice-president. She
Humiliation really does concentrate the political mind, doesn’t it? Over the years when the SNP dominated the Scottish parliamentary chamber, ministers spent little time reaching across party lines. Indeed, by the time Nicola Sturgeon was first minister in 2014, for every SNP MSP missing the point in Holyrood, there was another pointing and jeering at
When Sir Keir Starmer faced off against Rishi Sunak at the despatch box today, in the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the parliamentary recess, he seemed to be rather unsure what his role was. Over the course of their exchanges, the ostensible leader of the country referred to his opposite number not once, not twice,
Power hasn’t altered Sir Keir Starmer. His frosty and unamused demeanour remains. No hint of warmth or joy has penetrated his defensive outer rind. He still looks like a mourner-for-hire at an oligarch’s funeral. Today at PMQs he was faced by a quick-witted and forceful Rishi Sunak who clearly relishes the role of battering ram.
Priti Patel is out of the race to be the next Tory leader. In the first knockout round of the contest, the former Home Secretary received the lowest number of votes at 14, behind Mel Stride who was in fifth place with 16 votes. It is Robert Jenrick who has the most to celebrate –
Today’s long-awaited publication of the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry provides a forensic account of the ‘root causes’ of the tragedy that led to the loss of 72 lives. More than seven years since those awful early morning hours of 14 June 2017, Sir Martin Moore Bick’s 1,694 page report represents another traumatic
To Scotland, where the SNP’s newest health secretary has found himself in a rather large, Oasis-sized mess. At the weekend, Neil Gray was called out by the Sunday Mail for taking his eye off his day job and attempting to buy tickets to see the newly-reformed band during a conference event on Alzheimer’s disease. Mr
Keir Starmer made a couple of verbal slips at Prime Minister’s Questions. Both were quite telling. The first was that he repeatedly referred to Rishi Sunak as the ‘Prime Minister’. An easy mistake to make, perhaps, when both are still getting used to the job swap they performed after the election. But the reason it
Bitter austerity is biting in Argentina as the new president enacts the brutal cuts he promised in a bid to reign in one of the world’s worst inflation rates. Entire government departments – including the Culture Ministry – have been canned and consumer spending has slumped across the board as Argentines find their stacks of
The commute is often unreliable, expensive and crowded. It is easy enough to understand why so many of London’s 5 million strong workforce are so reluctant to go back to the office. There is a catch, however. Working from home is costing the British economy a huge amount of lost output. In reality, the UK
There are very few people who emerge from the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report with much credit today. Certainly very few who had a formal responsibility to ensure that those living in Grenfell Tower were safe. The local community stepped up in the aftermath of the disaster, but even then the institutions set up to ensure
Who will be the next prime minister of France? Almost two months after the centre lost its majority in the National Assembly, the potential candidates range from the improbable to the ludicrous. The latest semi-crazed idea is that Emmanuel Macron should call on Ségolene Royal, the former wife of François Hollande, a socialist party machine
They say old habits die hard, and Sir Keir Starmer is finding that out for himself today. It’s the first PMQs back after recess and it seems as though some in the Commons are rather struggling to adjust to the change of guard. Mr S notes that the Labour leader has today referred to his