All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It’s been a busy time for police investigations across the country and Manchester is no exception. As the curious case of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs trundles on, another development has now come to light. It turns out that the Labour MP’s eldest son from a previous relationship was registered to live at a different address
The most damning bit of the lurid Mark Menzies case is that the Conservatives had been aware of the allegations for three months before they story broke this week – but only stripped him of the whip yesterday. It’s not a particular surprise, though: for years it has been clear that the whips office holds
There is what can only be described as a mood of despair in SNP circles following the news that the former party chief executive Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, has been re-arrested and charged with ’embezzlement of funds from the Scottish National party’. It is the latest shocking twist in the long-running investigation into
Alongside the Prime Minister’s speech on welfare today, the Department for Work and Pensions quietly released updated forecasts. The numbers are stark: DWP expects there to be 3.96 million working-age claimants by 2028-29, a rise from 2.8 million in 2023-24. Meanwhile the number of working-age people receiving disability benefits is forecast to rise to 1.16
Few would disagree with Ben Wallace’s description of Iran as a ‘bully’. The former defence secretary made his comments earlier this week after Iran’s missile attack on Israel. ‘The only option when Iran and Russia hit, I have concluded, is to hit back twice as hard and not stop until they get the message,’ wrote
Israel conducted missile strikes against Iran on Thursday night, as confirmed by a senior American military official to NPR. Explosions in Iraq and Syria have also been reported. Despite Joe Biden’s warning, Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have decided not to ‘take the win’ following an Iranian retaliatory attack on Saturday night in which more than 300 drones
The decision by Glasgow’s Sandyford gender clinic to pause the prescription of puberty blockers to children is good news for the children of Scotland. In due course, a public inquiry is needed into how doctors ever got involved in what may possibly be one of the greatest medical scandals of all time. For now, however,
The Scottish nationalists are no stranger to hypocrisy, as their latest U-turn shows. For on Thursday afternoon the Yousaf regime — the only government in the UK which boasts Green politicians — announced that it was, er, ditching its flagship green commitments. Yes, that’s right, amid a litany of stories about SNP sleaze, the government
The news that German police have arrested two alleged Russian spies in Bavaria has understandably raised some alarm bells in Berlin. The men stand accused of targeting military infrastructure, aiming to undermine German support for Ukraine; such acute security threats are always bad news. But the response so far has been more defiant than divided.
As a conservative non-smoker who in his youth was a libertarian twenty-a-day man, I can see both sides of the argument over the government’s recent anti-smoking legislation. Sure, cigarettes can be delicious, and it’s entirely up to the adult individual, not the state, whether he or she decides to light up. But as I finally
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Freddy speaks to the diplomat and author Dennis B Ross, who worked under presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton. He was a special advisor on the Persian Gulf. They discuss the escalation of tensions in the Middle East and the flack that Joe Biden has come under for his response. Can the US
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Sunak’s top team is considering another ban: smartphones for teens. A consultation is due to begin this month that will question whether children need a smartphone, and if social media should require age verification. Could the debate bring the party together? Also, there’s another suspension in Westminster. Mark Menzies has been suspended after claims he
Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the SNP, has tonight been charged with embezzling money from his party. Murrell, the husband of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, was taken into police custody earlier today for a second time in connection with Operation Branchform, the probe into SNP funds. Murrell was arrested at 9 a.m. today,
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s crusade to defend Italian excellence from the destructive side of globalisation has won a small but symbolic victory. Global car colossus Stellantis, which owns Alfa Romeo, has bowed to pressure from Italy’s right-wing government and changed the name of its new SUV, less than a week after its launch. Given
In the 2010s the main political dynamic inside western societies could be boiled down to simple left and right. Figures such as Jordan Peterson, and others loosely grouped under the banner of the ‘intellectual dark web’, were only just rising to prominence and had begun to discuss the new-fangled idea of the ‘culture wars’. These
The threat North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme poses to the world is well known. But as the hermit kingdom actively expands its weapons arsenal, and international institutions struggle to contain it, we shouldn’t ignore its development of chemical and biological weapons either. A recent report from the United States State Department asserts that North Korea has a
When I was first scheduled to speak at this year’s National Conservatism conference (NatCon) in Brussels, I expected it to be a routine speaking engagement. After all, it is a mainstream conservative gathering that has hosted an event in Brussels before, as well as similar conferences in London, Washington DC, Rome, and Miami. Speakers typically
You’ve got to feel for Rishi Sunak. He spends his days slaving around the clock to shave half a percentage point off inflation, only to find one of his MPs making lurid headlines, again. Today, the Tory boat has been rocked by Mark Menzies, who lost the whip following claims that he had misused campaign
It was Cop26 in Glasgow and Nicola Sturgeon was in her element, posing for selfies with Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and assorted world leaders. The then first minister was desperate to upstage Boris Johnson who had very much put his mark on the global climate shindig. ‘It’s one minute to midnight on the Doomsday clock,’
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Queen of Privacy never manage to keep out of the news for too long. This time it transpires that the red-headed royal has now officially changed his primary country of residence from the UK to the US. Too good for us, Harry? Documents on the Companies House site
Labour, according to Rachel Reeves, is now the party of low taxes. She has said she won’t raise income tax, National Insurance, capital gains tax and corporation tax, as well as ruling out a wealth tax. But that still leaves a few options for jacking up taxes, as one of Reeves’ advisers, Sir Edward Troup
When Nicola Sturgeon unveiled the SNP’s climate change pledge in 2019, the First Minister boasted that Scotland had the ‘most stretching targets in the world’. The problem was that they were too stretching: five years on, the flagship goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 has been binned. The decision
There’s bad news for coffee fans: the price of your favourite beverage – which has already rocketed in recent years – is about to soar. A prolonged heatwave in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country after Brazil, is damaging the coffee crop and sending the cost of robusta beans – used in instant
On Tuesday, parliament voted for the first time on legislation to begin the phasing out of smoking (not just cigarettes, but cigars, shisha, you name it), and to create a two-tier legal system where some adults will be able to buy these products, and some won’t. Although the ban seems popular with the public, it
Another day, another Holyrood mess. This time, it’s hapless Humza Yousaf being criticised for his slow response to the Cass review into gender services. It’s not like the Scottish First Minister to be missing in action when it matters… If Yousaf’s time as First Minister is defined by anything, it might well be his staggering
It is hard not to feel a teeny weeny bit sorry for Emma Raducanu, who was hailed as the next big thing in tennis after her fairytale win in the 2021 US Open. She was just 18 when she won at Flushing Meadows, a Grand Slam triumph achieved only three months after she finished her
It’s a day ending in ‘y’ – which means it’s more bad news for Rishi Sunak. The beleaguered Tory premier had a relatively good day on Wednesday, celebrating falling inflation and a punchy performance in parliament. But today’s Times brings news that another Tory MP has lost the party whip while its claims about alleged
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The day after her book was published, Rishi Sunak faced down questions from Keir Starmer and Labour members at PMQs about Liz Truss. While he had his replies at the ready, the questions underscored the main issue for Sunak: how should he deal with his predecessor? Also on the podcast, there is more inflation news
A year ago today, the Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. For the last year, Kara-Murza has been held in a prison in Siberia, often in solitary confinement, with
The movement to radicalise the art and museum world was always going to come back and bite its own children. It has happened more quickly than we thought, as demonstrated by the seriously red faces at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) last week. Among the paintings on display at the NPG was one by French
Keir Starmer came to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) with a spring in his step. He announced that he owned ‘a rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s memoirs. ‘The only unsigned copy,’ he added with a chortle. Then he asked Rishi Sunak to justify the calamities of Truss’s premiership. ‘He should spend less time reading that
Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was a classic knockabout between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clearly written by their respective attack units. Both came armed with the sort of material you’d expect for a scrap: the Labour leader had a ‘rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s book, while the Prime Minister wanted to talk about Angela