All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) are champions of Europe for the first time in their history. They demolished Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League Final in Munich. Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets Forget the Premier League and the sporting abomination that is the revamped Fifa Club World Cup.
Now that a deal has been struck with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the government’s focus should be on the UK’s southernmost overseas territories. There are three of them: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) and the British Antarctic Territory (BAT). As increasingly tense geopolitics make the world more hostile,
‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I
Legal & General is Britain’s largest asset manager, with over £1 trillion on its books. Every pound it manages should be dedicated to achieving the highest possible returns. This matters a lot: L&G manages over five million pensions in the UK. But in recent years, the asset manager has been particularly concerned with fashionable causes,
This week, the Spectator Club hosted a quiz night for subscribers – with the ‘Charles Moore’s red corduroys’ team the eventual winners.* The night was such a success we thought other readers would enjoy doing the quiz as well. There are four rounds of questions below. We’d like to think the questions are fun to work
Forty a day for forty years – that’s a hell of a lot of cigarettes – but je ne regret rien. I loved smoking. But note the past tense because, eventually, for all the clichéd health reasons you can imagine, I had to give up. Despite always knowing it was a matter of life or death, I dreaded
Almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds wish they had grown up without the internet. A similar portion are even calling for a social media curfew, with a quarter wanting phones banned in schools, according to research from the British Standards Institution. Really? The truth is that Zoomers – those born between 1997 and 2012 –
For months, Israel has faced a relentless barrage of criticism over its conduct in Gaza – from western governments, UN agencies, and media outlets that once claimed to be her allies. Central to the condemnation are the humanitarian circumstances: civilian suffering, limited aid access, and Israel’s temporary obstruction of some relief efforts. What has gone
The Ukrainian president said this week he hopes the war will end by next June. Not this summer. Not this year. But in 12 months’ time. Sanctions, he believes, and four years of gruesome war will finally hit the Russian economy, pushing it into a deep budget deficit. The IMF’s latest forecast sort of backs
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London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has called for possession of small amounts of cannabis to be decriminalised following a report by the London Drugs Commission. The report has made 42 recommendations, which include removing natural cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act. Former cabinet minister, now Labour peer, Charlie Falconer and Tory MP Dr Neil
When Tommy Robinson walked out of prison this week, he was unrecognisable. The far-right activist, who was jailed for contempt of court, was sporting a huge bushy beard as he emerged from HMP Woodhill. Robinson looked more like a man who had been marooned on a desert island, or lost in the mountains, than someone
Is the Japanese tourist, for so long in good numbers a welcome and reliable fixture at our most famous tourist spots, now in serious decline? The number of Japanese travelling abroad is still well down on pre-Covid times and with government data just released revealing that fewer and fewer Japanese even hold a passport, the
Reaching the top of the world and returning to London within a week without so much as stopping for a coffee in Kathmandu sounds like the stuff dreams are made of. But on 21 May 2025, four former members of the British special forces turned this dream into reality when they stood on the summit
You know you’ve arrived when professors start thinking about how to look after you during a major emergency. As a vegan, I was thrilled to read in the Times this week that Professor Tim Lang, a professor of food policy, has told the government that us meat-dodgers must be catered for in any ‘food apocalypse’. Speaking at
I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years as British ambassador, as the first Jew in the role. Since then, I have turned down every request to be a talking head. Neither the world nor my successors needed another ex-ambassador pundit. But I
There’s not much that’s green in Larkhall, Scotland. So staunchly Protestant unionist is the ex-mining town in South Lanarkshire that it has scrubbed itself of anything associated with Irish Catholicism. The local Subway franchise has grey panelling on its front, and local pharmacies have opted for blue signage. The 15,000-strong area has one football team:
In recent years, governments looking for good news on growth have sounded increasingly desperate, like a doctor looking for signs of an improvement in a terminally ill patient. In the first quarter of this year Britain’s economy grew by 0.7 per cent, slightly higher than expected – a fact seized upon by this already beleaguered government.
Another day, another bit of bad press for the Labour party. Attorney General Lord Hermer sparked outrage when he compared political threats to leave the ECHR to the Nazis during a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank on Thursday – and has since acknowledged, rather begrudgingly, that his ‘choice of
Another day, another sign of the British state’s acceptance of criminality. This time it’s the news that almost half of people caught in possession of Class A drugs avoid criminal sanction, with the police either issuing a ‘community resolution’, which does not create a criminal record, or avoid any action at all ‘in the public interest’. This
‘The policymakers that live in London and stuff, they don’t really care about a small town like Rochdale. I just feel as though, for many years it’s been one of those forgotten things, we live under the shadow of Manchester.’ This quote, from a teaching assistant in his 30s with young children, is from a
Lord Hermer KC has done it again. Delivering RUSI’s annual security lecture this week, the Attorney General set out to ‘depolarise’ the debate about international law, before promptly comparing those who are open to withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with Carl Schmitt, the notorious German jurist who joined the Nazi party
Faced with a cost-of-living crisis, rising delinquency, failing public services, and riots in the suburbs, the French government has finally sprung into action – it’s banning smoking outdoors. Not entirely, of course, just in places where children might be. The new rules, coming into force in July, prohibit lighting up in any space ‘frequented by
Why can’t academics write properly? Why can’t they express themselves in language that normal people can understand? These are questions that have echoed through the ages, and ones that still resonate today – so much so that even academics are starting to ask them. In an address to the Hay Festival this week, Professor Kehinde
Is it getting harder for Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić to maintain his balancing act between Moscow and the West? Why else, after all, would Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) suddenly revive a year-old story about covert arms supplies to Ukraine? Back in June of last year, the Financial Times splashed the story that Serbia had
As if the Attorney General hadn’t proven his ability for conjuring up negative headlines enough, Lord Hermer took it upon himself on Thursday to compare political threats to leave the ECHR to the Nazis. Speaking to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank, Hermer earnestly told his audience: ‘The claim that international law
To understand what’s really going on with the latest British Medical Association strike threat – it is currently balloting 50,000 doctors over a putative six-month strike in support of a 29 per cent pay claim for ‘resident’ (formerly called junior) doctors – it’s instructive to look at what happened to Liverpool City Council in the
Rachel Reeves announced that a trade deal with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – in other words, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – was imminent last week. It was then leaked that, even though the deal was with unashamed petrostates with no time for net zero and, in some cases, a distinctly doubtful record
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Lots to discuss today: Robert Jenrick takes on TfL, a Nazi jibe from the attorney general and allegations of shoplifting made against our own Michael Simmons. But we start with Keir Starmer’s big speech yesterday, where the theme was ‘get Nigel’, after polling from More in Common showed that framing the election as a two-horse
It is an axiom of political debate that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have definitely lost the argument. That golden rule seems to have escaped the notice of the Attorney General Lord Hermer, who, in a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank did just that. Hermer,
Keir Starmer has already folded on the winter fuel payment, promising a partial reversal of the policy by reinstating it for pensioners in receipt of pension credit. How much longer before the proposed £4.8 billion cuts to welfare benefits go the same way? This morning, the Health Foundation think tank has issued a pronouncement that
Whatever happened to that £22bn black hole, eh? As yet more pay rises are dolled out to workers across the country this month, Mr S has been scouring the government’s transparency data to take a closer look at just how many times ministers have met with union barons. The conclusion? Quite a lot. In fact, in just six
Amid talk of a summer reshuffle, I recently asked a senior member of the Labour party if he thought the Attorney-General was likely for the chop. He paused and reflected. ‘No’, he eventually replied. ‘But he’s going the right way about it.’ Similar sentiments will no doubt be expressed in Downing Street today as they