Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

James Heale

Labour forced to pull its Rochdale candidate

Following 48 hours of criticism, Labour have tonight pulled their support for Azhar Ali. This morning, it seemed that Keir Starmer had chosen the unpalatable over the disastrous: backing Ali to avoid George Galloway returning as an independent to the Commons. Yet during the course of the day, the calculation appears to have changed.  The

What Trump gets right about Nato

With the exception of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, it’s safe to assume that Europe is petrified about the prospects of a second Donald Trump presidency. As one European foreign policy analyst told the New York Times last summer: ‘It’s slightly terrifying, it’s fair to say.’ The terror meter went up a few notches this weekend, when Trump addressed

Why no-fault evictions shouldn’t be banned

A decade ago, left-wingers started using the phrase ‘zero hours contracts’ to refer to what had previously been known as casual labour or piece work. Once this pejorative term become widely used, Ed Miliband, then the leader of the Labour party, promised to ban them. Similarly, the phrase ‘no fault evictions’ was almost unknown to

Ross Clark

Trump’s madness will strengthen Nato

‘Appalling and unhinged’ was Joe Biden’s (or at least the White House’s) verdict on Donald Trump’s remarks that he might actually encourage Vladimir Putin to invade Nato member states who fail to meet the organisation’s requirement that they spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence.    It is hard to disagree with that

James Heale

Can Starmer stamp out Labour’s antisemitism?

10 min listen

Labour faces another antisemitism battle as their candidate for the Rochdale by-election said that Israel allowed the October 7th attacks as a pretext to invade Gaza. Azhar Ali has since apologised for his comments and Labour has allowed him remain the candidate for Rochdale. Natasha Feroze speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman about Keir

Greta Thunberg
Gavin Mortimer

The sinister transformation of Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; 24 hours earlier the 21-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. ‘We are

James Heale

Keir Starmer’s by-election bind

It’s the nightmare scenario Labour dreads. A triumphant George Galloway, carried aloft on his supporters’ shoulders, hailing a shock by-election victory in a left-wing stronghold. Twelve years after his stunning upset in Bradford West, the odds of a repeat triumph in Rochdale have only increased after a storm of criticism this weekend over Labour’s chosen candidate. Following

Steerpike

Tories split on building new homes

The Tory vote might be tanking among the under-40s but don’t despair: Michael Gove is here to save the day once more. The Levelling Up Secretary did the media round on Sunday morning, talking up his plans to get young people on the housing ladder. It came after his interview in the Sunday Times in

Brendan O’Neill

Labour’s Rochdale shame

So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around. Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour

The problem with Kneecap – and the arts blob

When I was about 14 or 15, someone sent me a birthday card with the words: ‘Teenagers – tired of being harassed by your stupid parents? Act now! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, while you still know everything.’ I don’t think it was personal, not least because I was fairly strait-laced,

Sam Leith

Why the Tory party is breaking apart

I don’t, I freely admit, remember all that much about my chemistry lessons at school. Covalent bonding delighted me not, no, nor moles neither. But I do recall being absolutely thrilled the first time I saw paper chromatography. The idea was – I expect I’m getting this slightly wrong, but don’t write in – that

The battle for Rafah could turn into a bloodbath

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the conflict in Gaza as a zero-sum game – with Israel either destroying Hamas or losing the war. Given that is his strategy, the assault on the city of Rafah in the southernmost part of Gaza, where the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) believe up to four battalions of Hamas terrorists

Sunday shows round-up: Gove defends government’s housing record

In an interview with the Times this week, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove suggested that the country’s broken housing market could cause young people to lose faith in democracy. This morning, Laura Kuenssberg showed Gove a variety of statistics emphasising the worsening of the problem since the Conservatives came to power, and asked him who

Ross Clark

The renewables bubble has burst

It wasn’t so long ago that Orsted was being held up as an example of how oil and gas companies should handle the transition to clean energy. In 2009 the then-DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) announced that it was going to turn around it business so that instead of earning 85 per cent of its money

Is diversity actually good for business?

It is a sacred mantra of the business circuit that diverse boards improve company performance. It has apparently been proven in multiple studies by the world’s leading companies such as McKinsey and BlackRock, as well as regulators like the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). The evidence is so irrefutable that one FTSE 350 chair raged that

Why is President Biden scared of Iran?

The Biden administration often appears more afraid of Iran than Iran is of the Biden administration. That is a very dangerous dynamic for the United States. While the military action President Joe Biden has ordered this week to counter the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its axis of resistance is degrading Iran’s capacity, it

Stephen Daisley

Why Donald Cameron should be in the Lords

Finally, Rishi Sunak has put a half-decent Cameron in the House of Lords. In raising Donald Cameron to the peerage and appointing him parliamentary under-secretary of state for Scotland, the Prime Minister has poached one of the sharpest minds in the Scottish Parliament. Cameron has been an MSP for Highlands and Islands for the past

Freddy Gray

How bad is the border crisis?

33 min listen

Freddy is joined by Todd Bensman, fellow at the Centre for Immigration Studies and author of Overrun: how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in US history. They discuss how to solve what is perhaps the issue of our time, why meaningful reform doesn’t seem to happen on immigration, and the extent of Biden’s physical

Steerpike

Sunak ennobles his business adviser

Happy new peerages’ day! These auspicious occasions seem to roll around quicker now. Rishi Sunak has clearly learned something from the rows over resignation honours for his two predecessors: stagger the names, slip out a list in recess and then hope that no-one notices. Thirteen new peers have been ennobled in the latest drive to

(photo: Getty)
Cindy Yu

Is the Labour party already fractured?

25 min listen

Having ditched the green investment pledge, Keir Starmer faces questions over what the Labour party actually stands for. And without a clear vision, how can the Labour leader hold together a divided party? Cindy Yu speaks to Fraser Nelson and former Labour advisor Ayesha Hazarika.

How the Chinese markets lost faith in the CCP

Ahead of the Chinese new year holiday, Beijing has been intervening to prop up the country’s stock markets. Regulators have tightened market trading conditions, and this week the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Yi Huiman, was fired abruptly, presumably as the fall-guy for the relentless decline in the markets, which have lost about $6 trillion in

Gavin Mortimer

The left can’t stand France’s new culture minister

France’s new minister of culture has promised to put an end to the creeping cancel culture that is threatening the country. ‘Today wokeism has become a policy of censorship,’ said Rachida Dati, who was appointed to her post last month. ‘I am in favour of the freedom of art, the freedom of creation, and I

Can the SNP claw back support in Scotland?

On Thursday, health secretary Michael Matheson resigned and Humza Yousaf undertook a ‘mini-reshuffle’ of his cabinet. The scandal of the £11,000 iPad bill was only ever going to end this way. That it was allowed to rumble on eroding public trust for months is symptomatic of the SNP’s wider fortunes, which began to rapidly deteriorate

Boris Johnson accused of sabotaging Ukraine peace talks

10 min listen

Tucker Carlson released his highly anticipated interview with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin last night. The two-hour long discussion was dominated by Putin who gave history lessons, blamed the Nord Stream 2 explosion on the CIA, and accused Boris Johnson of sabotaging the peace talks 18 months ago. Natasha Feroze speaks to James Heale and Freddy

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden isn’t working

Joe Biden isn’t working. That much has been clear to anyone who has followed American politics for the past four years. The 81-year-old often has no idea what he is saying or where he is. Yet it’s only now, months away from his possible re-election, that the Department of Justice, apparently in an attempt to