All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
11 min listen
Are we looking at a spring of discontent? It’s the final push ahead of this week’s local elections, and what Keir Starmer wants to talk about is expanding the NHS app – which he says will cut waiting lists and end the days of the health service living in the ‘dark ages’. However, what people
Back to the Beeb, which is better at making the news rather than breaking it these days. Now a new report on the conduct of its employees has concluded that a ‘minority’ of stars and managers ‘behave unacceptably’ at work with chiefs failing to address bad behaviour. The review was ordered by the BBC’s board
Who is the most powerful woman in government? For some, it is the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. Next month, her department will publish a new White Paper, outlining its plans to curb legal migration. It is expected to make it harder for foreign students who come to the UK on graduate visas to stay here
Fifty-six thousand runners completing the London Marathon yesterday may well have gasped the words ‘never again’ as they staggered across the finish line. I have never been a runner, but I imagine that even those who willingly endure the 26.2-mile ordeal must feel not only a profound sense of accomplishment but also, at the very
In its war on waste, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been busy scrutinising the effectiveness of quangos – and today’s news may intensity the process somewhat. For it has now emerged that more than 1,300 public body staff earn over six figures a year, with their salaries and benefits topping £100,000. More than that,
The pictures of a triumphant Rachel Reeves holding aloft a US trade deal as she boards a plane home from Washington should have been all over the front pages this morning. After spending the weekend in Washington, and with a personal meeting with the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the advance briefings were that a
The final week of the local election campaign begins today. Much of the weekend discourse was dominated by the fall-out from Robert Jenrick’s comments about a potential ‘coalition’ with Reform. Strikingly, Ben Houchen – the most senior Conservative left in elected office – used his appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show to suggest that if
Never was there more truth in the old adage about every organisation that is not specifically right-wing eventually becoming left-wing. The pay review bodies which are supposed to provide independent advice to the government on public sector pay have become a menace. They have become advocates for trade unions and care not a jot about
These have been terrible days in France. On Thursday, a 15-year-old girl was stabbed to death and several of her classmates wounded at a private school in Nantes. It was an attack of singular ferocity. The victim, who was stabbed 57 times, was killed by a fellow pupil, a boy her own age. According to
Rachel Reeves sounds surprisingly perky. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has, of course, been forced – we may think, through gritted teeth – to say nice things she cannot possibly have believed about the Trumpian tariff programme that threatens to take a guillotine to her beloved fiscal headroom without her being able to do a
The Supreme Court judgment on sex and gender was a welcome return to common sense. As far as the Equality Act is concerned, even Keir Starmer now knows that a woman is a biological female and a man is a biological male. The task of producing new – and legally compliant – guidance for employers
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s clarification of the Supreme Court ruling on what is a woman is not as clear as it looks. It says that trans people may not use single-sex spaces – notably lavatories – but must not be left without spaces to use. So, the hunt is on in hospitals, restaurants,
After the 4 July wipeout last year, Ben Houchen became the most senior Conservative left in public office across the UK. So it is intriguing then to hear the Tees Valley mayor make a series of remarks that are not entirely helpful to party leader, Kemi Badenoch. First, there were his comments last month to
Just as day follows night, protestors accompany spectacle. Thousands took part this morning in the London marathon to raise millions of pounds for charity. But for two activists on London Bridge, it seems that the heroic efforts of others were an excuse to make it all about them. A pair wearing ‘Stop Arming Israel’ t-shirts
Pope Francis’s death at the age of 88 was neither untimely nor a great surprise. Having made what appeared to be a miraculous recovery from double pneumonia and kidney failure – and subsequently turning up at St Peter’s in a poncho just two weeks ago – Francis appeared to have been granted a new lease
Tomorrow’s election will be one of the most important in Canadian history. The results hang on one crucial question: what’s the biggest threat to Canada right now? The Liberals, under the guidance of Mark Carney, have used every tool at their disposal to frighten, persuade, and cajole voters into believing the biggest threat to Canada
German beer has been an important part of the country’s culture and history for centuries. When tourists think about travelling to Germany, many consider visiting one of the beer gardens in Bavaria or elsewhere. The Oktoberfest is not just the world’s largest Volksfest, but also represents Germany’s fun side. But how much appetite is there
Just over two years on from stepping down as Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is awaiting the imminent release of her memoir titled Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power. The launch will be supported by a 9-night US and UK book tour. The marketing around both employs the ‘kind and empathic’ messaging
Choosing a new pope has more in common than you might expect with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress’s system for picking a new general secretary. Both processes are autocratic, secret, and rigid; they focus on the leader’s infallibility, and involve a lack of succession planning. And women don’t get a look in. China’s president
‘Some of them will have been waiting for two days.’ My taxi driver was pointing at a queue of lorries, vans and cars stretching essentially the entire length of Villazon, a small town on Bolivia’s border with Argentina. At the front of the queue? A petrol station. Bolivia is in the grip of a severe
Britain’s welfare crisis may have slipped from the front pages following Liz Kendall’s £4.8 billion worth of cuts announced ahead of the Spring Statement, but the problems haven’t gone away. Figures quietly released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) this week show that, despite Labour’s planned ‘reforms’ to the benefits system, nearly a
Everyone knows that running a marathon can be painful. The worst part is the final 6.2 miles of the course, as your body runs out of glycogen stores, your legs turn to jelly, and your sweat-drenched head begins to thud. Every step can feel like a mile. Another challenge comes during the week before the
If there is one thing that Trump appointees, and most Trump voters, can get behind, it’s that marriage and babies are good, and falling fertility rates (now 1.57 children per American woman vs replacement level of 2.1), single parenthood and abortion are bad. The administration has been preparing to announce baby boom policies – possibly
The death of Virginia Giuffre by suicide at the age of 41 brings to an apparent end one of the grimmest and saddest sagas that has unfolded in public life in the past few decades. Giuffre, who came from a troubled and unhappy background and later became prey for both the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and
In the story of Pope Francis’s papacy, the same thread ran through the first and final chapters. On the evening of his election in 2013, he appeared on St Peter’s balcony dressed in plain white – shunning the red papal mozetta – delivering a simple ‘buonasera’ with a shy wave to the rapturous and adoring
Friday morning, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik was heading out from his flat in Balashikha, a commuter town east of Moscow, when a car bomb exploded, killing him. There can be little doubt this is an operation by Ukrainian intelligence, another example of their capacity to launch skilful targeted assassinations in the heart of Russia. But
The funeral of Pope Francis is perhaps his last chance to set his mark on the papacy. The ever so slightly pared down ceremony today is symbolic of the man, as were so many of his other ways of being pope. It will be difficult for Francis’s successor to return to the more ornate habits
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Legendary pollster Prof Sir John Curtice joins the Spectator’s deputy political editor James Heale to look ahead to next week’s local elections. The actual number of seats may be small, as John points out, but the political significance could be much greater. If polling is correct, Reform could win a ‘fresh’ by-election for the first time,
Does Britain have a ‘two-tier’ attitude towards policing? The Home Affairs Committee, made up of 11 Tory, Lib Dem and Labour MPs, is dismissive of the suggestion. ‘It was disgraceful to see the police officers who bore the brunt of (the) violence being undermined by baseless claims of ‘two-tier policing’, its report, published earlier this
This week, jihadist gunmen killed 26 tourists. For some reason Islamist diehards, supported by their stooges in British universities, did not pour onto London’s streets with their heads wrapped in kaffiyeh. I wonder why? Perhaps it was because the tourists killed were Indians not Jews or Caucasians, and the place was Pahalgam, a picturesque village
Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the
The moment the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nomination for defence secretary, the Pentagon community knew it was in trouble. One horrified defence official said at the time: ‘He may have been educated at Princeton and Harvard, but does he know anything about running a huge organisation like the Pentagon? No, he doesn’t.’ As
Imagine a time traveller from Mao Zedong’s China – say a Red Guard – landing in a Chinese city today, nearly half a century since Mao’s death in 1976 brought the Cultural Revolution to an end. Picture her in baggy unisex khaki and blunt bob, gaping at women her age prancing past in heels and
I open the calculator on my phone to count how many civilians have been killed in Ukraine over the past five days. The number 38 stares back at me. I hope I haven’t missed anyone. An apartment block in Kyiv. A five-story building in Pavlohrad. A bus in Marhanets. Russian missiles and drones found Ukrainians in their beds, on their way to work or school. In Kherson, the
