All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
One of the stranger events of the summer of 2023 is the sudden and unexplained appearance, one night in early August, of an eight-foot tall carved wooden pole on a coastal path in Kent depicting the Baltic thunder god Perkūnas. The impressive sculpture is carved from a single piece of wood crowned by four stylised
The online TaiwanPlus news agency reported recently that a new memorial had been unveiled in southern Taiwan to commemorate the thousands of Taiwanese youths who volunteered to help the Japanese war effort in the second world war. It is estimated that some 30,000 Taiwanese died while fighting for Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial army during the Pacific
When a man has spent 17 years in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit, there are many urgent questions about policing and the criminal justice system which need answering. Andrew Malkinson, who will never get back those years after being wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in a violent attack in 2003, certainly
The military types who recently testified before a congressional hearing about their close encounters with UFOs were not the usual suspects associated with such reports. Retired naval commander David Fravor said that he, his weapons service officer and their counterparts in another jet had seen a mysterious ‘Tic-Tac’ shaped ‘object’ while both planes were flying off
Has a well-meaning international effort to cut pollution from ships contributed to a sudden warming of the waters in the north Atlantic this year? That is the extraordinary claim made this week in an article in Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It asserts that limits on the sulphur content
The story of the out-of-touch 1960s High Court judge asking counsel ‘Who are the Beatles? Are they giving evidence in this case?’ is almost certainly apocryphal, as is the suave response (‘I believe they are a popular beat combo, m’lud.’). But a majority decision from the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn this week shows that senior
Tony Blair famously regretted his government’s introduction of freedom of information laws. ‘You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Blair complained that FOI is not used by ‘the people’
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It’s been 16 years since Tony Blair walked away from frontline politics, but rather than retiring to Fife to write his books – like another Labour leader – he has managed to build his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change into one of the most sophisticated and influential think tanks in modern politics. What role
‘Today was hard. I can’t imagine what it was like for the families of those we left behind.’ That was an email from a friend who’d served in Afghanistan, sent as the chaos of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan played out on rolling news almost exactly two years ago. His grief – mirrored across the military and the media establishment on both
As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s
When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too. I
My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity.
There was a time when Boris backers accused Rishi Sunak of being in cahoots with Dominic Cummings, as part of a plot to bring down the former PM. However, the relationship has certainly cooled since such claims. In his latest Substack, Cummings accuses Sunak of having no grip on power, no governing plan, no serious
This week the government has been focusing its energies on small boats crossing the channel, with several new immigration announcements. The government aim was to fill the news vacuum over the summer and put pressure on Labour. How has Small Boats Week gone so far? Well, today both the Times and Mail led on the
We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday. And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to
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Katy Balls and editor of Conservative Home Paul Goodman join Natasha Feroze to discuss the troublemaker, Lee Anderson. This week his inflammatory comments on small boats dominated the news – is this good or bad for the Conservatives? And what role does Rishi Sunak have in mind for the former miner and deputy Chairman of
Uh oh. Following a rowdy bust up with the SNP’s chief whip Brendan O’Hara, the party establishment has now chosen to expel Angus MacNeil MP. MacNeil, a close ally of former first minister Alex Salmond, was initially suspended after news of the fight broke, which saw him reportedly seethe ‘you’re a small wee man!’ at
Few political assassinations will have been as predictable as Fernando Villavicencio’s, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate and anti-corruption firebrand gunned down in Quito this week. The brutal murder took place in a country that in recent decades has been largely free of serious political violence, notwithstanding the ferocious inter-party struggles that have seen both coups and
Who is the most divisive figure in politics? Last year the Daily Mirror claimed Lee Anderson was ‘the worst man in Britain’. This week the Conservative MP is managing to cause a headache both for Labour and his own party. Anderson is a grassroots favourite who even before he was made deputy chairman of the
Dear oh dear. Those pesky junior doctors strike again — literally. The fifth round of industrial action started this morning and will last until 7am on Tuesday. Junior doctors in England are demanding full pay restoration of 35 per cent – which they say accounts for a 26 per cent real terms pay cut plus inflation.
So the economy has defied the predictions of doom once more. The latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the economy grew by 0.5 per cent in June, more than countering a 0.1 per cent fall in May, widely attributed to the extra bank holiday for the coronation.
The first time Mohamed Bazoum came to the attention of the European media was in the aftermath of the Great Migrant Crisis of 2015. The man who was, until a fortnight ago, the president of Niger, was at that time the minister of the interior. The shockwaves of a war in Niger would be
In the last few weeks, words like ‘slow’, ‘grinding’ and even ‘failure’ have been used to describe the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that Ukrainian forces have not broken through Russian lines and indeed have only liberated a relatively small amount of Ukraine’s occupied territory after seven weeks (though to be fair, they’ve taken about
Yet another suspected Russian spy has been arrested in Germany – the third such case in recent months. The suspect – named only as Thomas H. by the Geman media for legal reasons – is an employee of the department of Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr, responsible for procuring defence technology. The country that produced the
To say the SNP have a disastrous record on transport would be putting it lightly. The ferries don’t run on time (if at all), the mystery of the motorhome remains unsolved and the nationalists still haven’t dualled Scotland’s most dangerous road. Perhaps then it’s no surprise to hear that former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and
The data breach at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which has seen the personal details of all serving officers and just under 2,500 civilian staff accidentally released as part of a response to a Freedom of Information request, is the sort of grotesque, IT foul-up normally reserved for the realms of satire like The Thick
It will be harder to pick up a last-minute light bulb. You might have to rely on Amazon Prime for a quick delivery of new tea towels. And your local shopping centre will look even more dismally empty than it already does. There will, in fairness, be some disadvantages to the hardware chain Wilko disappearing.
For once we are having an old-fashioned silly season, with no pandemic, no insurgency by the Taliban, no leadership election in the Tory party and no energy crisis – with the result that a few migrants moving onto a barge has become the main story of the week. Or at least we didn’t seem to
Anyone reading the news over the past two days could be forgiven for feeling a certain sense of déjà vu. Senior figures in government, including an unnamed cabinet minister, have suggested that if Rwanda flights removing asylum seekers are blocked by the courts, Conservatives would ‘inevitably’ back moves to leave the European Convention on Human
Yet another of Rishi Sunak’s five targets looks to have slipped out of reach. Waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have climbed to another record high and now stand just shy of 7.6 million. There was a slight improvement for the longest waits: those waiting more than a year dropped slightly but still stand
Every few weeks I write a ‘Why isn’t Scottish Labour ahead in the polls yet?’ piece. Here is the latest instalment and the take away is: Labour still hasn’t sealed the deal but it continues to close in on a vulnerable SNP. New polling from Redfield and Wilton shows the SNP retaining its three-point lead
When 20-year old Mhairi Black was elected in 2015, she became the youngest MP for over 300 years. Eight years later, it seems that the ‘baby of the house’ has yet to grow up. Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Black has likened gender critical campaigners to white supremacists, and suggested that they were funded