All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
If you need to lose a few pounds after enjoying the French or Italian food a little too much on your summer holiday, there might soon be a problem. The cost of one of the new weight loss drugs that has become so popular in recent months is about to get a lot more expensive.
In Westminster, tradition often trumps innovation, and Nigel Farage’s latest demand has stirred the pot with characteristic vigour. The Reform UK leader has called on the Prime Minister to grant his party the right to nominate peers to the House of Lords, framing it as a correction to a glaring ‘democratic disparity.’ Far from a
The Alaska summit taking place today isn’t just about war – economics looms equally large. Vladimir Putin, with his forces pressing forward in Ukraine, faces neither military urgency nor economic desperation to halt the fighting. For him, this has never been a territorial grab but an existential struggle against Western hegemony. His challenge is to
Ding ding ding! John Healey was pulling no punches this morning as he took aim at Reform UK on the airwaves. Nigel Farage’s party has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer for presiding over a ‘democratic disparity’ because despite having four MPs and managing ten councils, the party has no representation in the House of Lords.
When Tony Blair and his team were deciding which venue should host his first speech as Prime Minister after his landslide 1997 election victory, they did not choose Downing Street or Whitehall or Parliament. They instead chose a much more unlikely setting, the notorious Aylesbury council estate in south-east London. Why? Because New Labour presentational
Yesterday’s stronger-than-expected GDP growth raises questions for the Bank of England. Second quarter growth came in at 0.3 per cent (0.2 per cent per Brit) propped up by a strong 0.7 per cent in June alone. The rest of the national accounts however, paint a worrying picture when it comes to inflation. The GDP deflator
When Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet in Alaska today, it will mark their first encounter since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Although the talks are likely to be dominated by questions of a ceasefire, possible division of territory, and how the three-year war will conclude, North Korea will likely be more
Victory over Japan Day – VJ Day – falls today, 15 August being the day in 1945 that Emperor Hirohito spoke to his people for the very first time to inform them of the country’s submission to the allies’ Potsdam declaration of unconditional surrender. Eighty years on, it will be an occasion shrouded in both
Friday 15 August is a painful anniversary for Afghanistan – it is four years since the Taliban took Kabul, turning my country into the worst place in the world to be a woman, and once again a safe haven for terrorists. We can mobilise many thousands of young men and women who are ready to fight
The 80th anniversary of VJ Day today marks the passing of the generation that took part in the second world war. The few surviving veterans must now be a hundred years old, or virtually so. They are departing; most have already left. This seems an appropriate moment to reflect upon the next generation, those whose fathers
Who is Ritchie Wellman? He is a father, a boyfriend, an assistant operations manager at a local business and a part-time paedophile hunter. Right now, however, at 7 p.m. in a dusty car park down the road from Bournemouth pier, Ritchie is the commander of his own private policing unit, briefing his officers before their
Who does Uefa think it’s kidding? It says the huge banner saying ‘Stop killing children’ unfurled at a Super Cup match last night was ‘not political’. It was ‘about humanity’, insists an insider. ‘In fact, you could just say it is common sense’, they said. They must think we were born yesterday. Everyone whose moral
The corruption trial of Tulip Siddiq formally commenced in Bangladesh on Wednesday. Among other allegations linked to £3.9 billion worth of embezzlement, the Bangladeshi-origin Labour MP has been accused by the Anti-Corruption Commission of securing luxury property for her family in Dhaka, using her relationship with the country’s former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was
Like much of Radio 4’s output, Thought for the Day is something of a curate’s egg – sometimes enlightening and a source of inspiration or comfort. Often, however, it’s sanctimonious; auricular masturbation for the comfortable. Comfortable England has an empathy problem; it is willing to contort itself into paroxysms of emotion for migrants yet remains incapable
14 min listen
Ukraine’s President Zelensky has spent today with Keir Starmer at Number 10. This is in anticipation of tomorrow’s Alaska summit between Presidents Trump and Putin – where European leaders will be notably absent. Zelensky’s visit to the UK is designed to project an image of solidarity with Starmer, and European leaders in general – but
While the Bank of England consults on who will appear on the next round of British bank notes, with reports that Winston Churchill could be dropped from the fiver, this week in the South Atlantic a new set of bank notes came into circulation. The notes will include the Falkland Islands coat of arms, the
The Imperial War Museum is supposed to be one of Britain’s guardians of historical truth. Yet in its description of the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi edicts that laid the legal groundwork for the Holocaust, the museum claims they defined Jews by religious observance. It’s a small phrase, but it’s entirely wrong. And it matters. When Jews
The news that Taylor Swift is releasing her 12th album in October will thrill her fans but perhaps we should all be grateful because this might mean we can move on from the endless chatter about the Oasis reunion tour. From the moment the Gallaghers announced their lucrative concerts it was clear that a lot
Well, well, well. Back to Scotland’s self-identifying ‘newspaper’, which has planted itself at the centre of a row over the delisting of a gender critical book from a national library exhibition. Women’s rights campaigners flagged concerns after The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht – a selection of gender critical essays – was removed from the National
‘Smashing Westminster’s glass ceiling’ is generally hailed as a good thing – except when it is the taxpayer left holding the bill. In the heady days of the new millennium, Portcullis House (PCH) was opened at a cost of £235million. As the newest part of the parliamentary estate, it was expected to last for 200
Who are all these people who keep being photographed on Bournemouth beach and elsewhere, frolicking in the midday sun? None of them, obviously, work for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or the TUC. None of them can possibly be members of the Unite union, nor Unison, nor the GMB. It is little wonder that
Well, well, well. Scottish health board NHS Fife has admitted to the UK’s equalities watchdog that it was in breach of the law when it allowed a trans doctor to use a single-sex changing room without first doing an equality impact assessment. Now NHS Fife has been ordered by the Equality and Human Rights Commission
Dear oh dear. Foreign Secretary David Lammy met with US Vice President JD Vance at the weekend to discuss the wars in Gaza and Ukraine over a spot of fishing. Lammy’s attempts at chumminess haven’t gone all that well however. Vance told Fox News that Washington is ‘done funding’ Kyiv, the Foreign Secretary failed to
If you want to understand what lies behind the rise of Reform and its consistent – indeed, deepening – lead in the polls, I have a suggestion: French air conditioning. To be more specific, if you want to understand the difficulty Reform’s opponents have in tackling it and why the party’s rise seems inexorable, the row
The Trump-Putin summit in Alaska could be the flop of the century or turn out to be the first step towards negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine and eventually an end to the war. The White House has been trying to downgrade expectations of any breakthrough and has described the meeting on Friday as an opportunity
Summerhall is one of Edinburgh’s largest Fringe venues, also running year-round exhibitions and artistic performances. This past week, it has also played host to the city’s latest site-specific beclowning show, with artists so reportedly ‘terrified’ by Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes being in the building, they had to set up a ‘safe room’ on the
There has always been something mad about the government’s deal over the Chagos Islands. The British Indian Ocean Territory was formed in 1965 from the seven atolls of the Chagos Archipelago and over 1,000 smaller individual islands. They had previously been administered as part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius, a British possession since 1810.
Britain’s is growing, albeit sluggishly. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the economy grew by just 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of the year – a sharp slowdown from the first three months, when growth was 0.7 per cent. ‘The economy was weak across April and May,’ the
It’s been forty years since I took my A-levels. Yet one particular dream still gatecrashes my sleep with irritating regularity: I’m in the exam hall, about to turn over the paper, but I’m trembling with terror because I haven’t done enough revision. Spool forward four decades and it might seem slightly nuts to think that
Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly, finally published today, is already looking like the most ill-advised autobiography since Prince Harry’s Spare. Her attempts to denigrate her former mentor, the late Alex Salmond, have rebounded disastrously. Her teasing about her ‘non-binary’ sexuality sounded contrived. Her complaints of victimhood ring hollow coming from a politician who had a relatively
We are 100 days into Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship, and Germany has achieved something truly remarkable: a coalition government so perfectly dysfunctional that it appears to have been designed by the AfD’s campaign strategists. The signs of trouble emerged from the very beginning. Merz, who could barely contain his eagerness to finally assume the chancellorship, stumbled
Well, well, well. After Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes announced she was stepping down at next year’s Scottish parliament election, speculation about who could stand for her Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch constituency has been rife. Some have suggested that Ian Blackford, the former SNP MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber and onetime Westminster group leader,