All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Nicola arrested, Boris now seatless, Nadine’s on the warpath and the Tories are in the mire. These days life seems pretty sweet if you’re Keir Starmer. You can even U-turn on your flagship policy on the Today programme and have it completely forgotten about by the time of the Six O’Clock news. And now a
No one wants to talk about the pandemic anymore. Not even partygate. Understandably so: we’ve all put hard work into suppressing and burying miserable memories over that two-year period. Why dredge it all back up? But as one of the people in this country who still deeply cares about partygate – the hypocrisy of it,
The Privileges Committee report is out today and the reaction is just what you’d expect. Nadine Dorries has taken to Twitter, declaring that any Conservative who votes for the report ‘is fundamentally not a Conservative’ and threatening deselections for those who do. Brendan Clarke-Smith has attacked its ‘spiteful, vindictive and overreaching conclusions’; Paul Bristow claims
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We have finally got the results of the Privileges Committee’s report into whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament, and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading for the former prime minister. The 30,000-word document finds that he committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the house, deliberately misleading the committee, breaching confidence, impugning the committee
The Commons privileges committee report into the conduct of Boris Johnson is completely damning. All the kerfuffle about whether the committee was justified in devising a new intermediate category of mendacity defined as ‘recklessly misleading parliament’ turns out to be irrelevant. The entire seven-strong committee, including the four Tory members on it, have found that
The Privileges Committee has today published its findings on whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Partygate. The House of Commons voted for such an inquiry, fourteen months ago: its members now have a 100-page, 30,000 word report to trawl through. It makes for damning reading. It finds that Johnson committed multiple contempts of parliament,
This morning the Privileges Committee published their findings of their investigation into Boris Johnson’s conduct in the wake of the partygate scandal. They found that Johnson had misled the House of Commons and said that, had he not resigned as an MP, they would have recommended a 90-day suspension for him. As part of their
The Privileges Committee has published its report on whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over partygate. It is damning. The 30,000-word document finds that he committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the house, deliberately misleading the committee, breaching confidence, impugning the committee and the democratic process of the house and ‘being complicit in
Lately Vladimir Putin has been strikingly unwilling to subject himself to any serious debate about his war in Ukraine. On Tuesday, he came the closest yet, spending more than two hours talking to war correspondents working for either the state media or nationalist social media channels. It was hardly an inquisition, but there were some
Nadine Dorries has this evening explained why she isn’t yet resigning as an MP, after she initially quit ‘with immediate effect’ last Friday. The Mid Bedfordshire MP had gone mysteriously quiet after her announcement, prompting Downing Street to suggest that she was letting her soon-to-be-former constituents down. She has now revealed that she is waiting
The Privileges Committee are all set to deliver their report into whether Boris Johnson lied to parliament – but there’s a sudden, last-minute twist in the tale. Guido Fawkes – that enduring sore on the national body politic – has revealed tonight that Bernard Jenkin, a member of the panel, attended a lockdown-breaking bash for
Just when they thought they were out of the woods, the SNP have been pulled right back in. Following Nicola Sturgeon’s sensational arrest on Sunday, reports have emerged that First Minister Humza Yousaf is willing to exhaust all options in a bid to get his party under control — and has gone so far as
Honours dominated the exchanges at PMQs. Sir Keir asked why the Tories have spent an entire week bickering about which Conservative deserves ennoblement. Rishi claimed that he followed ‘established convention’ in approving Boris’s lavender-list. A bit of a whopper. He clearly didn’t support the candidacy of Nadine Dorries who complained in frothing prose about the ‘sinister
There are plenty of reasons for viewing today’s huge merger deal between the UK mobile networks of Vodafone and Three with suspicion. It could reduce choice for consumers. It may lead to job losses. And it is possible that they will downgrade their service even more than they already have, cut back on investment, and
Is Labour U-turning on another big spending pledge? Last week, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back the party’s £28 billion green energy spending plan to take account of a tougher economic picture. Today, reports suggest the party is planning a similar retreat on childcare, dropping plans for a universal system in favour of means testing.
Is cutting, or abolishing, inheritance tax the key to keeping the Tories in power? Inheritance tax is certainly unpopular and is described by some voters as a ‘death tax’. Back in 2007, the Tories were in a similar predicament to the one they find themselves in now: they consistently trailed Labour in the polls. But
Until yesterday afternoon, Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. (better known to readers as Cormac) was the greatest living American writer – many would say the greatest living writer, full stop. The heir to Melville, Twain, Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner, McCarthy published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965 at the age of thirty-two. Set in rural
British politicians tend to avoid the issue of abortion. The subject divides America bitterly, yet Britain has opted for consensus. Now and again, however, a debate about abortion flares up – as it did this week after a number of pressure groups reacted with anger to the jailing of a mother of three who induced
Keir Starmer had a dilemma at Prime Minister’s Questions. Focus on the Boris Johnson psychodrama, or the more tangible story about mortgages and interests rates? He went for Tory infighting first. But then Sunak took the curious approach of deciding to use Starmer’s opener as an opportunity to address the Johnson question head on, rather
Nicola Sturgeon – progressive icon, feminist champion, scourge of corrupt Tories – is, almost by definition, incapable of wrongdoing. As she insisted after her arrest on Sunday: ‘I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.’ It is her truth. Her MSPs agree and have, we’re told, sent her flowers to soothe
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Having said she’ll step down, Nadine Dorries has now said that she won’t formally resign as an MP until later this year… It’s hard to see this as anything other than revenge taken on Rishi Sunak, so as to prolong the by-election pain, Katy Balls says. Cindy Yu also talks to Kate Andrews about the
She’s done it again. Having re-ignited the Tory wars with her shock plans to quit parliament last Friday, now Nadine Dorries is delaying her resignation plans – prolonging the by-election misery for Rishi Sunak. The former Culture Secretary may not leave the Commons until the summer recess, pushing a by-election in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency into
Silvio Berlusconi, whose state funeral will take place today in Milan, was the first modern populist. The media tycoon became a politician to take back control of Italy from the establishment on behalf of the people. The Italians called him Il Cavaliere (The Knight). He created a brand of politics that decades later would become a new driving force in America
In May 2020, two months into the pandemic, Carla Foster, a 44-year-old mother-of-three took pills at home to trigger an abortion. The foetus – a girl – was between 32 and 34 weeks old; a viable age for survival outside of the womb. On Monday, the mother was jailed for 28 months (with half of
The economy grew by 0.2 per cent in April, following on from a confirmed 0.3 per cent contraction in March. This fits the trend this year of small ebbs and flows in GDP, which all together add up to extremely little overall growth this year. This is now what the big forecasters have predicted, from the Office
Three people have died and three were injured in an attack in the centre of Nottingham yesterday. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, two students from the University of Nottingham were found stabbed to death on a street to the west of the city centre. Police were called to the scene just after 4
The scene in Miami was somewhat less than promised today. The predicted tens of thousands of protesters were replaced instead by the handful of eccentrics who always seem to find ways to show up at things involving Donald Trump – even historically significant things like the first federal arraignment of a president of the United
‘There are obviously lessons to be learned,’ said Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey at today’s House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. It was a point he repeated many times over, in reference to the inflation crisis that has plagued Britain for close to two years now. ‘We have to learn lessons from the experiences we’ve
What’s the difference between infanticide and an abortion at eight months’ gestation? This is one of the difficult questions thrown up by the grim case of Carla Foster, the mother who’s been jailed for 28 months (in practice, it’ll be half that) for inducing an abortion outside the legal limit using pills at home. Her
‘Bizarre’ is a high bar in Scottish politics these days, but the SNP has comfortably cleared it once again. The party’s deputy leader Keith Brown revealed Nationalist MSPs have agreed to ‘send some flowers’ to Nicola Sturgeon ‘as a mark of sympathy, given what she has been through over recent days’. Sturgeon was arrested on Sunday
Carla Foster spent last night in a prison cell. In 2020, after having obtained abortion pills under false pretences, the 44-year-old mother of three terminated her pregnancy at between 32 and 34 weeks gestation. This week, she was found guilty under section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 for administering drugs or
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Nadine Dorries has hit out on various platforms saying that ‘sinister forces’ stopped her from receiving her peerage, as promised to her by former prime minister Boris Johnson. This has been met by a strong rebuke from Number 10, but do Boris and Dorries have grounds to feel aggrieved? Also on the podcast, tomorrow we
One difference between the rivalry with China and the cold war is that the Soviet Union was completely economically segregated from the western world. That is not the case with China nowadays: cheap goods have flooded western markets for decades. But are we heading back to the multipolar world of the 20th century? China and