All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Should ‘misgendering’ someone be a disciplinary offence? One Oxford college seems to think so. Yesterday, Regent’s Park College posted a ‘Trans Inclusion Statement’, burnishing its existing bullying and harassment policy. On a long list of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ that might warrant punishment is ‘consistently using incorrect titles, pronouns or names to refer to a trans person’
Liz Truss’ fallen star has been rising again of late (at least a few degrees above the horizon) as gilt yields return to the heights they reached during her brief premiership. Together with sluggish GDP figures this has led many to wonder whether she was not right, after all, to make growth the absolute priority
It’s no secret that I’m not a personal fan of former president Donald Trump – but through the years I feel I’ve been mostly fair to him, his presidency, his accomplishments and his failures. Something, though, dawned on me during his friendly Fox town hall with Sean Hannity on Thursday night, which wasn’t really a town hall,
Most people who have been following the controversy over Kathleen Stock’s speech at the Oxford Union, and who have been observing this debate that combines transgender rights, the rights of women and free speech, might be tempted to conclude that the dispute has its origins in a sole ideology. That is, the transgender ideology which
Thursday evening saw the extraordinary sight of a government suing a highly respected retired judge from our Court of Appeal, who also now sits in the House of Lords. Perhaps a sheepish admission that this is Trumpian behaviour lay in the government refusing to use her name; instead calling her ‘The Chair of the UK
French President Emmanuel Macron tends to rock the boat whenever he opens his mouth, saying hard truths that many of his European colleagues, both at the state level and in the European Union’s gargantuan bureaucracy, would rather be left unsaid. Examples are legion: his insistence in 2019 that Nato was going ‘brain-dead’; his proclamation in June
President Biden continues to project strength ahead of the 2024 election — by tumbling on stage at the US Air Force Academy Graduation. The 80-year-old commander-in-chief fell today while handing out diplomas to graduating cadets in Colorado. Rest assured, he was quickly helped up and escorted off stage by three Air Force officials. The White
The Cabinet Office has tonight launched a last-ditch legal effort to avoid handing over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps to the official Covid public inquiry. Officials released a strongly-worded statement confirming the department has requested a judicial review of the inquiry’s demands for material, having missed the revised 4 p.m deadline to pass on Johnson’s messages. Baroness Hallett,
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Natasha Feroze speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Heale about Geraint Davies, a Labour MP who has been suspended from the party amid allegations of sexual harassment. Another Pestminster scandal to add to the list, how many more could be out there? Also on the podcast, as Rishi Sunak meets European leaders in Moldova to
24 min listen
Andrew Neil, The Spectator‘s chairman and super fan of the HBO show, Succession, joins this episode to talk to Freddy about where the show overlapped with the real life media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who has his own problems of succession to think about. This conversation was originally filmed as an episode of ‘The View from 22’
Today in Sydney, Australia’s most decorated soldier, former Special Air Services corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC, was found by a civil court, on a balance of probabilities, to be a likely war criminal, a murderer, a liar and a bully. Roberts-Smith is a huge man, towering over all around him. When he was presented alongside other
Labour has been clapping themselves on the back today after suspending backbencher Geraint Davies following claims of ‘completely unacceptable behaviour.’ It followed a report by Politico, which claimed the Swansea West MP had subjected younger colleagues to unwanted sexual attention. Politico said it had spoken to more than 20 people who worked with Davies in
Are Scotland and England drifting inexorably apart? To find out if that’s true, at Our Scottish Future, we carried out extensive polling of people across Scotland, Wales and England, asking if they feel negatively or positively about our governing system. Did they feel invisible to people in Westminster? Two thirds of those polled in Scotland
Not for the first time, a gulf has opened up between house price indices. This morning, Nationwide reports that average prices fell by 0.1 per cent in May (following a surprise rise of 0.4 per cent in April), taking annual house price inflation down to minus 3.4 per cent. That will surprise no-one, given the
Nominations for the Tory mayoral race closed last week, with a final shortlist of two or three expected to be published a week on Sunday. So far nine candidates have declared their interest in taking on Sadiq Khan, with Paul Scully, the Minister for London, the early favourite. But Mr S wonders if the real
The government has paid a whacking out-of-court settlement of £100,000 to Anna Thomas, a whistleblower sacked after she tried to warn them about the infiltration of the DWP by political activists. Baroness Falkner, chair of the equality watchdog, was placed under investigation after a spurious ‘dossier’ of complaints was compiled by staff, which just so
You only have to hear the words of Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President and Vladimir Putin’s long term chief sidekick, to realise just how far Russia has propelled itself from the circle of civilised nations. Putin’s Russia not only uses state assassinations as an instrument of policy, but jokes and boasts about it too Dmitry
A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more. After his announcement
Rishi Sunak’s pet theory that voters are relaxed about the level of legal immigration – so long as the government is in charge of it – and only really care about illegal immigration has just collapsed. New polling from YouGov shows that among 2019 Conservative voters, concern about immigration and asylum is now running nip
In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots
It’s 2023 and a lesbian requires security guards to speak at the Oxford Union. That image of Kathleen Stock arriving in Oxford yesterday, looking badass in shades and a baseball cap, surrounded by burly blokes who were tasked with protecting her from assault, shames Oxford university. This is meant to be one of the highest
One of the great parts of my job is that you get to meet the people you’ve always wanted to. When I first became editor, I used this a lot – mainly abusing my expenses account. Then we acquired an events department and with it, the facility to invite others along too. So next month, we’ll
8 min listen
Boris Johnson’s team today suggested that they would be happy to hand over his WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic to help the Covid enquiry. Why has the civil service got itself in such a muddle over this, and why have the Tories failed to reform Whitehall? Max Jeffery speaks to James Heale and Kate
Why do we have inquiries? The late Geoffrey Howe suggested six principal reasons: to establish the facts, to learn from the events, to provide catharsis for those affected, to reassure the public that matters are being resolved, to allocate accountability and blame, and the political urge to show something is being done. By those metrics,
Talk about going down to the wire. With today’s deadline fast approaching, the SNP Westminster group has made, at the eleventh hour, a significant announcement: they have finally submitted their audited accounts. Had the group been unable to do so, they would have missed out on £1.2 million of public funds, so-called ‘Short money’, making
It is nearly a year now since the latest round of rail strikes began. They have cost union members thousands of pounds in lost income. But according to Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, on the Today programme this morning the union has made ‘zero progress’ in its negotiations with the Rail Delivery Group, which
It is hard not to be increasingly concerned about the safeguarding of children at Childline, an arm of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). I believe that young, vulnerable and impressionable children are being exposed to worrying material, grounded in ideology, on the charity’s website. Childline runs a message board which children can use to
It has been a pathetic sight to watch politicians pleading with the supermarkets to lower food prices. Inflation has yet again proven to be more persistent than the government expected and it will do almost anything to bring it down. The Chancellor has even said that a recession would be a price worth paying to
Where have Boris Johnson’s diaries and WhatsApp messages gone? The row over the demands of the Covid Inquiry for evidence from the former prime minister and his aide Henry Cook took another twist yesterday, with his team insisting that he has already handed over all the relevant material to the Cabinet Office and that it
When it comes to dealings with their political opponents, Scottish nationalists have only one setting: furious outrage. No matter the subject, Scotland’s ruling parties – the SNP and the Greens – may be depended upon to move swiftly to apoplexy. Everything the Conservatives and Labour say, no matter how benign, must be twisted and reshaped into
As we pass the 15-month mark of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it’s clear the Putin government is in a fix. It cannot win this war nor afford to lose or stop it. But with another mobilisation politically risky and tens of thousands of Russian citizens now fallen on the battlefield, it’s evident they will need all the
Last night, Professor Kathleen Stock told the Oxford Union that we need to talk about ‘reality’. She is absolutely right. Make no mistake, Stock is a reasonable voice in a political debate where many appear to be living in some sort of fantasy world. Her views are what many would consider to be mainstream. For
