All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I don’t know about you, but it’s getting rather tiresome for me now. The Boris Johnson saga, that is. Did he knowingly mislead parliament about rule-breaking lockdown parties in Downing Street? Very probably. Though perhaps not certainly, if one places any credence in his argument that nobody in authority definitively told him boozy post-work gatherings
‘Cuts’, ‘retrenchment’ and ‘savings’ are very much the buzz words over on King Charles Street. There’s lots of talk about ‘fierce and draconian’ reductions in foreign aid spending with James Cleverly warning that ‘money is tight.’ So Mr S was surprised to discover that the Foreign Office will spend at least £2.5 million on the
Quick, nurse, they’re at it again! Boris Johnson’s evidence to the Privileges Committee today has re-started the longest running war in Westminster, after a temporary cessation of hostilities. Johnson savages his former No. 10 advisor Dominic Cummings in his submission, referencing the Vote Leave guru and his infamous Substack no fewer than ten times during
Was it Vladimir Putin or wasn’t it? ‘Vladimir Putin’ was certainly shown on television being helicoptered into Crimea this week, meeting ‘the people’ and driving himself around reconstruction sites in the devastated city of Mariupol. In the wider world, though, there was widespread scepticism that it was the real Russian President. Clips were posted on
What scale of rebellion will Rishi Sunak face on his Brexit deal? There had been hopes in Downing Street and the whips’ office that this could be in single figures when the deal is put to a vote tomorrow. However, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has said his party – all eight MPs – will
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Boris Johnson has today made his defence of partygate, before he is questioned by the Privileges Committee tomorrow. He accepts that he misled the House of Commons, but insists he made his statements ‘in good faith’ and that he ‘would never have dreamed’ of doing so intentionally. But who’s going to support him now? Katy
This morning, Boris Johnson’s response to the accusations against him was published in a substantial dossier to the Privileges Committee. It comes just a day before the unprecedented hearing that is likely to determine his political future. This submission was a long time coming. In its interim report, published on 3 March, the Committee noted
Ever since last February’s invasion, Russia has used Crimea – annexed in 2014 – as a base for its military. But that base is now under regular attack. Last night, cruise missiles being transported from Crimea were blown up by drones. The attack was in Dzhankoi, a junction just north of Crimea used by Russia
Just how does Rishi Sunak intend to grow the economy? It’s the second of his five pledges; last week’s Budget was full of Tory talk about the virtues of getting people off benefits and into work. But the data shows a rather different picture: five million are on benefits while mass immigration – now running
I don’t know about voter’s remorse but there was precious little remorse from Nicola Sturgeon on Loose Women on Monday for the chaos she inflicted on her party by resigning in pique without giving it a chance to organise an orderly transition. She showed all the insouciance of a teenager who had just wrecked the family
What are Prince Harry’s pronouns? The obvious ones, of course, are ‘he/him’, but the mischievous might suggest that ‘heir/spare’ are just as likely. In either case, the Duke of Sussex has struck most of the world as a man who is in touch – if perhaps not through his own volition – with contemporary gender
Boris Johnson has today published his long-awaited ‘partygate’ defence, ahead of his appearance before the Privileges Committee tomorrow afternoon. In the 52-page submission, Johnson accepts that he did mislead the House of Commons when he said that ‘the rules and guidance had been followed at all times’ during Covid. But he insists he made his
Does UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres really have any hope of persuading rich countries to commit to achieving net zero by 2040? This was a target he declared was vital as he launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report yesterday. He will have his work cut out. The trouble is that
To what extent have the public finances really been brought under control? This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics reveals that public sector net borrowing reached £16.7 billion in February. This is more than double the figure from February 2022 of £7.1 billion, and also well above the consensus estimate of around £11 billion.
It hardly seems like the most propitious time for Xi Jinping to be visiting Moscow. There’s an international arrest warrant out for his host Vladimir Putin for war crimes, and the man Xi has described as his ‘best friend’ spent the weekend inspecting land he’s snatched from Ukraine – in gross violation of the principles
The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow. According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’
For the past 12 months, the Metropolitan Police has been in the organisational equivalent of a body scanner. Every vital organ of this 194-year-old beast has been examined in detail by Baroness Louise Casey and her review team enabling them to understand the Met in a way that no one has done before. The results,
Today Louise Casey has published her report into the Metropolitan police – and it makes for damning reading. The review was commissioned in the aftermath of the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met PC Wayne Couzens in March 2021. Baroness Casey was appointed by the Met to lead an independent probe
The government of Emmanuel Macron won a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly on Monday by a mere nine votes. The cross-party no-confidence motion, tabled by a Centrist coalition fell just short of the 287 votes it needed to bring down the government. To succeed the no-confidence motion required the support of the
Vladimir Putin has his story, and he’s sticking to it: the destruction of three of the four Gazprom-owned Nord Stream pipelines on 26 September 2022 was the work of the American government. Speaking to reporters in Siberia last week, Putin insisted that the Nord Stream attacks had been carried out on a ‘state level’ and
Nicola Sturgeon’s valedictory address to the RSA was her ‘And now we turn to the liars…’ speech. The outgoing SNP leader’s remarks were nominally about inequality and climate change but she was really there to talk about the distorting impact of social media on democratic politics. Given her departure was possibly hastened by the pushback
Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine has united the West. Nato has been strengthened and there has been much support for the sanctions against the Kremlin and its supporters. Public opinion in the UK is firmly behind the Ukrainian people in their suffering, even if many remain wary of direct military entanglement. For the countries bordering
For more than a decade, bitcoin bores have been banging on about cryptocurrency as the future of money. The emergence and spectacular growth of digital currencies, according to these evangelists, prove that the financial system upon which we all depend is broken. Bitcoin was after all created in 2009, after the great meltdown of 2008,
You may have been forgiven for thinking that the only story in town up here in Scotland is the election of the leader of the SNP, and Scotland’s next First Minister. However, for a day at least, some of the headlines have been stolen by a man who became almost as well-known to Scots as
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Ahead of the vote on Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP has said he will not back the key parts of the Windsor Framework. How much could this become a problem for Rishi Sunak? Also on Wednesday, what are the possible outcomes of Boris Johnson’s probe into Partygate? Natasha Feroze,
It wasn’t so long ago that the Conservatives won a landslide on Boris Johnson’s pledge not to put up income tax, national insurance or VAT. But four years on, and after 13 years in office, it seems the Tories have lost their hard-won reputation for low taxes. Mr S has done some polling and last
There was bad news for Rishi Sunak this lunchtime as Sir Jeffrey Donaldson confirmed that he and the seven other DUP MPs will vote on Wednesday against the Windsor Framework. Few in government were expecting the party to vote for the deal but some harboured hopes that the party might abstain or register a more
China’s president Xi Jinping has arrived in Russia for the start of a three day state visit. The aim of the trip, according to the Chinese, is to strengthen relations between the two countries in a world threatened by ‘acts of hegemony, despotism and bullying’. Xi and Putin will meet in person this afternoon, before holding bilateral talks
It seems to be all going to pot for the SNP. The party’s chief executive and its top spinner are heading for the exit as the ongoing shambles of a leadership race continues to claim more scalps than a Scorsese flick. And it seems the pressure is getting to some of the SNP’s grandees, judging
Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round
In modern society, we live with a conundrum: there’s no need to endure physical discomfort of any kind, but unless you embrace it via exercise, it comes for you in the form of chronic illness. Good exercise can be very painful, however. In the case of the sport of cycling, agonisingly and unnecessarily so. Put
With neither the Conservatives nor the Labour party keen to talk publicly at least about softening Brexit, is there a gap in the market for an unashamedly pro-EU party? This is – once again – the hope of the Liberal Democrats. Speaking in York on Sunday at their first in-person party conference since the pandemic,
If the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS was supposed to calm markets, it is not looking that way this morning. Markets are sharply down in Asia, and the FTSE fell by 1.5 per cent on opening this morning. Banks were the biggest fallers, losing up to 7 per cent of their value. There
