All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The sudden resignation of Reform UK’s chairman Zia Yusuf came as a shock in Westminster yesterday – but is unlikely to do the party much lasting damage. Yusuf, 38, a successful businessman and a former Goldman Sachs banker, said in a terse and huffy statement that working for the election of a Reform government was
Let’s face it, no one expected Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ to be perfect. But for Elon Musk to adopt the intransigent position that the work of government should stop in its tracks in pursuit of perfection is a manifest nonsense. Especially when considering OMB chief Russ Vought’s explanation of how the bill helps reduce the
MPs from Nigel Farage’s Reform party are calling for a burqa ban in Britain. Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn by-election last month, asked Sir Keir Starmer in the House of Commons this week if he would consider outlawing the garment. Her demand attracted the ire of Reform chairman Zia Yusuf, who has since stepped down
In the early hours of this morning, Scottish Labour won the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election in a three-way contest that turned out to be even tighter than expected. Local candidate Davy Russell clinched victory in a seat that the SNP has held for 14 years – despite running a media-shy campaign that saw him
Oh dear. It sounds as though Rachel Reeves was something of a bust at the big CBI shindig last night at the swish 8 Northumberland Avenue venue in central London. It was barely seven months ago that the Chancellor confidently promised the lobby group in the same room that ‘We’re not going to be coming
Zia Yusuf has quit as Reform Party chairman. Nigel Farage and other power brokers within the Reform fold took to social media in an attempt at message control not long after Yusuf announced the parting of ways this evening. “Politics can be a highly pressured and difficult game and Zia has clearly had enough. He
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Zia Yusuf resigned this evening from his position as chairman of Reform UK, saying: ‘I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time.’ This comes after he tweeted yesterday that it was ‘dumb’ for Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, to urge the Prime Minister to ban
Zia Yusuf has tonight resigned as chairman of Reform UK. In a statement, he posted on X that ‘I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office.’ He has worked for Reform for 11 months, during which time, he noted: ‘I
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Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride delivered a speech today where he attempted to banish the ghost of Liz Truss and improve the Conservatives’ reputation over fiscal credibility. And he compared leader Kemi Badenoch to Thatcher, saying she too struggled at first and will ‘get better’ at the dispatch box. LBC broadcaster Iain Dale and the Spectator’s
As Israel continues to wage a defensive war against the terrorists who invaded and slaughtered hundreds of Jews on October 7, the Jewish State is under attack as never before in the West. I found this out for myself when I was invited on to Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss the situation in Gaza. Piers Morgan asks
‘The ONS apologises for any inconvenience caused’ is becoming an all-too-familiar refrain from Britain’s statisticians. The latest mea culpa came after a blunder involving vehicle tax data led the Office for National Statistics to overstate April’s inflation figure. Initially reported as 3.5 per cent, the true figure was 3.4 per cent – only revealed once
The Shadow Chancellor’s speech this morning was a predictable one. Mel Stride is the kind of Conservative who spin doctors love to send out on the media round: smart, well-briefed and able to stick to the party line. He is also the kind of Conservative who was very much not a fan of Liz Truss,
The woman two tables from me at a branch of Pret in the City was talking about her chemotherapy. Her male companion asked her how her treatment was going, and she replied that it was gruelling. She was on a short break and was dreading the next round. I have leukaemia, and know the pattern
Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz seems serious about his pledge to make the Bundeswehr the ‘strongest conventional army in Europe’. Yet less than a month into his chancellorship, a daunting realisation is dawning on Berlin: without resorting to conscription, there is little prospect of growing the German army or fulfilling Merz’s ambitious promise. Merz’s defence minister Boris Pistorius
When the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from most pensioners on the same day, last July, when she awarded fat pay rises to many public sector workers she perhaps imagined herself as striking a blow for inter-generational fairness. Working people would get more money – at least if
There are some sights that nobody should ever be forced to see, lest they be forced into a lifetime of therapy-intensive PTSD. To this list should be added a video of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex twerking. For some unfathomable reason, Meghan and Harry decided to mark their daughter Lilibet’s fourth birthday by posting a video
When the fintech giant Wise floated its shares on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 it was widely seen as proof that the City still had a future as a centre for equity trading. This was London’s largest-ever tech listing: it was one of only a handful of new British companies with a global presence
Much akin to Britain on 4 July last year, South Korea is now veering leftwards. Seoul only had a protracted two-and-a-half, and not fourteen, years of conservative rule by a leader who declared martial law on a cold winter evening last December. But at a time when security in East Asia is increasingly precarious, the
For Europe’s war effort, the time has come for boom or bust. Specifically, it needs more boom. On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer trumpeted the UK’s £1.5 billion investment in six new munitions factories, creating over 1,000 jobs. But we are still miles behind Russia and the rest of Europe when it comes to ammunition. Russia, with assistance from
The Conservatives were nearly wiped out at last July’s general election, and the party is currently trailing Nigel Farage’s Reform in the polls. You might think then that the handful of remaining ‘big beasts’ on the Tory benches would decide to try and work together. Instead, a split appears to be emerging in the party
The Nato meeting of defence ministers in Brussels today will give its participants an opportunity to discuss the issues facing the alliance in perhaps a more cordial, if frank, manner before the inevitably more theatrical leaders’ summit in The Hague at the end of the month. Much of the focus will be on proposed defence
Donald Trump has had another one of his ‘good conversations’ with Vladimir Putin, this time to commiserate over Ukraine’s drone raid that destroyed dozens of Russian heavy bombers across four airfields on Sunday. Trump wrote on Truth Social that their 75-minute call was a ‘good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate
It has taken Sir Keir Starmer just under 11 months to enter his Brezhnev era. Portly, autocratic and reliant on past glories, the Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by reading a list that would make Borat proud of the infrastructural benevolences to make benefit glorious region of Red Wall. In Sir Keir’s world, there is
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Rachel Reeves unveiled billions of pounds of investment today for transport and infrastructure projects, as Labour attempts to demonstrate that next week’s spending review is not just about departmental cuts. However, most of the political noise today has centred on her announcement that the winter fuel cut will be reversed by the end of the
Tree-hugging isn’t just for the Greens, it seems – as former Tory leadership contender James Cleverly will insist this evening. At a London event tonight, the ex-Foreign Secretary will make the case that Conservatives should care about the climate and urge his colleagues to reject ‘both the luddite Left and the luddite Right’ on green
Labour’s winter fuel payment cut has proven one of the most controversial policies brought in by the party since it got into government last summer – and today Chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised the payment will be reinstated to some pensioners by this winter. Speaking from Manchester this morning, the Chancellor said that ‘more people
Fists flew at Prime Minister’s Questions. The party leaders sprang from their corners and bashed each other repeatedly in the face. It was fun to watch. Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir Starmer of performing so many U-turns that ‘his head must be spinning.’ Two weeks ago, he panicked and cancelled his decision to withdraw the winter
When the White House uses a press briefing to lambast a foreign broadcaster by name, something seismic has shifted. That’s exactly what happened today when Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, publicly accused the BBC of treating ‘the word of Hamas as total truth’ and challenged the White House’s description of the broadcaster rushing out
Was the prosecution of Lucy Connolly in the public interest? That is the question now being asked of the embattled Attorney General, Richard Hermer, following my story in the Sunday Telegraph that Hermer approved the charge of stirring up racial hatred against the mother and childminder last summer, over a hastily deleted tweet on the night
Whisper it, but there was some rather good lines amid the dross of today’s PMQs. ‘Mr Speaker, I asked the Prime Minister what he believes in’, jibed Kemi Badenoch at one point. ‘He had to look in his folder to find out the answer.’ The Speaker responded in kind. ‘Please’, he said, during one of
It has only been a few weeks since the UK agreed to a trade deal with the United States that exempted us from the worst of President Trump’s tariffs. There was a grand, if slightly awkward, ceremony in the White House. The deal was sold as a triumph of negotiation and diplomacy for the Prime
Two days. That’s how long Friedrich Merz’s signature border policy survived before walking into a perfectly laid ambush. While international economists celebrate Germany’s potential economic resurgence under new leadership, the country’s Chancellor is discovering that electoral victories mean little when faced with opponents who don’t need votes to wield power. The weapon of choice? Legal
The murder of a prison officer on duty is closer now than at any time in the last 25 years. That was the inevitable conclusion I reached after the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick commissioned me to look into the threat posed by terrorists inside our high-security prisons and the safety of front-line staff in