All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
‘I know that what I have revealed, while increasing public knowledge, will raise other questions that I have not been able to answer,’ Sir John Saunders said, in issuing his final report into the Manchester Arena bombing. ‘I did ask the questions, I did get answers, but for the reasons I have given I have
Oliver Dowden – the unions have a decent deal now, ‘let’s move forward’ The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Oliver Dowden faced up to the media this morning to speak on a number of issues, beginning with the NHS strikes. Dowden claimed the government had always been willing to engage with the unions, but
How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels? The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’
Ninety years ago this week, the acting chief of the Munich Police Department held a press conference. The new man had been busy. On assuming office a few days earlier, the chief had tried to get to grips with what he saw as acute political unrest in the city by authorising a wave of mass
Boris Johnson was reselected on Thursday night as the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. Yet the future of his parliamentary career could be decided this week when he appears before the Privileges Committee. The former prime minister is facing a Commons inquiry into whether he knowingly misled parliament over partygate, the alleged
And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports
First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray
‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had changed. He was no longer Polish; the culture he had been born in, the citizenship he held, the language he spoke, the country he loved – it all meant nothing. He was just Jewish. He
It would be enough to buy Tesco twice over. Or Barclays, with almost enough change left over to buy Lloyds as well. Even by the standards of the financial markets 50 billion Swiss francs (£45 billion) is a lot of money. And yet, as it turns out, it is not enough to save Credit Suisse.
The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims. But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive
There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been
We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give
No victory is ever final in politics – and the wrecking-ball of lockdowns now seems to have destroyed almost every success of the 2012-20 welfare reforms. The workless numbers are again as bad as they they were under Labour. People who stopped working during lockdowns never quite got back into it and the UK has
Boris Ratnikov, a former KGB officer and retired chief advisor to Russia’s security service, gave a remarkable interview back in 2016. Ratnikov, who died in 2020, claimed his boss had penetrated and read the mind of Madeleine Albright while she was US Secretary of State in the mid-1990s. Ratnikov said his superior officer used a photograph
12 min listen
The SNP has confirmed that its membership has fallen to 72,000 – a loss of over 30,000 since 2021. This has prompted an open letter from leadership candidates Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, calling for transparency when it comes to membership numbers. Why are so many leaving? Also on the podcast, Humza Yousaf has committed
Their two countries may be at war, but Russian and Ukrainian police have a common and apparently formidable enemy. That is, judging by their efforts to infiltrate groups of 13- to 17-year-old kids sporting long black hair and hoodies emblazoned with a picture of a spider on the back. The so-called PMC Ryodan – a
There is great excitement in Italy, which has spilled over into the British press: Carlo Vecce, a professor from Naples, has discovered documents in the archives of Florence that appear to indicate that Caterina, the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, was a baptised slave who had been brought all the way to Tuscany from the
Well, well, well. It’s been a tumultuous time for the SNP recently, and no one knows that better than their own spin doctor Murray Foote. But it all seemed to prove too much this evening as he announced his shock resignation. Standing down after four years of spinning for the party, Mr Foote issued a
Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary
First the good news. Unlike the IMF, which predicted in January that the UK economy would have a worse 2023 than even Russia, the OECD’s latest forecast has Britain outperforming Russia. Now the bad news: the OECD still predicts the UK to perform worse than any European country other than Russia. Forecasts aside, the actual
11 min listen
A look ahead to next week where MPs will vote on parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. What would a win look like for the government? The vote has been conveniently placed on the same day Boris Johnson is already in parliament for the privileges committee hearing. The lone rebel of the protocol will have
A million pounds is very small change in the context of wider government spending – especially compared to the £20 billion of extra giveaways Jeremy Hunt has announced for the next few years. But sometimes that small change tells you more about a government’s priorities, and its sense of direction, than the big announcements. I
People love free stuff. Why wouldn’t they? Free healthcare, free education, free childcare – what’s not to like? Expanding free childcare hours doesn’t change the fact that a full-time nursery place costs around £15,000 a year Of course, government provides nothing for free. When the economist Milton Friedman appropriated the adage ‘there’s no such thing
On a normal morning in Winchester, the streets are crowded with sullen teenagers mooching in sleepy phalanxes to school, scruffy in their school uniforms, a hormonal march of the penguins. My three teenagers are usually among them. Today, however, the city was treated to a different spectacle: hoards of adolescents in hoodies. That’s right, it’s
Democracy and the rule of law have always struggled to take hold in Pakistan, a country in which no elected prime minister has yet completed a full term in office and where the military has been in power for nearly half of its history. The latest antics of Imran Khan, the former prime minister, do
France is on the brink of another revolution! The proles are swarming to the barricades and it’s only a matter of time before President Macron is dragged from the Élysée palace. That is the gist of some of the more excitable reporting about what happened yesterday in France. It was certainly a dramatic day after
After the hash the Church of England has made of the issue of same-sex marriage, a group of MPs led by long-standing churchman Ben Bradshaw has hatched a plan to pull the Anglican chestnuts out of the fire. His scheme is undoubtedly well-meaning: unfortunately, it is more likely to push them further in, to be
Few people in Rostov-on-Don will weep over the news that a local FSB building in the city caught fire yesterday. Just the mention of the acronym for the Security Services (formerly KGB) was, when I lived there, enough to still and silence a room. When a girl in one of my classes announced rather proudly
It’s a big week for Boris Johnson as he prepares to give evidence before the Privileges Committee next Wednesday. So it will have been to some relief tonight that he easily won re-adoption as the candidate for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat which he currently represents in parliament. The association have now released the
The money for the NHS pay agreement isn’t new cash, I’m told. This is going to cause a real ruckus with the trade unions, who came away from today’s talks believing that the £2.5 billion deal was extra money from the Treasury. But talking to my sources in government, I now understand that while there
Rising NHS waiting lists, a widening attainment gap in education and falling support for independence: Scotland’s next first minister will have a bulging in-tray when he or she assumes office in coming weeks. However one issue in particular seems set to be an early thorn in the side of Scotland’s new leader: the increasingly scandalous