All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The BBC’s decision to back down and allow Gary Lineker to return to presenting is a welcome conclusion to a weekend of extreme silliness. In withdrawing the Match of the Day presenter from the airwaves over a crass and stupid tweet in which Lineker compared the government’s rhetoric on illegal migration to that of 1930s
The BBC-based sitcom W1A centred on a running joke about how the spinelessness and ineptitude of senior management led them to dig themselves ever-deeper into holes. At one point in the series, the Corporation’s ‘Head of Values’ is wrong-footed by an ex-footballer who wants to be a television pundit. Another episode centres on him closing
As Wagner mercenaries are being deliberately expended by the regular military as cannon-fodder in the battle for Bakhmut, their backer, Evgeny Prigozhin, is learning a hard lesson in Kremlin politics: it doesn’t matter how useful you were yesterday, what matters is how useful you may be tomorrow. Last year, the Russians were desperately short of
Well, it was nice while it lasted. Following the farce of last night’s 14-minute episode of Match of the Day, BBC management have come out this morning waving the white flag to sue for peace with Gary Lineker. The ex-football star is going to return to the Beeb after after the corporation announced a review
The Oscars was always doomed to fail to live up to the drama of last year’s ceremony. In 2022, Will Smith stormed on to the stage to slap host Chris Rock after he took offence to the comic’s routine. But in Los Angeles last night, celebrities were on their best behaviour. Well, mostly. Step forward,
What if your boss asked you to work fewer hours, for 50 per cent more pay, surrounded by great coffee, great beaches and great weather? A third of UK junior doctors have answered ‘bonza!’ and are already planning their move to Australia. This comes as the NHS struggles along, with shortfalls of 12,000 hospital doctors
One hundred miles or so south of Sydney, lies tranquil Jervis Bay. On its shores, largely reclaimed by the bush, are the abandoned foundations of a large nuclear power station. When it was built in the late 1960s, it was intended to be the first of a network supplying nuclear-generated electricity to the eastern Australian
Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I
Day five and the Gary Lineker row shows no sign of abating any time soon. The BBC has gone into meltdown; the Prime Minister has been forced to distance himself. Lineker’s show Match of the Day was shortened to a mere 20 minutes without commentary, with his co-stars boycotting the programme in ‘solidarity.’ Faced with
When silhouetted against the symbolism – as French media proudly insist – of King Charles choosing France for his first state visit at month’s end, this weekend is very much an Anglo-French affair. On Friday, Rishi Sunak and seven ministers visited Paris – a first for five frosty years – for a Franco-British summit with
While sports fans this morning are discussing why the entire England rugby team backed Gary Lineker by choosing not to turn up at Twickenham, the drama rumbles on. At its heart, this is a communications crisis borne out of that all-too-often-seen disease of people with important jobs taking themselves far too seriously. First we have
Tech start-ups tend to involve taking big risks on ideas which are untested both in terms of technology and the market place. Yet it isn’t blind faith in new ideas that is threatening to bring down scores of British tech start-ups over the next few days: it is boring old bonds. Many start-ups have relied
With only a day to go until voting for the next SNP leader starts, candidates don’t have long left to convince members to back them. So perhaps it’s little wonder that tensions are running high. The favourite for the contest Humza Yousaf has secured the backing of John Swinney, with the Deputy First Minister publicly
A Chancellor’s Sunday media appearance before a Budget often serves as a ‘free pass’ – not because difficult questions aren’t asked, but because they can quite easily get out of answering by saying some polite version of: ‘you’ll have to wait and see.’ So instead of focusing on the upcoming Budget this Wednesday, the BBC’s
Oh dear. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. After Gary Lineker was forced to ‘step back’ from presenting BBC’s Match of the Day over a tweet comparing the language used by the government with regards to its new Illegal Migration Bill to that ‘used by Germany in the 30s’, other presenters – from
36 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and regular contributor to The Spectator to discuss new footage which has emerged from January 6th.
It will be yet another bailout for failed bankers. It will simply encourage yet more risk-taking in the City. It only impacts a tiny number of tech companies and venture capital funds, and anyway we can’t afford it. As the London arm of Silicon Valley Bank – which has gone spectacularly bust over the weekend
Well, did you enjoy MOTD? Did you miss Gary? Thanks to, let’s just say ‘circumstances’, we were able to take part in a unique television experiment last night. For the first time in its 60-year history MOTD consisted of all action and no talk. No presenters, no expert comment, no fancy graphic preview packages, no
The womb, that secretive house of early life, is coming under the spotlight. For a long time it was scarcely mentioned in public at all, save in obstetrics, gynaecology, DH Lawrence novels and the Bible. In recent years, however, the uterus has attracted the dubious attentions of the ‘wellness’ industry: Gwyneth Paltrow even recommended ‘cleansing’
In July and August, Australia and New Zealand are hosts of the 2023 Fifa Women’s world cup. It could not be a better opportunity for the sport. Football in Australia at the professional level lags well behind Australian Rules and rugby league when it comes to profile and broadcast attention. And in New Zealand
‘Message me when you get there.’ This phrase became a rallying cry when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Greece this week, in protests sparked by the country’s deadliest train disaster which killed 57 people earlier this month. Anger against the government was palpable, with protesters shouting ‘murderers’ outside the parliament
I never expected staff at an entire department of the BBC to put their shoulders to the wheel of the campaign to bring about an early demise for the television licence fee. Yet that is what those working for BBC Sport have done with their rock-solid sympathy strike on behalf of Gary Lineker. Of course,
My son, Martyn Hett, was one of 22 people murdered in the Manchester Arena terrorist attack on 22 May 2017. That day, my whole world came crashing down. I knew instantly that life as it was before had changed completely and forever. At the time, I was a busy psychotherapist with my own private practice. Family life was also
After months of negotiations and a week of drama, the Turkish opposition bloc has announced Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), as their joint presidential candidate. The general election in May looks set to be the biggest challenge president Erdoğan has faced since coming to power in 2002. An unusual scene
Georg Friedrich Prince of Prussia has two big problems: he is the great-great-grandson and heir of Wilhelm II, Germany’s last emperor who was forced to abdicate after his country’s disastrous defeat in the First World War. For another, he is Prince of a country that hasn’t existed since 1947, when the victorious Allies abolished Prussia.
Any hopes in No. 10 that Rishi Sunak’s French charm offensive with Emmanuel Macron would dominate the weekend papers were dashed when the BBC announced on Friday that Gary Lineker had been asked to ‘step back’ from presenting Match of the Day. This decision came after a tweet by Lineker where he compared the language
Today was the penultimate party hustings of the SNP leadership contest, this time with Glasgow party members quizzing the leadership contenders. Did they want to know about what the next leader of the SNP thinks about the constitution perhaps, or the race to save Scotland’s NHS? Not quite. Instead, it appears what really matters to
The high-profile political activist Gary Lineker will not present Match of the Day tonight after he likened the rhetoric of the government to 1930s Germany. Several pundits and commentators are boycotting the show, while the BBC has also been forced to pull from air Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk. Many people are professing themselves baffled that this story about a football presenter
It’s not a proper Tory bunfight until Nadine Dorries weighs in. The former Culture Secretary has never been shy to share her opinions and she has now weighed into the ongoing row about Gary Lineker and Match of the Day. ‘Lineker off air amid Twitter row’ roared the strap-line on Dorries’ flagship Friday show as
Supermarkets are once again back in the firing line. Henry Dimbleby, the Leon co-founder turned government food tsar, has blamed the current food shortages on their ‘weird culture’. When food is scarce UK supermarkets won’t raise their prices, he claimed. It leads to growers selling less here and more in Europe, exacerbating shortages. He wasn’t alone
The BBC’s decision to take Gary Lineker off the air is the sort of self-harming stupidity at which the Corporation excels. The Match of the Day presenter tweeted that the Illegal Migration Bill was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people’ and done ‘in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the
How big a deal is it that Australia has chosen a British design for its nuclear submarines rather than the US one that it could have chosen? Does it really justify Rishi Sunak ‘bouncing on the balls of his feet’, as described by one minister? True, the machines aren’t actually going to be built in
12 min listen
Boris Johnson is reportedly cutting the number of names on his honours list from 100 to 60 (still much higher than the average honours list for former prime ministers). This is a Tory sleaze scandal in the making, so should Rishi Sunak think about blocking it? Or could the reminder of Johnson’s flaws actually help
When I was a girl, footballers had a somewhat limited vocabulary. That wasn’t to say that they were seen as inferior to wordy types – on the contrary, like blind piano-tuners, they were seen as accessing a higher level of excellence in one specific realm which we Normals had no chance of achieving. Thus when they