All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix ‘docuseries’ looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of African descent, her grandmother’s idea of historical truth was highly subjective.
Just what Humza needed on the day of his Big Speech to Holyrood: another arrest in what has inevitably been called the ‘campervangate’ affair. This time it was the party treasurer, Colin Beattie, who was taken into police custody this morning. The 71-year-old has now been released without charge, pending further investigation. It is the
For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders
Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed
It must rank as some form of political satire that Angela Merkel has been awarded Germany’s highest political honour. Not least because the former Chancellor will most likely be remembered foremost for turning a blind eye to the security threat posed by Russia. The Grand Cross of the Order of Merit has previously been given
For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that
Another day brings another bombshell revelation about Scotland’s ruling party. Yesterday morning the SNP treasurer Colin Beattie was arrested by police investigating the party’s finances. It now transpires that Beattie has quit as the SNP’s national treasurer following his arrest. He also states that he will ‘be stepping back from my role on the Public
Who needs Succession when we have Dominion? A billion-dollar lawsuit involving a media tycoon, the 2020 presidential race and a potential Supreme Court showdown. But for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News this is no fictional drama. They are about to begin one of the most anticipated defamation trials in American history, over the claims that
The UK’s labour market is cooling down, slowly. Although unemployment rose from 3.7 per cent to 3.8 per cent, figures published by the Office for National Statistics this morning show that job vacancies have fallen for the ninth consecutive period. They’re now down 47,000 but still stand at over a million. The number of people
The headline in the Guardian could not have spelt it out more clearly: ‘World leaders rush to congratulate Lula on Brazil election victory’. From North America to Europe to Australia, the sigh of relief that Lula had beaten Jair Bolsonaro in last October’s general election was audible. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was cock-a-hoop, so too
Fighting is raging once again in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a power struggle between rival factions has claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Around 185 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured in the wake of an attempted coup. A US diplomatic convoy came under fire yesterday and the EU’s
After decades in the shadows, members of the Scottish Labour party are back out in the open, their confidence growing. Emboldened first by polls signalling the very real prospect of Sir Keir Starmer becoming the next prime minister, Scottish Labour politicians now watch with tastefully concealed glee as the SNP – under the stewardship of new
Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch
The Internet Archive (archive.org), a San Francisco-based virtual lending library, is one of the quiet wonders of the modern world. A digital collection of seven million books and nearly 15 million audio-recordings, it was ambitiously intended by its founder Brewster Kahle – a member of the internet ‘Hall of Fame’ – to be a kind of
‘She is screaming, she is a little kid, you know – five, maybe six years old. And I took a kill shot, you know? I was told to let no one out’, said Azamat Uldarov, blowing cigarette smoke at his phone camera. Yesterday Russian human rights organization Gulagu.net published a video with two ex-convicts and
How long are the NHS strikes going to go on for? The collapse in agreement on nurses’ pay over the Easter recess has made it much harder for ministers to push the British Medical Association towards a deal on junior doctors’ pay, as well as undermining Rishi Sunak’s positioning as someone who gets things done.
A new week has come around, and it brings yet more turmoil for the SNP. Calls for Nicola Sturgeon to resign as MSP for Glasgow Southside have grown louder after a leaked video showed the former SNP leader angrily warning colleagues about speaking negatively of the party’s finances. Despite her colleagues returning to the Scottish
As the battle of the economic forecasts rages on, it’s useful to note that (right now, anyway), the predictions aren’t all that different. The more optimistic scenarios, like the one published by EY ITEM Club today, suggest the UK will see minuscule growth this year but avoid technical recession. The pessimistic scenarios, like the IMF’s
In a warning to Kremlin critics everywhere, the prominent Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza has today been sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony by a Moscow court. His conviction is based on several charges, all of which he denies, including treason and ‘discreditation of the Russian Army’ – a move that has been
The chip maker ARM decided against listing its shares in London, despite plenty of arm twisting from the government. The building materials group CRH decided last month that New York was a better place for its equity to be traded, leaving the FTSE for good. The mining giant BHP has moved its listing from London
Are we going to have to give up flying to save the planet? Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers. It is rather significant that the
Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, the SNP was renowned for its discipline, unity and its impressive electoral success. Since the former first minister resigned, a series of revelations have chipped away at the party’s reputation leaving Scotland’s dominant party standing on shaky ground. If people had cared to look they would be forgiven for thinking that
Bang goes Rishi Sunak’s big maths speech. Fresh from delivering a paean to the joys of numeracy, the Prime Minister is now facing an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner into his outside interests. The probe is understood to concern Sunak’s wife’s shareholding in a business that runs Koru Kids – one of the childcare
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Parliament is back from the Easter break and Rishi Sunak has taken the opportunity to reiterate his commitment to improving maths literacy in the country. Listeners will remember that the plan to make maths compulsory until 18 was first announced in Rishi’s new year’s speech along with his five priorities. Why is maths provision so
It is a bad cliché, of several decades’ vintage, to say that a given civil war is ‘complex’. Normally, this is a dodge on the foreign correspondent’s part. He either wishes to hide his lack of knowledge from you, or to pretend that without him holding the reader’s hand, they could never hope to understand the
‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation’ claimed Robert Conquest ‘is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.’ If that is the case then the Brecon Beacons National Park must be run by a veritable junta of saboteurs. Park bosses have today announced that it will
Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to
Over the past month, there has been increasing optimism within the Tory party that the political situation may not be as apocalyptic as first feared. The polls appear to be narrowing slightly, Rishi Sunak’s approval ratings have risen and there are early signs of progress on the Prime Minister’s policy priorities. But it’s the coming
Following the row over those Labour attack adverts about child sex offenders, it seems it’s open season now on Sir Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions. Over the weekend the Sunday papers have been filled with stories from when he led the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) including his poor record in, er, prosecuting
Rishi Sunak is back in the headlines today, saying it’s time for greater maths literacy. But when it comes to his own political pledges, how many of those stand up to mathematical scrutiny? A Spectator mug for the first person to complete all challenges.
Many Brits who’ve outstayed their welcome in the Old Country head across the Pond for pastures new and the chance of a fresh start. The Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Oliver. Could former prime minister Liz Truss be the next to follow that well-trodden path? Since her astonishing fall from grace last September, when she managed
It would take longer than I’ve got to comb through copies of Thank you, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, to find out the ways in which they’ve been edited, ‘minimally’, to remove offensive language, but I think we can work out which bits may have fallen foul of the thought police. Penguin Random House have informed
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Isabel Hardman hosts the highlights from Sunday morning’s political shows. This morning’s shows heavily focussed on the crisis in the NHS, after the Royal College of Nursing voted against the government’s pay deal, meaning further strike action. Pat Cullen says the strikes could last as long as Christmas. Conservative Party Chair, Greg Hands disagrees and
