All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Once again gamers appear to be behind a dramatic leak of classified military intelligence. Documents originally emanating from the Pentagon appear to have been shared on the video game chat platform Discord by a 21-year-old air national guardsman – in an effort to win an esoteric argument involving the highly popular video game Minecraft Maps and
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because ‘in the next five to ten
Humza Yousaf is not a leader with troubles to seek. In the three weeks since his election as First Minister, the SNP has been rocked by a series of arrests and accusations of mismanagement. Meanwhile, the Scottish Nationalists’ poll ratings have continued to slide as Yousaf’s attempts to regain the initiative have inevitably been overshadowed
Striking was part of my childhood. One of my first memories is of walking through Middlesbrough town centre and seeing people with ‘Coal Not Dole’ badges, holding buckets and asking us to ‘Dig Deep for the Miners’. Long before I left primary school, I knew what it meant to be a ‘scab’ and why it
Ministers have agreed to back two amendments to its flagship Illegal Migration Bill as part of No. 10’s attempt to ward off the latest Tory rebellion. The first is an agreement to change the law so that judges can no longer block migrant deportations. An amendment will give the Home Secretary the power to ‘disregard’
Six months after he became Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has finally honoured one of the smaller, but more eye-catching, promises he made during his party leadership campaign. He has announced an end to the building of so-called ‘smart’ motorways, citing the economic cost and safety concerns. In doing so, Sunak has halted a near 20-year
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Prime Minister’s Questions was a punchy affair today. Rishi Sunak fought back against accusations that the Conservatives have failed on tackling crime, calling Keir Starmer ‘Sir Softy’ to turn the attack back around on Starmer, for his track record as the Director of Public Prosecutions. But was it an effective attack? Cindy Yu talks to
‘Sir Softie.’ That’s Rishi’s new nickname for Sir Keir Starmer. ‘Sir Softie,’ he called out twice at PMQs. ‘He’s soft on crime!’ The insult works because it’s easy to remember and pleasantly alliterative. And it builds on an existing perception of Sir Keir as a criminal-hugging lawyer. Sir Keir set out to overturn that impression
It seems that not even MPs’ offices are exempt from the nation’s employment crisis. Ahead of next year’s general election, Mr S hears that many bright young things on the Tory side are leaving parliament – with their elected members now finding it difficult to hire suitable replacements. Some quitting the Commons fear a Labour
The idea that Donald Trump was denied victory in the 2020 presidential election by conspirators determined to fiddle with the electoral system was never more than a fiction dreamed up by a frustrated losing candidate. At such times, the role of the media is crucial. If there were genuine evidence of vote-rigging then it should
Just what would it take to induce a housing price crash in Britain? Evidently, more than a Bank of England base rate of 4.25 per cent combined with a cost of living crisis. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index – the most comprehensive of the house pries indices – shows that prices fell
Keir Starmer had a much better Prime Minister’s Questions than Rishi Sunak today. The main reason for this was that the Labour leader had come with a clear thesis about the Tories breaking public services and Sunak not noticing. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister had brought along a bizarre insult for his opponent. While Starmer ridiculed
I see it is acceptable again for men to tell women what to do. And to snap ‘Get over it!’ if any of the little dears dares to quibble or speak back. How else do we explain William Hague taking to the airwaves to wag a patriarchal finger at the Women’s Institute and instruct it
Amidst the veneration of the Belfast Agreement taking place at Queen’s University this week, there has been a less than subtle message: that the DUP should get back to work and re-join the devolved executive at Stormont. One of the many banging that particular drum – and unlikely to feature in any Orange parade this
WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the government’s Online Safety Bill. They fear the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and say, in an open letter, that this could open the door to ‘routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages’. The stakes are high: WhatsApp and Signal are threatening to leave the
The rate of inflation has come down, barely. This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics shows inflation fell to 10.1 per cent on the year in March, down from 10.4 per cent in February. The rate remains in the double digits, where it has hovered since September 2022. Today’s update takes the rate back down
With Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine showing no signs of reaching a conclusion, a recent study by the country’s main state-run pollster, VTsIOM, revealed that 91 per cent of Russians consider themselves patriots. On the face of it, these numbers seem to vindicate two camps with a strikingly similar worldview. On the one hand, there
‘Poor taste,’ said Julie, ‘Really desperate,’ added Shawn. Mark thought it was ‘A low blow’ and Becky was simply ‘gobsmacked’. That was the verdict of our focus group participants in Erewash in Derbyshire last week when they were shown Labour’s controversial advert suggesting Rishi Sunak did not believe that those convicted of sexually assaulting children should
Now that Dominion Voting Systems has settled for $787.5 million (£633 million) – less than half the $1.6 billion (£1.3 billion) they were asking for in damages from Fox News – the circus must pack up and move elsewhere. There’s nothing the media likes to cover more than itself, and there is no media target juicier than
Talk about denying us a grand finale. Moments before the defamation ‘trial of the century’ was due to begin, media giant Fox News announced last night it had settled the lawsuit from the voting machine company, Dominion, over its reporting of the 2020 presidential election. In a last-minute settlement before trial, the network agreed to
All political careers end in failure but Humza Yousaf has managed to begin his there. Three weeks ago, he clinched the leadership of the SNP in a 52-48 per cent photo finish. Since then, he has deepened divisions within his party by shunning MSPs who failed to support his leadership bid, launched a legal challenge
It was, by his own admission, a ‘not ideal’ set of circumstances for Humza Yousaf’s speech setting out his priorities as First Minister, with the arrest of the party treasurer just hours before he was due in the Scottish parliament chamber amid the ongoing investigation into the party’s finances. Then again, there were a lot
One way or another, we’re almost all ‘content creators’ these days, humble social-media serfs toiling away in the Silicon Valley vineyards of the ‘likes’. That’s why dinosaur billionaire media owners – the old kings of content – have taken on mythic qualities even as their empires collapse. It’s why everybody loves the TV show Succession.
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The investigation into Rishi Sunak leads several papers today, but how much does it really matter? On the episode, James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Conservative Home editor Paul Goodman about why the episode is unlikely to hurt Sunak in the long run. They also discuss the coming report on Dominic Raab’s alleged workplace
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The arrest of the SNP’s treasurer Colin Beattie in relation to the probe into the party’s finances has overshadowed Humza Yousaf’s relaunch speech scheduled for today. Beattie has been taken into custody two weeks after Peter Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive, was questioned by police regarding loans made in June 2021. Can Yousaf distance himself
‘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
