Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Steerpike

Oxford Union president-elect’s latest own goal

Something of a nightmare is gripping the city of dreaming spires. Over at the Oxford Union – the supposed nursery of our nation’s leaders – the new Union president-elect is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Last month, George Abaraonye sparked outrage after appearing to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. Then, on Saturday

Keir Starmer is the king of porkies

Samworth Brothers are the biggest producers of pork pies in Britain. Or so they claim. I suspect they will find at the end of this financial year that they have very stiff competition from a new producer in the field, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. Except it isn’t just porkies that Sir Keir indulges in. Today

Are the Tories to blame for the China spy scandal?

14 min listen

Keir Starmer did not go into Prime Minister’s Questions with the intention of resolving the row over the collapse of the Chinese spying case: he merely wanted to avoid the pressure building too much. He announced in a long statement at the start of the session that the government would be publishing its three witness

Pedro Sanchez is compiling a blacklist of anti-abortion doctors

Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, has demanded that the regions of Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands and Madrid – most of which are governed by the Conservative People’s party (PP) – compile lists of doctors who refuse to perform pregnancy terminations. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP president of Madrid, has refused to publish what

What’s the point of remaking Amadeus?

At the close of Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning film, Amadeus, the central character, the terminally envious court composer Salieri, declares: ‘I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.’ It’s one of the many memorable lines in the film, adapted from Peter Shaffer’s play, which revolves around the

Steerpike

How close is Labour to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’ group?

When stories first emerged about a new tell-all book on Keir Starmer’s ruthless rise to power, Corbynites got predictably excited. The work by Paul Holden – titled The Fraud – has not quite proved to be the thing which finally does for this besieged No. 10 team. But it does, however, contain some interesting details

Ross Clark

It’s ridiculous for Labour to blame tax rises on Farage

It is day three of Labour’s latest strategy: to try to blame Nigel Farage for the forthcoming tax rises in the Budget. After Health Secretary Wes Streeting had a go on Monday, Rachel Reeves this morning has made a similar point. The reason she is looking to raise taxes in the Budget, the Chancellor says,

Human rights busybodies should keep out of the trans toilet row

The problems with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the bureaucracy behind it aren’t limited to the spanners they push into the wheels of immigration enforcement. They also now appear to be meddling over hard-won sex-based rights. A letter from the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, is likely to be

Netanyahu has let a key opportunity slip through his fingers

The refusal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit this week has cast a long shadow over his future – both at home and abroad. After President Donald Trump landed earlier that day at Ben Gurion Airport – at the very moment Israeli hostages began to be released – he invited Netanyahu

Strava is ruining running

When I first started running 25 years ago, it was the simplicity that captured my heart. There were no complicated techniques to master, no ghastly membership fees or extortionate equipment to shell out on. You just needed to buy a pair of shoes, get out there in the fresh air and put one foot in

Max Jeffery

Inside Britain’s socialist dogfight

For a few days in Manchester last weekend, there was a utopia. The World Transformed conference of British socialists had taken over Hulme – the once rough but now bohemian part of the city – and in the middle of it all, at the Community Garden Centre, a collectivist’s dream was established. All day comrades

Hamas unchecked is as brutal as ever

As the dust settles on Israel’s phased withdrawal from Gaza under Donald Trump’s hard-won ceasefire deal, Hamas has slithered straight back into the void. Barely hours after the ink dried on ‘phase one’ of Trump’s plan, the Islamist rulers of Gaza unleashed a wave of reprisals against rival Palestinian clans. Accusations of ‘collaboration’ with Israel,

Steerpike

Rayner set to miss I’m a Celebrity

They say that politics is showbiz for ugly people. But that has not stopped some of parliament’s finest swapping the Westminster jungle for the real thing. Over the years, a series of politicians have braved the Australian climate of ITV’s reality series I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Among them are the ex-Scottish

Stephen Daisley

Middle East experts got Trump all wrong

Whenever Donald Trump proposes a policy that runs counter to the progressive consensus, there are three stages of response: it’ll never work, it’s a disaster, it was our idea all along. We are at stage three on Trump’s truce in Gaza. Antony Blinken, Secretary of State in Joe Biden’s administration, says: ‘It’s good that President

Steerpike

Joan Collins hailed at conservative shindig

As any good Spectator subscriber knows, Joan Collins is a national institution. The Hollywood star took centre stage at last night’s big Thatcher Centre bash to mark one hundred years since the Iron Lady’s birth. Boris Johnson reminisced about Collins’ diaries when he edited this august outlet some twenty years ago. But it was left

China spy scandal: ‘a masterclass of ineptitude’?

13 min listen

Tim Shipman and Charles Parton, China adviser at the Council on Geostrategy, join James Heale to discuss the ongoing fallout over the collapse of the Westminster spy case. Security minister Dan Jarvis answered an urgent question on the matter late on Monday in Parliament, stringently denying that the government played an active role in collapsing

Can the peace in Gaza last?

He came, he saw, he conquered. That just about describes President Trump’s 12,000-mile round trip from Washington, D.C. to Israel and Egypt. He addressed Israel’s Knesset in Jerusalem, greeted the hostages and their families, hopped on Air Force One for a flight to Sharm el-Sheikh, signed the first phase of a Gaza peace deal, delivered

Polanski is talking nonsense about wealth taxes

On Question Time last week, Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader and erstwhile boob-whisperer, declared that there is no evidence that the wealthy leave Britain because of wealth taxes. A bold claim, and a wrong one. It’s also revealing, symptomatic of a growing belief on the populist left that Britain’s problems could be solved if

Ross Clark

Workers are paying the price for Labour’s National Insurance hike

Wasn’t Labour supposed to be tackling the scourge of insecure employment, doing away with exploitative zero hours contracts and giving employees protection against unfair dismissal from the first day they start their jobs? How odd then that so far it seems to have achieved the exact opposite. The latest labour market figures released by the

Steerpike

Boris blasts Farage at Thatcher dinner

To the Guildhall where hundreds of Thatcherites last night met to pay tribute to the Iron Lady. On the centenary of her birth, a roll call of the great and the good was assembled by the eponymous centre named in her honour. Highlights of the evening included Jeffrey Archer’s auction, where he told the crowd

Gareth Roberts

The truth about the Green party’s booming membership

The Greens are having quite a moment. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader of the party, there’s been a 45 per cent increase in the membership, which is now up to about a hundred thousand believers. The party is also doing very well, comparatively speaking, in opinion polling, reaching about 15 per cent,

Did Blair really rebuild Kosovo?

Donald Trump seems to be questioning Tony Blair’s inclusion in the so-called ‘Board of Peace’ to rebuild Gaza. On Monday, speaking on Air Force One, the President said, ‘I like Tony, I’ve always liked Tony, but I want to find out that he’s an acceptable choice to everybody’. Those backing Blair’s bid to be involved

The Tory party will never die

A political party widely referred to as ‘the Tories’ has now existed – albeit with some rather serious discontinuities along the way – for just short of 350 years. The rise of Reform and apparently terminal decline of the Tories in the polls, Kemi Badenoch’s widely praised conference speech notwithstanding, has, however, made many start