All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
One of the functions of the honours system is to articulate our principles and priorities. Amid the cringe cronyism and inexplicable baubles for even more inexplicable mainstays of public life (Sir Chris Bryant, Lord preserve us), there are the nods to good people doing good work, whether in their community, the charity sector, industry, research or
With five continuous days of rail strikes this week, it’s beginning to look like we’re reaching an endgame. Someone, or something, has got to give. And it must be becoming gradually clear to the RMT’s Mick Lynch – and the other unions involved – that they won’t necessarily be the ones left standing at the end. They
It’s a new year but Lord Cruddas is not giving up an old causes. The onetime milkman turned billionaire led the campaign last summer to put Boris Johnson back on the ballot after the latter was forced out of No. 10. After that failed, Cruddas suggested he would stop funding the Conservatives unless it rewrote
Amid New Year celebrations, and a tide of high-profile obituaries, you might have missed something small and far away, but nonetheless significant. The opposition in Venezuela has dissolved its government-in-pretence. By 72 votes to 29, the country’s national assembly voted its parallel government out of existence. Juan Guaidó can no longer say that he is Venezuela’s legitimate president-in-waiting. Venezuela
They say time can be a great healer. And, in the case of Leo Varadkar, it seems that even the most festering of wounds can be fixed by a brief stint away from the premiership. Varadkar, who became Taoiseach again in December, was one of the great antagonists in the Brexit battles during his first
Donald Trump just made his first significant political error of the 2024 nomination battle, and it’s a doozy. After being asked about the abortion issue, Trump took to Truth Social to post the following: ‘It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion
A new year, a new grudge. Or, at least, a new expression of an old one, which is pretty much all that we’ve heard from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over the past few years. Yet after the interminable six hours of score-settling that Netflix punished us with last month in the form of
University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant PwC pointed out that more and more middle-class teenagers are walking away from old-style university studies and embracing degree apprenticeships and other forms of on-the-job learning. Already the number of those taking up degree apprenticeship
‘A mother hen watching all her chicks, a sassy old lady full of tricks’. Mrs Brown’s Boys recently returned to BBC One for yet more festive specials. Astonishingly the last actual full series of non-seasonal episodes was transmitted ten years ago, though a new one is imminent. This Christmas’s were, reassuringly, exactly the same as
The best thing that can be said about global economic growth prospects for 2023 is that no-one is expecting very much. On that basis, hopefully, things can only get better. Over the weekend, International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Kristalina Georgieva said that she expects a third of the globe to be in recession, including
And you thought we’d seen the last of them in 2022. The new year kicks off with some old score-settling: for next week will see the publication of Prince Harry’s pithily-titled memoir Spare (or Going Spare, quips one royal insider). As the title suggests, the book is expected to focus on the fraternal frictions between
With Labour twenty points ahead of the Conservatives and leading in most policy areas – including, crucially, the ability to best manage the economy – the next election seems to be Keir Starmer’s to lose. Divided and distraught Conservative MPs appear to have accepted their fate. Indeed, some supporters of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss
Anyone who thinks the NHS isn’t in a state of collapse hasn’t been paying attention. This is the 75th year of the health service, and it is arguably its worst. Emergency doctors are now warning that A&E delays are ‘killing up to 500 people a week’. They say as many as 500 people could be
It was Benedict XVI’s election as Pope, his speeches and his writings that prompted my conversion, and it was his words at Bellahouston Park during his 2010 visit to the United Kingdom that first made me seriously consider my vocation. Without Pope Benedict XVI I would not have become a priest. His passing is for
With a new year comes the New Year’s Honours and I’m struck to see an MBE given to Pouria Hadjibagheri. He’s the technical lead of a civil service team whose drive and creativity led to the Coronavirus data hub. It was a breakthrough in the democratisation of public data. He and his team saw to it that
In a quiet suburb of Moscow, a twenty-minute metro ride from the Kremlin, is the Soviet Union’s answer to Disneyland. Between a budget supermarket and a teacher training college is the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, known to locals by its Russian-language acronym, VDNKh. The ‘Kh’ is said like you are clearing your throat.
New year, old politicians. Yesterday’s men will loom large in the politics of 2023. British politics has a nostalgia problem, often to the benefit of our over-large population of former prime ministers. They may have disappointed in office, but the urge to rose-tint our memories means failure is no bar to a lucrative or influential
Like many with an interest in national security, I’ve spent this week closely following the news that there has been yet another delay to the release of the long-anticipated review into the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent. But unlike many of my colleagues, these issues feel more intimate and closer to home for me, given my
I hate the fact that I felt a major sense of relief when I saw the news that the World Boxing Council (WBC) has rejected calls from trans-activists to allow male bodied people to compete against females. Rather, they are recommending that a special transgender category is set up, and further, that only male born people can
Even in their most difficult moments, there’s an aura of invincibility about the Conservative party. It is, after all, one of the oldest political parties in the world, if not the oldest – depending on whether you count back to the founding of the party’s current iteration in 1834, or the Tory party’s origins in
Pope Benedict is dead; now only Pope Francis remains in the Vatican. And the Catholic Church is diminished by his passing, at least in a here-and-now sense. He was controversial for those who wanted the church to identify with the values of the age, and was cordially detested by liberal Catholics – I know of
Following an unusually quiet December for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin has emerged to deliver his traditional New Year’s Eve address. The first since his invasion of Ukraine ten months ago, many across Russia’s eleven time zones will today be glued to TV screens and internet live-streams at five minutes to midnight to hear what
Four Chancellors, three Prime Ministers, two monarchs – one hell of a year. We said that it would be difficult to top the Covid craziness of 2021: we were wrong. Partygate, Pinchergate, porngate, beergate, queuegate – the greatest hits kept on coming as Boris Johnson was washed away in a sea of sleaze and scandal.
Anyone travelling from China to the UK will now be asked to present evidence of a negative Covid-19 test before they are allowed to enter the country. But what will this achieve and is this measure even necessary? It’s often argued that these sorts of restrictions don’t work, and this is a reason the UK
The parlous state of the Conservative party would matter very much less were it not for the fact that the alternative is a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. Recent days have given us two examples of how a Starmer administration would be very far from the moderate and sensible force he tries to depict.
In August this year Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times. The novelist survived the attack, to the outward relief of the West. Prominent figures from the world of religion, politics and the arts offered their unqualified support to Rushdie as he lay in a New York hospital, recovering from the 12 knife wounds to his
Back in early 2019, my wife discovered that she was pregnant with our fourth child. A few weeks later, we discovered that the child, a girl, had Down Syndrome. The NHS asked if we wanted to abort her. We did not. My wife, brave and stoic, soon accepted the news as a blessing. I wanted
So, are you Team Tate or Team Thunberg? Do you side with the muscled misogynist who has convinced tragic TikTok incels that he’s a ‘real man’? Or with the pint-sized prophetess of doom famous for scaring the world witless about the coming climate apocalypse? I say neither. I can’t be the only person who finds
It’s been hard to miss the excitement since the US Energy Department announced that its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had produced a fusion reaction, which, for the first time, unleashed more power than it took to create. Using an array of 192 lasers to superheat and compress hydrogen atoms to more than 100,000,000°C, scientists managed
What’s your New Year’s resolution? Eat less, move more? Or perhaps you’re a contrary cuss aiming to eat more and move less? Ever perverse, I plan a little exercise which will leave me both more streamlined yet more replete; by culling what I can only call ‘swivel-eyed Remainers’ from my friendship group, both online and
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its long-serving founder and Executive Chairman, Professor Klaus Schwab, are the subjects of many insane conspiracy theories. This NGO, which again this January will bring together politicians, business leaders, journalists, academics, and assorted celebrities in Davos, has been accused, among other things, of being a secret cabal of paedophiles who used the Covid-19
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number one: Yuan Yi Zhu’s piece from April on Canada’s euthanasia policy. There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under
What’s the point in asking people flying in from China to present a negative Covid test? Rishi Sunak has stepped in to order this, but he hasn’t quite explained why this is necessary or how it would help. Covid is still widespread worldwide but British resistance (through exposure and vaccination) is such that the virus
