All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Nicola Sturgeon has blamed ‘unnecessary attendances’ at hospital for the mounting crisis within Scotland’s health service. In a speech defending Health Secretary Humza Yousaf this morning, she said ‘hospitals right now are currently almost completely full’. Turn to Facebook and her government is running a series of adverts where the government’s clinical director, Jason Leitch, advises patients to seek
Rishi Sunak is absolutely right to say, in softer terms, that his family’s healthcare arrangements are no one’s business. There is a reason that one of the core tenets of the Hippocratic Oath is confidentiality: accessing healthcare is a deeply personal and private matter. That’s as true for the prime minister as it is for
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In an interview on Sunday, Rishi Sunak refused to tell Laura Kuenssberg whether he has a private GP. Could this question come back to haunt him amid accusations he is ‘out of touch’? As Parliament returns from recess, ministers are holding talks with unions to avoid further public sector strikes. However, with strike action still
When the Sunday newspaper, Le Journal Du Dimanche, recently published its annual list of France’s fifty most popular personalities, politicians barely got a look in. Only two made the cut: Emmanuel Macron, at number 35, and Marine Le Pen, at 48. When the list was first published in 1988 the president of France was François
A few days after the anniversary of the 6 January events in Washington DC, thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s congress, its presidential palace and supreme court to protest against the inauguration of Lula da Silva. They were evicted within hours, but that they got so far – in the face of a heavy
Bombs away! Prince Harry’s mission to dump ordnance on his nearest and dearest continued last night in a riveting interview with Tom Bradby of ITV. Their explosive tete-a-tete began well for the royal escapologist who described the heart-breaking scene on 31 August, 1997, when Charles (whom he calls ‘Pa’) woke him at Balmoral. ‘Darling boy,
Both the Westminster and Scottish governments are trying to show they have a grip on the crises in their respective National Health Services today. Neither currently find themselves politically in a strong place on the winter crisis. English Health Secretary Steve Barclay is giving a statement to the House of Commons when it returns this
As MPs return to parliament after the Christmas break, Rishi Sunak is under pressure both on the NHS and strikes. Union leaders have been invited for talks with ministers today in a bid to find a landing zone (though there still seems to be a rather large gap between the two sides). Yet while aides
Prince Harry kicked off the promo tour for his memoir Spare in earnest on Sunday, with a pair of interviews either side of the pond. One with Vanderbilt scion Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes and his old chum Tom Bradby on ITV in Britain. What did we learn from the Bradby chat? Well, we got a little more
It’s fair to say that last night’s ITV interview – imaginatively entitled Harry: The Interview – between Prince Harry and his long-standing friend, the journalist Tom Bradby, has been overshadowed by the chaotic leak of Harry’s autobiography Spare. Given the sheer wealth of revelations in the book, what should have been a revelatory teaser for its publication tomorrow has now become almost anti-climatic. Nonetheless, ITV has
One of the more surprising moments in Sunday night’s ITV interview was when Prince Harry sought to defend Lady Susan Hussey, the late Queen’s former lady-in-waiting accused of racism. ‘Meghan and I love Susan Hussey,’ declared Harry, ‘[Meghan] thinks she’s great. And I also know that what she meant, she never meant any harm at
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is a true believer. And that, I think, makes him very dangerous to the monarchy indeed. He came across well: modest, steely, scrupulously honest by his own lights, unshakably coherent in his view of the world and in
For days now, there has been great excitement about Prince Harry’s first UK television interview. Here, at long last, was a chance for a member of the great British press corps to ask the tough questions of the dilettante Duke of Sussex. Not for them, the soft-soaping, credulous quasi-therapy of an Oprah Winfrey light entertainment
Poor old Tom Bradby. He got the interview that everyone wants to watch – the first sit-down with Prince Harry about his new book, which aired tonight on ITV – and his fellow journalists all hate him for being a frightful suck-up. We must all be jealous. Mr S, certainly, would kill for Bradby levels
It’s a tough gig politics. One minute you’re leader of HM Loyal Opposition, the next you’re an independent backbencher likely to lose your seat come polling day. For Jeremy Corbyn, the witless, whip-less Member for Islington North, it’s been a tough few years. He lost the election in December 2019, lost the Labour leadership in
Rishi Sunak – The NHS ‘is under pressure’ Laura Kuenssberg kicked off her first show of the new year with an interview with the Prime Minister, who now has a maximum of just two years to turn his party’s ailing poll numbers around. The National Health Service has always posed its fair share of political
Rishi Sunak is still refusing to say that the NHS is ‘in crisis’. He’s held meetings on ‘NHS recovery’ this weekend, and will have been told in no uncertain terms by healthcare leaders that this is a crisis, probably the worst one the health service has faced in its history. He told Laura Kuenssberg in
Oh dear. In their endless Tory-bashing quest, it seems that the Observer has blundered again. The release of a new ITV show on a dodgy 1970s politician with a propensity for scandal prompted columnist Catherine Bennett to write how he ‘paved the way for today’s sleazy Tory MPs.’ In an article that appears in today’s
It’s the first Sunday broadcast round of 2023. Ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big grilling on the BBC, Sir Keir Starmer was up on Sky News, keen to depict Labour as the party of change. So it was jolly bad timing then that Sky chose this week to unveil their ‘Westminster Accounts’ project with Tortoise Media:
The difficulty of ramping up hospital care for Covid might threaten the CCP’s control of its people. Only a few weeks after restating its commitment to Zero Covid, the Chinese Communist Party made a remarkable U-turn in December – at pace, rather than with a carefully measured loosening of restrictions. Three elements may have shattered
There’s an advert for cruise holidays on television at the moment. It’s all dolphins and dining halls and laughing women flashing their teeth. Above the tinkly swelling music is a familiar voice. It’s the kind of clear English accent that might remind you of a compelling history teacher or vicar. ‘I wonder, I wonder, what
China is entering the new year with its tech ambitions under a Covid cloud. The enormous cost of the now abandoned zero-Covid policy has badly strained government finances, and the communist party’s pledge to build a world-beating chip industry, already reeling from American sanctions, is falling victim to the familiar ills of cost, waste and
With his forthcoming memoir and surrounding publicity tours, the Duke of Sussex has passed the point of no return. He is haemorrhaging friends and goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic. In the past few days, with revelations from his memoir Spare leaking like a sieve, Harry has been denounced for his indiscreet discussion of his service in Afghanistan
Childline has acted as a haven for struggling children for over 35 years. In 2006, it became part of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), to further its child safeguarding mission. However, in recent years Childline has chosen ideology over safeguarding. I should know; I used to work there. I was a
After his five key pledges speech this week, one can only conclude that Rishi Sunak must have been shown the chart. The chart in question crops up in a regular update that polling firm YouGov puts out on the key political issues, as seen by various segments of the electorate. It measures the priorities of
Away from the gun-toting, field-romping antics of the dilettante Duke of Sussex, normal politics carries on as usual. And this weekend will see the first in-person Jewish Labour conference since 2018. Much has changed since then, when the party’s antisemitism crisis was at its height. Chair Mike Katz reflected in Jewish News how, back then,
The physics department at King’s College London offers a module called ‘Gender Action’. Students studying this module go into schools and nurseries to work on projects related to the elimination of gender stereotypes. The course is run in association with a charity, also called Gender Action, who explain on their website that the problem with phrases such as
Two years ago, 13-year-old singer Maléna was rehearsing for Eurovision Junior when war broke out. While her rivals battled in Warsaw on stage, she stayed home in Armenia. Young men picked up AK-47s to fight against their Azerbaijani neighbours in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 4,000 never returned. A year later, Maléna re-entered
We haven’t lowered tariffs on food. We haven’t done many new trade deals, and certainly not one with the United States. Hardly any rules and regulations have been repealed, and if anyone thought it was going to help fix the NHS then the winter crisis will have disappointed them. Six years since we voted to
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Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Heale about the former prime minister’s lunch with her loyalists at Ma La Sichuan, and whether her ideas might be mounting a comeback.
You really have to wonder what Harry and Meghan, hunkered down in their Montecito wellness bunker, currently make of the reaction to Harry’s memoir Spare, which has been leaked to the world over the past few days. So far the book has made headlines for Prince Harry’s tales about losing his virginity in a field
When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful