All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It is easy to imagine that a dam might be bursting in China. There have been spontaneous street protests across the country against the country’s zero Covid policy, unconfirmed videos in Shanghai show crowds calling for president Xi Jinping to resign, and political content is slipping though China’s draconian social media censorship. Earlier in the pandemic,
It was Enoch Powell who once called the whips’ office ‘the sewers of parliament’. But it seems that – much like the aforementioned disciplinarians – the sewers themselves aren’t up to much these days. For word reaches Mr S of a problem with the parliamentary plumbing system that are driving MPs around the (U) bend.
Ye is not in Calabasas anymore. The superstar rapper, designer and now 2024 presidential candidate flew to western Maryland on Monday alongside his new campaign manager, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous and the de facto leader of the ‘Groyper Army’, Nick Fuentes. The trio landed at Frederick Municipal Airport only to find that their driver
Saturday’s news of the sudden death of Belarusian foreign minister Vladimir Makei, as well as the rather terse nature of the official notice, has raised the inevitable storm of instant speculation, revolving around notional Russian plots. In the process it has illustrated both some of the shortcomings of ‘instant punditry’ and the continuing significance of
Jeremy Hunt has supposedly just closed a black hole in the government’s finances. But is another black hole opening up before his eyes? One of the more popular announcements in the autumn statement on 17 November was a rise in the windfall tax applied to oil and gas companies from 25 per cent to
Across China, the world’s most populous nation and its second largest economy, scenes unprecedented since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 are unfolding. In city after city crowds of young people are taking to the streets, holding up blank placards in eloquent protest against state censorship, and demanding to be treated ‘as citizens not slaves’.
All eyes tonight will be on Rishi Sunak when he addresses the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet. The Prime Minister is expected to give his first major speech on foreign policy in which he will pledge to treat Britain’s adversaries in Beijing and Moscow with ‘robust pragmatism.’ Such talk is likely to be read in the
The Chinese people seem to have run out of patience with their country’s draconian Covid policies. After almost three years of brutal lockdowns, mass testing and sweeping quarantine, all facilitated by claustrophobic surveillance, they appear to have snapped. The protests that swept China at the weekend are the biggest challenge to Xi Jinping since he
Things are looking up for the Labour party. They’re twenty points ahead in the polls, the Tories are squabbling over planning reform and just last week Keir Starmer won Politician of the Year at the annual Spectator Parliamentarian Awards. Still – as anyone within the Leader’s Office will tell you – they’re keen to avoid
Is the BBC trying to mend its ways? Word reaches Mr S that John McAndrew – the former head honcho of GB News – is returning to Broadcasting House as the Corporation’s new Director of News Programmes. The TV veteran boasts more than a quarter of a century of experience in news and current affairs
Are the Conservatives planning to inject Andy Burnham with political steroids? That could be the result of one of the plans being mulled by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who has been trying to work out how to make levelling up something that works and lasts. Greater Manchester Tories will spit tacks about the mayoral position created
Staging rebellions against their own government has become a way of life for many Tory MPs – but why choose onshore wind farms as the hill on which to die? If Rishi Sunak concedes to the demands of a group of (reportedly) around 50 MPs and lifts the moratorium on onshore wind which has been in
If you, like me, have an unhealthy taste for depressing news, then you’ll have already heard about the Wellcome Collection’s decision to close its Medicine Man exhibition last weekend. The display, which featured an extraordinary range of unusual medical artefacts collected by the entrepreneur Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), has been permanently shut on the grounds that
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As MPs mull over whether they would like to stand in the next general election, the cracks in the party widen. Notable MPs like Chloe Smith and Dehenna Davison have already declared they will not stand but there are likely to be more over the coming days. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has two rebellions to
Everyone on the television agrees: seeing an England team give succour to a repressive regime by playing prestigious fixtures on its soil is deeply troubling – or ‘problematic’ to use the latest horrible buzz word. A society that represses gay people and women and whose ruling class routinely engages in corruption to further its own
It’s somehow appropriate that Matt Hancock finished third in the 2022 series of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Third is a word that fits him neatly. Third choice. Third wheel. Third rate. Third is the ‘and you did great, too!’ of victories. The day before, Hancock had donned the brass hot pants of ‘the Bronze
The Lying-in-State of Her Majesty the Queen was widely hailed in September as a triumph. The organisation was slick, the tributes were moving, the crowds respectful and the queue deftly managed. But it seems that the otherwise flawless ceremony had one misstep: the impact of all those thousands of visitors on the floor of Westminster
As Tory MPs ponder whether to stand down at the next election in the face of grim polling, the Prime Minister is facing an uphill task to show he has a grip on his party. Ahead of a difficult winter with the NHS and public sector strikes, Rishi Sunak is facing a two pronged rebellion
The disappearance of rural bus routes is one of the small tragedies of our time. It isn’t, alas, a very glamorous tragedy. It affects older people, poorer people, people who live in unfashionable parts of the country. You seldom see Twitter storms about rural bus routes. You don’t see footballers campaigning on the issue with moist eye, bent knee and clenched fist.
America could be entering the ‘Great Stagflation’, defined by economist Noriel Roubini as ‘an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions’. Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labour participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.
All of Westminster was glued to their screens on Sunday tonight to watch the final of I’m A Celebrity. For three weeks, SW1’s finest have watched Matt Hancock – the Casanova of the Commons – battle heroically against endless jungle-based challenges. The onetime Health Secretary has been covered in creepy-crawlies and subject to public opprobrium
The Covid situation in China is not looking good right now. The authorities have trapped themselves into a situation from which there’s no obvious escape strategy. Whatever they choose – or will be forced – to do next will be very costly. The country is extremely poorly prepared for a major surge of the virus
How can 20 per cent of people in our great cities be on benefits at a time of mass migration and record vacancies? It’s perhaps the most important question in politics right now, but it’s not being given any scrutiny because the real figures lie behind a fog of data. But the fog is easily
On Friday, Justin Trudeau made his much-anticipated appearance before the Canadian Public Order Emergency Commission, where he gave testimony about his unprecedented decision to use the Emergencies Act last February to suspend civil liberties and suppress the trucker protests against vaccine mandates. Using the Act allowed Trudeau to freeze the personal and business accounts of the protestors
Mark Harper – Inflation matching pay rises are ‘unaffordable’ The Transport Secretary Mark Harper joined Sophy Ridge this morning, at a time when public sector strikes are high on the agenda. Though rail unions claim to have found Harper far more satisfactory to work with than his predecessor Grant Shapps, Harper cautioned that nobody should
Farewell Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘trans, non-binary and gender-variant children, young people and their families’. Green resigned rather abruptly on Friday, and the statement from its chair was short and to the point. An interim CEO will be appointed in due course. Mermaids has found itself under
One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings
Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for China’s zero-Covid policy. Rare displays of public anger have risen to levels not seen since the Shanghai lockdown, and perhaps even since the death of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang three years ago. Chinese social
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, appeared 60 years ago this month. Vividly portraying a normal day in the life of a Gulag prisoner, it was followed by Solzhenitsyn’s two great anti-Stalinist novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), which helped establish the Soviet dissident-in-excelsis as a
I love a good hard debate, especially at a university. I can’t recall how many such clashes I have had, on God, free speech, marijuana, and Russia. But on the subject I really want to talk about, the destruction of the grammar schools, I find it harder and harder to get anyone to debate against
Just why is Britain still spending over £50 million a year in development aid to China? Despite it being the world’s second largest economy and investing in UK infrastructure projects, the latest statistical release by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office shows that in 2021 more than £50 million of bilateral aid money was spend
On New Year’s Day, 2014, during those sunny, innocent times of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, Labour MP Keith Vaz headed down to Luton Airport to greet new arrivals coming off the planes. There he met a rather bemused young Romanian man, Victor Spirescu, who had no idea he was going to become the face of migration on