All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Liz Truss goes into her first Conservative party conference with the latest Opinium polling giving Labour a 19-point-lead and her own approval ratings down at -37 – worse than Boris Johnson’s in his final days in office. Yet despite this, the new Prime Minister used her first big sit down interview since the fallout from
It was right of the Prime Minister to acknowledge that the fiscal event (the mini Budget) needs to be revisited. There needs to be a recognition of mistakes. But it’s still the case, on the basis of what the Prime Minister said this morning, that there is an inadequate realisation at the top of government
At the start of the year, largely thanks to the actions of the president, the Republican party was sitting pretty. It would be generous to say that Joe Biden’s first year in office didn’t live up to expectations. The former vice president who was heralded by his party and the liberal media as the man
After 12 years in Downing Street, four prime ministers (so far), two monarchs, and one mini-budget, the public are starting to drop hints that it’s time for Tories to head home. As Conservative conference kicks off, it’s as good a time as any to take stock: what do the Tories have to show for their
Kwasi Kwarteng delivered his mini-Budget one week after the thirtieth anniversary of Black Wednesday, when the markets forcibly ejected sterling from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). There’s one measure that makes recent market turmoil seem modest and even manageable by comparison with Black Wednesday. According to the Bank of England’s database, the pound fell 2.16
After six months of war in Ukraine, most observers agree that the roots of Russian aggression lie in the country’s deep-rooted attitudes to culture and history. In line with Russia’s nationalist traditions, Putin denies any place for a separate Ukrainian identity. The Ukrainians, in contrast, see themselves as a proud nation with their own history,
At last, Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to
Another Covid-19 lockdown, another angry confrontation. This time it was on the streets of Shenzhen, China’s high-tech hub, where videos this week showed an angry crowd facing off against police officers wearing protective medical gear, including blue gowns, masks and plastic visors. ‘Lift the lockdown’, the protesters yelled, pushing against hastily erected barricades. Some threw
Markets are nervous and they are right to be. The government has announced a huge, open-ended package of energy subsidies expected to cost over £100 billion but that could cost over £200 billion if energy prices rise and stay high. At the same time, the Bank of England is making large losses on its QE
Well it’s that time of year again. Fresh from internecine civil war, the Tory party will drag itself together again this weekend for another Conservative Party Conference, this year held in the great city of Birmingham. Mr S has done some scanning and it appears that Michael Gove takes the gong for most scheduled appearances
French elites are annoyed and perturbed that Italian elections have produced a new prime minister of the right, Giorgia Meloni, whom many within the Paris groupthink bubble consider to be practically a fascist. Not welcome news for Emmanuel Macron, who is up to his neck in problems. His European Renaissance is flailing. Eurozone inflation is
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky made an offer to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine would drop its ambition to join Nato and would instead stay neutral, he said. It would not align with the West, in exchange for an end to hostilities. It was a sincere offer, and unpopular with Ukrainians. Yet it was significant: Putin had
As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980. She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian,
So much for the honeymoon. Liz Truss closes her first ‘proper’ fortnight of politics this weekend with her backbenchers in open revolt and talk already building of a mounting government U-turn. There have been plenty of damning verdicts on last Friday’s ‘mini Budget’ but none more so than the YouGov poll which put Labour a
Is there a way for the government to get out of the mess that it is in? This is the question obsessing ministers and Tory MPs. If the government doesn’t set out how it intends to square the circle, it’ll be risking more market mayhem. But as I say in the Times today, it is
‘The West has let their mask slip and revealed their true nature!’ That was Vladimir Putin’s message to a hall of vacant-looking officials at the Kremlin this afternoon. The Russian president gathered the great and the good of Russia to reveal the formal annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaphorizhzhia and Kherson. But Putin’s
When the Liz Truss camp floated the idea of side-lining the Office for Budget Responsibility for her government’s first fiscal statement, the argument went that the announcements would be targeted at the energy crisis – and they couldn’t wait. As anticipation around the fiscal event grew, and it became clear that it would include much
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Despite rejecting the Office for Budget Responsibility’s offer of a forecast to accompany last week’s so-called fiscal event, this morning it appears that the government have u-turned. What can we expect from the OBR’s statement ahead of the November budget? Also on the podcast, after last night’s YouGov poll put Labour ahead by 33 points,
Sergei Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic within the Russian Federation, is hardly a dissident. As Colonel General Melikov, he was deputy head of the National Guard, the main militarised internal security force, and he has been a loyal agent of Moscow’s all his life. Nonetheless, he has become a no-doubt-temporary phenomenon on social media
Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution. And
The fallout from last Friday’s mini-Budget has been bigger and more volatile than almost anyone expected, with sterling hitting an all-time low against the dollar; runaway gilt yields; a U-turn from the Bank of England on its plans to start quantitative tightening. And that was all by Wednesday lunchtime. Will things be looking up anytime
The big hope for Boris Johnson, according to Dominic Cummings, was that Liz Truss’s likely implosion as Prime Minister might give him a fighting chance of making a triumphant return to Number 10. The first weeks of Truss’s premiership have not exactly been auspicious, leading some betting markets to already put Johnson among the favourites
George Floyd was a 46-year-old petty criminal from Minneapolis who died on 25 May 2020 after a police officer knelt on his neck while arresting him. The protests at the brutal manner of his death began the next day and by early June an estimated half a million people demonstrated in his name across the
The rapid economic collapse that Britain is facing is simply an accelerated version of what the whole of Europe is about to go through; unsustainable borrowing to fund the gap between high energy prices and what households can actually afford. With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there is now no feasible way back.
Today Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to calm concerns in his party over the fallout from the not-so-mini Budget – telling MPs: ‘We are one team and need to remain focused’. That message is likely to face some resistance after the latest polling. Tonight the Times has published a new YouGov poll which gives Labour a 33-point lead. Yes,
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Liz Truss broke her silence this morning and embarked on a pre-Tory conference media round of regional stations across the UK. In a brutal set of interviews, the Prime Minister faced questions on tax cutting the rich at the expense of the poor, fracking and bankers’ bonuses. With conference just three days away, what will be
Gosh! Cripes! Gazooks! It seems that those tireless seekers of truth at the Guardian have done it again. They’ve stumbled on something of a scoop: so toxic is new Prime Minister Liz Truss that even her former colleagues don’t want to vote for her. This afternoon the newspaper published a scathing piece by Nick Boles,
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you then, as Rudyard Kipling almost wrote, there is a strong possibility you haven’t appreciated the gravity of the situation. Or as Corporal Jones put it more pithily in Dad’s Army: ‘Don’t panic!’ It is undeniable that Liz Truss
Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, has again preached to the faithful of the Russian world. He told them that if they heed their president’s call to arms, they shall be absolved of their sins and avoid any possibility of Hades. ‘The Church realises that if somebody, driven by a sense of
The regional BBC round is normally the amuse-bouche of pre-conference media: a bit of light relief before the main course. But with a plunging pound and market mania, this morning’s media appearances for Liz Truss resembled something of a turkey shoot, with eight regional interviewers lining up in 60 minutes to savage the PM’s mini-Budget. Given
For a politician who only a few days ago was bravely mocking Vladimir Putin as a ‘sabre-rattling’ loudmouth ‘desperately trying to justify his catastrophic failures,’ Liz Truss has turned out to be the greatest coward ever to be prime minister. At least Putin feels the need to justify the catastrophe he has inflicted. Truss and
