All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Gaining a place in medical school has always been a lottery, made even more difficult for aspiring doctors this year. For those who failed to achieve their A level conditional offer grades, this will come as a hard blow and may seem grossly unfair. Some students are entitled to feel victims of the A level
Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF) or possibly partisan fighters have conducted successfully attacks on three significant targets in occupied Crimea since 10 August. An initial attack on the Saki airbase caused a fire that quickly spread to stored ammunition and fuel, resulting in multiple huge secondary explosions. These destroyed at least nine Russian fast jets
It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of
Is the Tory leadership race already over? That’s the narrative among Conservative MPs with two weeks of the leadership contest to go. The Sunak camp dispute this version of events – and tonight they have an endorsement which works in their favour. After several Tory MPs switched their allegiance from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss,
Elaine Miller is one of the grown-ups. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, with a specialism in pelvic health. She also jokes about it. Her comedy show, Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story is currently playing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a good one: the production has won awards and a
This morning, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a moratorium on energy prices – so while gas bills are rising all over Europe, Ukraine will remain unaffected. This honours a pledge he made on his election. Freezing energy bills is a standard populist policy in Ukrainian politics (in a country where temperatures can reach -25ºC and the elderly
12 min listen
The UK has been hit by another round of rail strikes today with rising inflation and falling wages a recipe for continued disruption in the public sector. Labour rebels such as Sam Tarry are fast becoming celebrities among the unions. Could this leave Starmer in another predicament? Also on the podcast, as Liz Truss remains
This week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies offered tough words for those hoping for tax cuts: with inflation taking its toll on both government and household finances, the next prime minister would be forced to prioritise the most vulnerable and debt-servicing payments. This would require more revenue for the Treasury, not less. As the Office
From the beginning, the debate over lockdowns was skewed by the fact that Covid deaths were imminent – and any other effects from lockdown would become apparent over a longer period. But are we beginning to see that now? Over the past few months the Office for National Statistics has been recording ‘excess’ non-covid deaths
The stabbing of Salman Rushdie sends a renewed message to the world: take Islamism – the transformation of the Islamic faith into a radical utopian ideology inspired by medieval goals – seriously. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the most consequential Islamist of the past century, personally issued the edict (often called a fatwa) condemning Rushdie to death
This week’s news that the Royal Air Force is reviewing its recruitment policies is causing quite a stir. In an astounding revelation, it emerged that all white male recruit applications are effectively to be put on pause to allow for a dramatic increase in ethnic minority and female hires. There are many, many troubling issues
In August 1999 a group of protestors demolished a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in Aveyron, southern France. Their leader was Jose Bové, a middle-class farmer, who whipped up his followers by declaring that ‘McDo is the symbol of the multinational who wants us to eat crap and make the farmers die’. The French regard that
When you say the name ‘Andy Coulson,’ it’s hard not to think of the phone hacking scandal. The former News of the World editor served five months of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to commit phone hacking in 2014 but has now managed to rebound from Belmarsh to business success, with a PR firm making
You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist. Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of
A year ago we scuttled out of Afghanistan. We abandoned the aim we and the Americans had proclaimed so noisily of bringing Afghanistan into the twenty-first century so that the Taliban could never triumph again. We left behind many Afghans who had helped us at the risk of their lives. To most of the world
13 min listen
It seems like Labour has a problem when it comes to the size of its membership. It lost 91,000 members last year and recorded a £4.8 million deficit. Is this the Keir Starmer effect on the Corbyn membership? Also on the podcast, Rishi Sunak has gone viral after sharing his McDonald’s breakfast order on This
After the disruption caused to education by the pandemic, this is the first year since 2019 in which school leavers have sat traditional A-level exams. Normally, 26 per cent of A-level students are marked A or higher: last year it jumped to 45 per cent after teacher-assessed grades were brought in. Now it’s 36 per
It’s the scandal all Westminster is talking about. Appearing on ITV’s This Morning Rishi Sunak told viewers that if he goes to McDonald’s with his daughters they all get the breakfast wrap: ‘My eldest daughter, we get the wrap so if I’m with her that wrap with the hashbrown and everything in it is what
There are so many house indices that they can create confusion. Last week, the Halifax house price index showed a small monthly fall. This week the government’s own index, the HPI, shows that prices rose by 7.8 per cent in the year to June, down from 12.8 per cent in the year to May. That
Congratulations to Amol Rajan, who adds the mantle of University Challenge host to his burgeoning portfolio of BBC jobs. Rajan will succeed Jeremy Paxman in the role when the latter steps down this autumn after 28 years hosting the show. On current trends, Mr S estimates the former Independent editor will have held every top
You wouldn’t normally electrify the world with a press release detailing a formal UK legal demand for discussions and possible arbitration about non-admission to Horizon Europe, a EU-led scientific research programme which in all probability most people will never have heard of. But, as you may have gathered from recent news reports, there is more
Party politics is done somewhat differently in Finland. While Boris was hounded out in Westminster for some miserable looking cake and wine, over in Helsinki, his counterpart finds herself in hot water for simply having too much (legal) fun. Sanna Marin, the country’s 36-year-old Prime Minister, is now facing criticism after a video of her
The bad news of the week is that Jeremy Paxman is retiring from University Challenge. The worse is that most of those lined up to succeed him are nothing like as good. University Challenge is a quiz show that JP has very much made his own: the curled lip, the incredulity at culpable ignorance, the
A Chinese spy ship that docked in Sri Lanka on Tuesday in defiance of Indian and western protests is the latest symbol of China’s power and ambition in the Indian Ocean. It is also a stark demonstration and warning of the harder edges of Beijing’s debt trap diplomacy. The Yuan Wang 5, bristling with satellite
If you have an 18-year-old in your life, as I do, or even if you vaguely know of one, please take a moment to think kindly of them and wish them well today. Today is A level results day and for my son and his peers, taking their A Levels in May and June was
You probably think you’ve heard every story there is to hear about people getting fired over their tweets. Well, here’s the story of Sarah Muscroft. She’s got them all beat. Until last Friday, Muscroft was the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA). For 72
Nearly 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the embers of sectarianism in Northern Ireland are still glowing bright. This week thousands of young nationalists at a west Belfast community and music festival ended the night by chanting pro-IRA slogans. They were seemingly oblivious to the fact that the IRA murdered more Roman Catholics in
The Tory leadership teams rolled into Belfast this afternoon, clad in metaphorical red, white and blue and eager to display their unionist credentials. But while all eyes were on Ulster, elsewhere the real scrap was happening at the Conservative Environment Network where proxies were battling it out for the two final contenders. In team Truss’s
This time it was surely all over. As inflation started to rise towards a 40-year high, as central banks started raising interest rates for the first time in more than a decade, and as the monetary printing presses finally stopped running, the cryptocurrencies crashed. What a crash it was. Bitcoin, the best-known crypto, fell all
Have we yet seen the end of Covid restrictions? It is tempting to think so. For many people, Covid and the lockdowns have receded into history, replaced by Ukraine and the energy crisis. It would be easy, but foolish, to dismiss Tony Blair’s proposals as the ramblings of a bored ex-PM But perhaps we have
James Cook, the BBC’s Scotland editor, is ‘a traitor’. He is ‘scum’, ‘a scumbag’ and ‘a liar’. At least he is according to the Scottish nationalists who howled those epithets at him last night as he tried to report on the Tory leadership hustings. Outside Perth Concert Hall, a mob had gathered, as they invariably
It’s been a difficult year for the Metropolitan Police. Commissioner Cressida Dick was forced out in April after a string of scandals while the force’s broader handling of issues around racism and sexism has also been called into question. Given all that, it can be difficult to hire new officers willing to join the force;
20 min listen
Yesterday Liz Cheney lost the Republican nomination for Wyoming’s House seat to the Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman. Freddy Gray is joined by the author and journalist James Pogue to discuss the impact of the result.