All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
When did it become certain that American women’s abortion rights would fall? The Supreme Court’s ruling that ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start’ was leaked almost two months ago, so the formal release of the judgment yesterday is bitter but hardly a surprise. Certainly, Donald Trump can take a lot of the credit. Somehow,
22 min listen
Inez Stepman returns to talk to Freddy Gray about the overturning of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court.
Dmytro Savluchenko was one of Moscow’s useful idiots: a Ukrainian advocate of Russkiy Mir (or ‘Russian world’), Putin’s idea of a kind of reich of Russian-speaking peoples. Back in 2014, when the Russian army stormed the Donbas region, Savluchenko campaigned for Kherson (an area bordering Crimea) to join Russia. More recently, Savluchenko has served as a senior official in
Boris Johnson has not accepted responsibility for the two by-election defeats. You could have written this line at any point today and it would be true – and it remains the case after the Prime Minister gave a press conference from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali. He said the party needed to
Katie Price has, yet again, avoided prison. She was up at Lewes Crown Court on Friday, this time for breaching a restraining order; from what I can work out from the asterisks-laden news reports, she had texted her ex-husband’s fiancée, calling her a ‘gutter slag’. As an avid Katie Price fan, I have watched the last
Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t quite make it onto the Glastonbury line-up posters. Perhaps Michael Eavis, the owner of ever-so Worthy Farm, had last-minute difficulties with the Ukrainian President’s booking agent. No matter. An eight-foot-high image of President Zelensky’s face graced the Pyramid Stage on Friday, right before ageing indie rockers The Libertines belted out their two-decades-old
You wait decades for landmark reforms in America and then, like culture-war buses, two come along at once. Earlier this week, the Senate passed a gun control bill – the most significant firearm control legislation in US history. Now, the Supreme Court has voted 6-3 to overturn Roe v. Wade – as everyone expected since
The US Supreme Court has today officially overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling which gave women the constitutional right to have an abortion. The Court had been examining the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which was challenging a Mississippi law which banned abortion after 15 weeks. Following the Dobbs decision, some states will now serve as
The resignation of the party chairman Oliver Dowden is so damaging for Boris Johnson because the issue in Tiverton was not the campaign that CCHQ ran. You can’t put a 30 point swing down to the choice of candidate or the campaign tactics. Dowden is a party man through and through, a loyalist to the
So. Farewell then Oliver Dowden. The Hertsmere MP resigned as co-chairman of the Conservative party this morning, following last night’s by-election defeats in Tiverton and Wakefield. He was appointed to the post in September and was tasked with guiding the Tory machine through the mid-term blues and focus CCHQ on winning the next general election. Now
10 min listen
In a major blow, the Conservatives have lost two seats in the Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections. Immediately after, the Conservative party chairman, Oliver Dowden resigned citing ‘a deeply personal decision’ following a ‘run of very poor results for our party’. The Lib Dems overturned a huge Tory majority in Tiverton and Honiton, Devon, their third
The partygate scandal has left a long hangover. Westminster is waking up to the news that Tory seats in both the ‘red’ and ‘blue wall’ have fallen respectively to the Lib Dems and Labour. In true form, Sir Ed Davey is claiming the Tiverton result is the ‘biggest by-election victory we’ve ever seen’ (it wasn’t)
If only they had waited until today. Had Tory MPs cleared the threshold for a confidence vote in Boris Johnson this morning – amid the smouldering embers of two blazing by-election defeats – rather than earlier in the month, then he would surely be toast. As it is, all that the Prime Minister’s many critics
Looking at these Tory losses, it is hard not to conclude that the rebels would have got the 180 votes they needed to oust Boris Johnson if they had been organised enough to wait until after the by-elections before going for a vote of no confidence. But having had a vote two weeks ago, it is
Why was the Tory defeat in 1997 so heavy? One of the reasons was that the anti-Tory vote tended to coalesce around the candidate most likely to defeat the Tory in each place. Tactical voting in 1997 cost the Tories 30 seats, turning a bad defeat into a catastrophe. Last night provides evidence that this is
Last night’s by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton have proved disastrous for the Tories. Labour took Wakefield by 4,925 votes – a swing of almost 13 per cent. The Liberal Democrats meanwhile put another dent in the ‘blue wall’ taking Tiverton by 6,144 and achieving a massive 30 per cent swing. The Tiverton and Honiton
The optics this morning could not look any worse for the Conservative party. They have been defeated by Labour in a red wall constituency – demonstrating how vulnerable they are to losing seats newly won in 2019. And they have suffered a crushing defeat against the Lib Dems in a formerly (very) safe seat. The
What now for Boris Johnson? He’s lost two by-elections and a cabinet minister before breakfast, and isn’t even in the country. His response from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda was that he would keep going, saying: I’ve got to listen to what people are saying, in particular to the difficulties people are
Below is Oliver Dowden’s letter to Boris Johnson, explaining why he is resigning as chairman of the Conservative party, following this week’s two by-election losses. It is with great sadness that I must resign as Chairman of the Conservative Party with immediate effect. Yesterday’s Parliamentary by-elections are the latest in a run of very poor
‘For the record, I knocked two out. One woman’s skull was fractured, the other not. And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up Terfs in the cage.’ Can someone who says such things be considered a respectable commentator on women’s rights and interests? I suspect that most people who glory
Boris Johnson has been clear that he will not resign in the face of by-election losses. But his party chairman just has done, saying someone needs to take responsibility for losses in both and Tiverton & Honiton. Tory chairman Oliver Dowden announced he is quitting as ‘we cannot carry on with business as usual’. In
Boris Johnson is suffering a further blow to his leadership this morning after the Conservatives lost two by-elections overnight. Labour took Wakefield from the Tories by 4,925 votes – a swing of 12.7 per cent. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats managed to overturn a Tory majority of 24,239 in Tiverton and Honiton – beating the Conservatives
Covid cases are on the increase in France, as they are in most European countries, and the scientists who have been silent for months have once more found their voice. At the weekend professor Jean-François Delfraissy called for everyone in France this autumn to have a fourth vaccination, while Alain Fischer, president of the Scientific
10 min listen
Today, British Airways staff have voted have a strike of their own, adding to the government’s woes as rail workers continue to strike throughout this week. On the podcast, James Forsyth adopts a term from the Americans and asks: can the government prevent a ‘bummer summer’, where nothing quite works? Cindy Yu also talks to
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s war on Whitehall continues apace. The Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency has embraced his new role with relish, firing off notes to officials refusing to return to the office and launching his new ‘EU law dashboard’. But it’s his intention to trim the size of the state which has caused most
To Bristol, the right-on Remain capital of liberal Britain. The local Labour mayor Marvin Rees has been having a bit of a bad time recently. Elected in 2016, his constituents think he’s done such a good job that they, er, voted to abolish the mayoralty in a referendum last month. Awkward. Since then, Rees has
The latest data on the UK’s public finances have provided more ammunition for those arguing that the government cannot afford to cut taxes. However, the economic reality is far more nuanced – especially when it comes to interest payments. The bad news is that the government borrowed another £14 billion in May, £3.7 billion more
Jacob Rees-Mogg this week unveiled something that has variously been mocked as either a ‘vanity project’ or the Johnson administration’s equivalent of the Major government’s Cones Hotline. The Cones Hotline was a policy designed to tackle the great social evil of traffic cones loitering without intent – and became emblematic of that government’s tiredness and
For years, the Human Rights Act has cast a shadow over British politics. Its supporters claim, in the absence of a single written document in Britain’s constitution, that it upholds key freedoms; its detractors say it has been misused and hands too much power to the courts over elected politicians. Soon, this debate may be
‘America is a nation that can be defined in a single word,’ said the proud Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, standing outside the White House earlier this year. ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa.’ We shouldn’t laugh. The poor man has a speech impediment. Still, that ‘Alsdfnalcaofjlksfa’ word will strike many Americans as an amusingly apt description of their country in 2022.
The polls are open for the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections. The results are due in the early hours of Friday – with the Tories at risk of losing both of them. The votes have long been seen as a crunch point for Boris Johnson’s premiership – even though the fact that there was a
It was with great excitement that Steerpike learned that Jeremy Hunt had (finally) made public what many had privately long-suspected: he’s running. Yet the more Mr S read of the politician’s bid for high office, the less it sounded like the Tory Remainer that we all know and love. For Hunt’s prospective manifesto included support
The latest inflation figures have sent Tory MPs into a tizz again, unsurprisingly. There are a number of things that they’re upset about: the first is the ongoing refrain that their party should be cutting taxes, not imposing the highest tax burdens in living memory. Another is that Universal Credit is largely ‘an unfinished project’,