All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There is a lot of pearl-clutching over Liz Truss’s dismissive remarks about Nicola Sturgeon. Much of it involves conflating a dig at the leader of the SNP with a grave insult to Scotland. This is symptomatic not only of the fetid culture of grievance that permeates Scottish politics but of the steady merging of the
Serbia and Kosovo are close to conflict. Of all things, a dispute over car number plates is threatening the fragile peace won 23 years ago, after a Nato bombing campaign against then-Yugoslavia. For that, Serbs have never truly forgiven the West. On Sunday night, roads were blockaded by Serbs in northern Kosovo. Their anger was
21 min listen
Liz Truss has U-turned on a public worker pay plan announced just last night – the idea being that pay would reflect the cost of living in regional areas. What made her backtrack on the announcement? And how damaging has this been to her campaign? ‘Any discussion of lowering pay right now is politically intolerable.
At times like this, it’s tempting to channel Bette Davis: only speak good of the dead. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dead. Good. But perhaps the moment deserves some more considered reflection. There’s striking footage (see below) of al-Zawahiri in the defendants’ cage during the 1982 trial of Islamic Jihad members implicated in the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat.
This week more than two million New Zealanders are expected to receive roughly $116 (£60) in their bank accounts as the government paid out the first instalment of its cost-of-living payment. A further two instalments over the next two months have been promised to those earning below $70,000 (£36,000). These payments are part of a
People complaining about supposedly offensive pop lyrics is hardly anything new. It’s as old as the form itself; never-ending proof that everyone is offended by something and that every era has its own set of taboos. But the speed with which music stars appear to be acquiescing to other people’s hurt feelings today is surely
14 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, ahead of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. They discuss if this is a turning point in US relations with Taiwan, whether we are heading for World War Three, or if Pelosi is calling China’s bluff.
In the coming hours, Nancy Pelosi is expected to arrive in Taiwan. The plane that is thought to be carrying her is approaching the island from the east to avoid the Taiwan Strait and any attempt by the Chinese to fly close to her. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, she will be the
That was quick. Less than 15 hours after pledging a robust reform of public sector pay, Liz Truss has performed a u-turn on plans to bring national pay bargaining to an end. It comes after criticism mounted that slashing pay for new frontline staff was not the most obvious way to handle an escalating cost-of-living
Sherpur District, to the north of central Kabul, where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed, lies at the western end of a huge former military base where British forces were besieged in the winter of 1879, during the second Anglo-Afghan war. The parade ground, still a wide open area until 2001, was quickly built over by
If the first rule of leadership is, as Barack Obama once said, ‘don’t do stupid shit’ then this Tory leadership contest offers ample reasons for thinking neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss is remotely capable of being prime minister. Having advertised himself as the only adult in the race, the only candidate prepared to tell
Oh dear. It seems that Liz Truss’s winning run has come to an end. After a week of riding high, the Foreign Secretary’s campaign for leader has hit a bit of a bump in the road. Her campaign last night sent out a press release declaring: ‘Truss: I’ll wage a war on Whitehall waste to
‘Mermaids must fall next.’ That was the response of Professor Kathleen Stock to the news that last week that the NHS was closing its Tavistock gender identity clinic for children. Stock, who quit Sussex University over what she called a trans rights ‘witch-hunt’, added that it was now time for ‘a no-holds barred journalistic dive’
The sound of screeching gears could be heard across Westminster this morning as Team Truss executed a dramatic U-turn from their headquarters in Lord North Street. A midday press statement confirmed that the Foreign Secretary has now dropped her policy adopted, er, just last night, to introduce regional pay boards. The move would have seen
Was Oliver Cromwell a religious fanatic who loved banning stuff, or a pioneer of liberal values? Sunday’s Observer reported that a group of historians have dredged up some documents that suggest that he was seriously committed to religious freedom. Despite his reputation for brutally suppressing Irish Catholics, it emerges that Cromwell was open to them
Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer. We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as
Rishi Sunak’s promises on tax are lacklustre. He’s announced a fiddly one-off tax break on energy that will last for just a year which hardly anyone will notice due to inflation. There’s also income tax cuts up to seven years in the future, even though he is hardly likely to be Prime Minister by then (and he seldom
After England scored their first goal last night, the team visibly relaxed and had a spell of playing happily until Germany equalised. Liz Truss was in the crowd and saw that sudden surge in confidence up close. Tonight we saw the same from the frontrunner. She enjoyed the latest hustings in Exeter, making jokes about
If a week is a long time in politics, then a fortnight is an eternity. Two weeks ago, Penny Mordaunt was the bookies’ favourite to be our next Prime Minister, riding high in the polls and second among MPs. Now, after a bruising campaign, the vanquished candidate has opted to back the woman who defeated
With most signs pointing to a Liz Truss triumph, team Sunak have been pulling out all the stops in a bid to make up lost ground. Tory membership ballots go out this week and although the rules technically allow members to vote a second time online if they change their mind, neither camp expects this
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent sanctions, are roiling European energy markets and threatening a continent-wide recession. But we live in an age of multiple crises, and tensions over Taiwan are bound to flare in the coming days. There are reports that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, will visit tomorrow.
It’s time for another round of crackpot Russian sanctions. Still smarting from the latest package of western measures, Moscow has retaliated by hitting us where it hurts: banning our best and brightest from visiting Vlad’s kleptocratic empire. In April it was Nadine Dorries and Grant Shapps: this month it’s Huw Edwards and Robert Peston. Bemused
The Tory leadership race is becoming a test of patience. Today Rishi Sunak has laid out his plan to slash tax: not in a matter of days or weeks, as Liz Truss has pledged to do, but by the end of the next parliament. He’s promised to reduce the base rate of income tax by
Last week, I spent a night in a police cell. My ‘crime’? To intervene after I witnessed an ex-soldier being arrested over a social media post. Is what someone posts on Facebook – even if it is a distasteful image of a transgender pride flag in the shape of a swastika – really a matter for the
The BBC’s 50:50 project is designed to empower women. One of its targets is to ensure that half of the contributors are female. But while this aim might have been questionable from the outset – is this really something the BBC should be focusing on? – its mission has been undermined: the BBC has admitted it does
Much to the chagrin of colleagues, friends and ex-friends, I’ve spent the past few years raising the alarm about how Scottish devolution is gradually eroding the Union. I’ve noted how the devolution settlement was devised as a fiefdom by arrogant New Labour architects who, unable to imagine anyone else coming to power, failed to include
12 min listen
This morning, Lisa Nandy defied party orders by joining a picket line in Wigan to support striking BT and Openreach staff. This comes after last week, Keir Starmer sacked Sam Tarry MP, who went on an unauthorised media round at an RMT picket line. Similarly, Labour’s biggest union, Unite, threatened to pull all funding from
Estonia Independence Day – celebrating the country’s 1918 emancipation from the Russian empire – takes place on 24 February each year. This year, Independence Day for the Estonians was horribly ironic. ‘Instead of opening the news in the morning and seeing the expected ‘Happy Independence Day Everyone!’’ Lidia, a language-specialist, told me, ‘the headline was ‘Russia has
Lisa Nandy’s appearance on a picket line is very different from Sam Tarry’s. There were no media interviews and this is a dispute involving a Labour-affiliated union and a private company. This is not a public sector strike; taking a position on it does not have implications for the public finances. But given Keir Starmer’s
This could be the biggest week of the Tory leadership campaign: postal ballots will start arriving on members’ doormats in the coming days and the chances are that most will fill them in and send them back pretty sharpish. Both candidates to be Prime Minister are consequently extremely busy: Rishi Sunak has been making tax
Should Apple use software to scan the photo library of every individual iPhone in search of images of child abuse? GCHQ thinks so. So does the National Cyber Security Centre. (Well, you might say: they would, wouldn’t they?) And so does professor Hany Farid, inventor of a technology called PhotoDNA, which is already used across
Given the Scottish political establishment’s misty-eyed myth-making about Scottish nationalism — it’s civic! Joyous! Inclusive! — Mr Steerpike admires the commitment of the grassroots to saying the quiet part out loud. The National has published a missive on its letters page this morning that calls for the English to be banned from owning land in
Admirers of one of America’s great modern historians sat up and paid attention when Liz Truss told the Times in December that she read ‘anything’ by Rick Perlstein. In May, we nodded along with the interviewer from the Atlantic magazine who ‘saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf and thought it