Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Russia and Ukraine’s fate is about to be decided

The first phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ended with a decisive defeat for Russian forces in the north of the country. The large scale Russian advances in the north west and north east were halted in the outskirts of Kyiv. Russian forces failed to take the encircled north eastern cities of Chernihiv,

Steerpike

The best and worst of Boris’s Chief Whip

What with partygate and Ukraine, it was easy to miss some of the movements in February’s mini-reshuffle. Among them was the bovine Mark Spencer being shuffled out of the Whips’ Office into a safer berth as Leader of the Commons, following accusations of Islamophobia. His replacement, Chris Heaton-Harris, is a man largely unknown outside SW1 but who,

Jake Wallis Simons

Can Jews like me trust Keir Starmer’s Labour party?

When I sat down with Sir Keir Starmer this week we had unfinished business to discuss. Foremost in my mind was the central political question in Jewish circles these days, particularly on the left: is it safe to vote Labour again? To answer this, I had to ask him about Jeremy Corbyn. When it comes to his

Katy Balls

Pressure on Sunak grows over his wife’s non-dom status

Rishi Sunak goes into the weekend facing questions from the media, Labour and some Tories over the tax status of his wife Akshata Murthy. On Wednesday night, the Independent reported that Murthy has non-dom status, meaning she does not have to pay UK tax on income earned abroad. Her spokesperson has confirmed that she pays

Ukraine has exposed the EU for what it really is

Since the Ukraine conflict erupted, the EU has had a great deal to say about its sympathy for Ukraine as a brother European state. But if you look closely it has not actually done a great deal to derail Vladimir Putin’s war machine. Even the grisly discoveries at Bucha has wrought little change. Not surprisingly,

Ross Clark

Will Britain’s new energy strategy keep the lights on?

Today’s Energy Security Strategy puts energy security at the heart of the debate over energy and environmental policy, where it always should have been. There is little question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought about a big change to the tone of energy policy, but will today’s announcements really wean us off Russian

Steerpike

Five ways for Rishi to bounce back

Four weeks ago, Rishi Sunak was riding high, Boris Johnson was on the slide and the Chancellor’s daughter was proudly telling the women’s lobby drinks that she too wants to be a reporter. Now, after a fortnight of damning media coverage, her ambition might have been changed. Lambasted over his spring statement, mocked over his

Anxiety is killing parenthood

Britain is on a slow descent to oblivion. Scotland is even closer to the abyss, with a birth rate of just 1.29, well below the UK’s sub-replacement level of 1.65. It turns out the answer to the West Lothian question is that West Lothian will disappear. Doomsday demography should matter, but Whitehall is in no

Cindy Yu

Is the energy strategy a missed opportunity?

10 min listen

The government is publishing its long-awaited energy security strategy today, but Labour has criticised it for the strategy’s lack of action on onshore wind, among other concerns. Has Boris wrongly buckled to backbenchers on a policy that would have been efficient and popular? Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Isabel argues that

Steerpike

George Galloway’s Twitter fury

The Ukraine crisis claims another victim. Step forward George Galloway, the mystic Myrtle who bet in February that the country would not be invaded by Moscow. The journeyman politician is in something of a strop at present, after Twitter took the step of labelling his account as ‘Russia state-affiliated media’ following a series of bizarre takes on

Mark Galeotti

Good riddance to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russia’s clown prince

He wanted to see the Baltic States bombarded with toxic waste. He brawled in parliament. He encouraged Vladimir Putin to declare himself tsar. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, one of the most grotesque fixtures in Russian politics for over thirty years, is dead. It is the end of an era – and good riddance. The 75-year-old died in a

Putin’s winning streak in European politics

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said triumphantly that ‘if Putin was seeking to divide the EU, to weaken Nato, and to break the international community, he has achieved the exact opposite.’ A month later, Vladimir Putin may be struggling on Ukraine’s battlefields but he

The view from Ukraine: world war three has already started

I saw the first Russian bombs land from my balcony in Chernivtsi. They hit a military depot 50 miles away but the vibrations were so strong it felt like it happened right by us. I’d attended an intelligence briefing from Volodymyr Zelensky’s office hours before to be updated on the situation: I’m the governor of

Ross Clark

Will the NHS ever give up the national insurance levy?

This week’s rise in National Insurance has caused the government enough trouble, but it faces potentially an even bigger problem next year – when it tries to prise the extra £12 billion raised in NI away from the NHS and use it to fund social care instead. The extra revenue from NI has been earmarked

Gavin Mortimer

Macron has taken this election for granted

Things are going from bad to worse for Emmanuel Macron, and for the first time political commentators in France are considering the possibility that he might not win a second term. The latest poll, carried out for Le Figaro, has him one point ahead of Marine Le Pen in the voting intentions of the people

Stephen Daisley

The revealing backlash to Boris’s Channel 4 sell off

Why is there so much anger over the sale of Channel 4? Tonnes of slebs are very cross and have signed a petition. But there’s no guarantee it will actually happen now that some Tory backbenchers have expressed their misgivings. If I were a Tory and cared at all about this issue — which, to be

Max Jeffery

What’s behind Sunak’s poll slide?

15 min listen

The National Insurance hike comes into effect today which is going to hit doubly hard when coupled with the ever-increasing cost of living. While we are all going to feel this burden on our bank accounts, Rishi Sunak is taking his first major political blow. Is there anything he can do to bounce back, or

How to waste an 80-seat majority

Cast your mind back to Channel 4’s election night programme. The 2019 exit poll results flash up on screen. Realising the size of the Tory majority, hosts Krishnan Guru-Murthy and comedian Katherine Ryan, along with pundits Amber Rudd and Tom Watson, all look crestfallen: the Conservatives had won and Brexit was secured.  However, nearly two

Katy Balls

Sunak’s popularity plummets

The government’s National Insurance hike takes effect today, meaning many workers will feel even more squeezed as the cost-of-living crisis grows. While measures on thresholds announced in the spring statement will help to soften the impact for lower-income workers (although not for another three months), the tax rise remains very unpopular in the Tory party.  Boris

Ross Clark

The war on workers

It is been a familiar story in recent years: a Budget that sounded reasonably good when delivered, but that unravels in subsequent days. Rishi Sunak’s spring statement was no exception. When he delivered it a fortnight ago, he said he was going to compensate low-earners by raising the primary threshold for National Insurance, bringing it

Cindy Yu

China’s zero Covid crack-up

‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu Weiping, a senior official at Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), have gone viral in China. Her phone call with a frustrated local was recorded, and her despair resonated with people in the city and the

Bucha and the dark echoes of Srebrenica

High on a hillside not far from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica the remains of dozens of young Muslim men had been left to rot. By the time I found them most of the flesh had been eaten away by forest scavengers – bears, wolves, foxes and even stray dogs – but the skeletons

Steerpike

Matt Hancock, crypto bro

The Matt Hancock comeback tour continues at pace. After the mothballed memoir, the Serpentine stunt and the UN embarrassment, you might think that the Casanova of the Commons has run out of ideas for retrospective rehabilitation. Far from it: alongside doing endless media rounds to defend Boris Johnson’s latest blunder, Hancock has reinvented himself as a champion

Gavin Mortimer

Could Marine Le Pen actually win?

Emmanuel Macron is worried. This wasn’t how he had envisaged the election. A month ago the president of France held a staggering 18 point lead in the polls and, as he looked over his shoulder in the home straight, he could barely make out Marine Le Pen in the distance. Now the gap is four

Isabel Hardman

The true cause of No. 10’s conversion therapy muddle

The government has had to bow to the inevitable and cancel its own international LGBT conference after more than 100 organisations withdrew their support as a protest against the decision to not ban conversion therapy for transgender people. The die was cast much further back than last week’s botched double-U-turn on a ban on gay

Putin, Bucha and a tale of two Russias

The scenes of butchery and barbarism in the liberated Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin and nearby villages – civilians tied up, tortured, mutilated and shot; women raped, burned to death in their cars, and buried in a mass grave – have been compared to the worst slaughters of World War Two. The West struggles