All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In the latest installment from the idiot age of Twitter, #ungratefulcow has been trending. The reason? Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had expressed, mildly and politely, some unhappiness that it had taken Her Britannic Majesty’s Government six years to free her from Iranian captivity. Cue a handful of shallow trolls slagging her off, and a lot of other people slagging them off. I say
Rishi Sunak ended 2021 as the most popular politician in the country. A YouGov poll for the final quarter of the year found that 31 per cent of all adults had a positive opinion of the Chancellor compared to 28 per cent for Nicola Sturgeon and 26 per cent for Boris Johnson. However, ending 2022 in
With global tensions running high amid Russia’s continued bombardment of Ukraine, cool heads are needed now more than ever. Alternatively, we could instead listen to George Galloway. The fedora-rocking serial candidate advises his 400,000 Twitter followers that ‘the US is about to stage a false-flag #WMD incident in #Ukraine’. No word as of yet where Gorgeous George
15 min listen
Tomorrow is the spring statement. The proposed NI rise set to be outlined in it has been described by the Labour leader Keir Starmer as a ‘cynical’ move so the Chancellor can cut taxes before the next election for political brownie points. But what are Rishi Sunak’s true motives? Cindy Yu deciphers them with Katy
Jacinda Ardern, once the golden girl of New Zealand politics, is in trouble. The country’s main opposition party, National, is edging ahead of the prime minister’s Labour government in the polls for the first time in two years, having opened up a two point lead. And while Adern is still the favoured pick to be PM her personal
Here’s the Rishi Sunak paradox: he proudly defines himself as a low-tax Tory but under his watch taxes are reaching a 71-year high. There are plenty of Tories who want to ditch next month’s National Insurance increase but Sunak is firmly opposed – mainly because he wants to link up in people’s minds that more
Speculation over which taxes the Chancellor will slash or, more likely, hike at tomorrow’s spring statement seems to have settled on two areas. First, a cut to fuel duty and, second, an increase in National Insurance thresholds, a way of tweaking the already announced tax hike to reduce the burden on the poorest. On the first
Vladimir Putin will soon have to select the version of defeat that suits him best. His plan A – a lightning quick invasion, followed by installing a government in Kiev, then horse trading with the effete and corrupt West – has failed entirely. To that extent, he has already lost. For now, Putin has applied
Battered Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second most populous city, is showing no signs of falling. The column of Russian tanks outside Kiev has gone to ground. The capital itself seems to be off Moscow’s menu entirely, at least for now. In Russia FSB chiefs are reported to be under house arrest. The economy is in freefall. There
It’s five years today since the Westminster terror attack. Outside the gates of parliament stands the memorial to PC Keith Palmer, stabbed to death, defending the place where he worked. And the policemen and women at the Palace has clearly been working overtime to prevent a repeat attack from ever occurring again. For Mr S has obtained
Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. ‘We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock
Welcome home Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, released after six years imprisonment. The 43-year-old returned to the UK last week after the government settled a historical £400 million debt owed to Iran over a cancelled 1970s order for British tanks. But it seems the mother-of-one is not done generating headlines yet, after she caused something of a stir yesterday with her comments
Thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia in the wake of Putin’s crackdown are receiving a poor welcome. ‘F*** Russia’ and ‘Russians go home’ are scrawled on the walls, and there are campaigns to boycott Russian goods. A Russian girl asked in a local chat about the best way to transfer money, and received
The shadow of Afghanistan darkened Westminster again this afternoon as the Foreign Affairs Committee gathered to discuss the farce of Operation Ark. Two of Whitehall’s top mandarins – Sir Philip Barton, the Foreign Office’s permanent secretary, and Nigel Casey, the PM’s special representative for Afghanistan – were hauled up before the panel of MPs. It came after
In recent weeks, partygate has felt all but a distant memory in Westminster. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Boris Johnson has focussed on recasting himself as a statesman focussed on the foreign affairs crisis. Even as the Metropolitan police announce their investigation has reached the stage of ‘interviewing key witnesses’, Johnson’s supporters
After years of post-Brexit rancour, the last few weeks have been a striking display of European (not just EU) unity. Britain was the first to send arms to Ukraine, now the EU is (for the first time) buying weapons so it can follow suit. No one forced Norway’s strategic wealth fund to disinvest all Russian
Boris was right to compare the vote for Brexit with the struggle for freedom in Ukraine. And here’s the thing: deep down, his fulminating critics know it. It’s why they’re so angry, why they’ve been lashing out so furiously against the PM. Because Boris has drawn attention to something that they would prefer to leave
This week, Sam Leith spoke to Francis Fukuyama – the author of ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ and the newly released ‘Liberalism and its Discontents’ on the latest episode of The Book Club. You can watch their conversation below, listen to it here or read this transcript. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there has been no shortage of historical analogies used to explain the conflict. From Stalinist terrors to the Cold War, Russian and Ukrainian leaders – and politicians from around the world – have sought to make links between the ongoing situation and historical points of reference. But Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest reference point –
Anyone wanting an insight into the strange atmosphere springing up almost overnight in Russia’s institutions could do a lot worse than consider campaigns held in Russian schools and kindergartens over the past week. There have been numerous photographs published online of infants waving Russian flags and arranging themselves in Z-formation, ‘Z’ being the current war-symbol
16 min listen
Over the weekend, Boris Johnson sparked a wave of criticism after he linked the Ukraine crisis to Brexit. During his speech at the Conservative Party’s Spring Conference, the PM suggested that Ukraine’s decision to ‘choose freedom’ was reminiscent of Brexit. ‘I think it was up there with the Jimmy Saville joke which he made about Keir
Boris Johnson is doing rather well on Ukraine at the moment, thanks to Britain’s role in sending arms and training instructors there. But now another military crisis from the not-so-recent past threatens to block the greased pig’s escape from political danger yet again. For this afternoon the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) will be taking evidence
‘How many foreign secretaries does it take for someone to come home? Five?’ Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has spoken for the first time in public, giving a press conference alongside her husband Richard and MP Tulip Siddiq this lunchtime. She was grateful for her release from Iran, but also very clear that she wasn’t as thankful to
The news that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has banned eleven opposition parties – including the pro-Russian ‘Opposition – Platform For Life’ which holds 44 seats in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament and has spoken out against the Russian invasion – may be the embattled leader’s first major mistake in the month since Putin launched his brutal invasion.
When Rishi Sunak first envisaged this year’s spring statement, the idea was that it would be policy light. Instead, it would serve as an economic update on the latest forecast and give him a chance to lay out his broad tax aspirations for the year ahead. However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine means that the goalposts have
It was Nye Bevan who claimed that the Conservative party was ‘lower than vermin.’ But in today’s House of Commons, it is not just the Tories who have to serve cheek by jowl with some of nature’s less attractive creatures. Since the return of Westminster last year, Steerpike has heard nothing but complaints about the
Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm Tóibín, speaking in our current Book Club podcast, talks about publishing his fine first poetry collection Vinegar Hill – decades of international acclaim as a novelist notwithstanding. Poetry is a high-status artform, perhaps the highest.
Cast your minds back to March 2021. Back then, Britain was emerging from lockdown, the Americans were in place in Afghanistan and Thorntons still had shops. Up in Edinburgh meanwhile, the Salmond Inquiry was raging. The timely leak from a parliamentary committee which concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled Holyrood prompted a flurry of accusations
Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000
Rishi Sunak – Brexit vote and Ukraine resistance ‘are not analogous’ The Chancellor was in the TV studios this morning, ahead of the Spring Statement that he will deliver on Wednesday. Economic issues, like much else, have been cast into the shadows over recent weeks as the spotlight has inevitably focused on the Russian invasion of
Well over a year after the presidential election, long after all mainstream media outlets killed a legitimate story about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, the New York Times finally announced it had ‘authenticated’ the computer and its messages. The computer, left at a Delaware computer repair shop, is filled with damning information about Hunter’s operations, which
What support might the Chancellor dish out to help with the cost of living squeeze in the Spring Statement this week? In line with his previous media appearances, Rishi Sunak’s statements ahead of his mini-Budget this morning on the BBC didn’t give much away, as the Chancellor ‘can’t speculate’ on what’s to come in his