All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Silence. That is what we heard during Gloria de Piero’s recent focus group which she held for her GB News show in her old constituency of Ashfield, one of many Red Wall seats that fell to the Conservatives in 2019. Most participants had been Labour voters up to that election but felt the party had
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Boris Johnson was surrounded by opposition at the despatch box when he faced the Labour leader at PMQs today. Did Keir Starmer make the most of his opportunity to score points against the Prime Minister’s disappointing result in the confidence vote the night before? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.
The UK and EU are currently locked in a debate about Britain’s participation in the Horizon Europe science funding programme, with the EU blocking the UK from taking part due to concerns about the Northern Ireland protocol. The situation is very disappointing for scientists. Eighteen months ago, when the Brexit deal was signed in good
After Boris Johnson faced a confidence vote by his own MPs, the Prime Minister has come under pressure to bring in changes to his government. This ranges from talk of a reshuffle to shaking up the No. 10 operation yet again. But the issue which has the broadest support among MPs calling for change is
Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges doesn’t ‘want special treatment from anyone’. In an ITV interview, Bridges said: ‘I just want the same opportunities as my fellow female athletes’. As someone who transitioned a few years before Emily, I’d say Bridges is right: transgender people should not need special treatment. We are human beings, just like everyone
PMQs started with a bump. The Speaker called Dame Angela Eagle whose tone was acidic but quietly conversational. ‘This week’s events demonstrated just how loathed this Prime Minister is,’ said the dame. ‘And that’s only in his own party.’ A decent gag that won big laughs – and not just from the opposition. But Boris
After an uncomfortably close confidence vote for the Prime Minister on Monday, Boris Johnson’s premiership still hobbles along. But for how much longer? It seems the PM’s latest strategy is to find favour with his party again by promising bread-and-butter Tory policies: mainly tax cuts. Speaking to Tory MPs just hours before this week’s confidence
It’s not unusual for a Labour leader to attack the government over the NHS at Prime Minister’s Questions. Neither is it a topic of low salience at the moment, given the size of the backlog. But it was nonetheless Sir Keir Starmer’s subject choice today was curious because it was precisely what Boris Johnson wanted to
In what other industry could demand collapse by a tenth and yet the staff still think that they have a right to an above inflation pay rise and no job losses? Rail privatisation was supposed to put an end to union militancy and to relieve taxpayers of the financial risk of running the railways. Patently,
The last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of
Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist
Carrie Johnson hasn’t been seen much around Westminster recently, as her embattled husband tries to rescue his flailing premiership. But last weekend, the couple dressed up in their finery to mark the Platinum Jubilee. While the pair faced a, er, mixed reaction when they appeared at the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, it seems that
When Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s president Zelensky walked through the streets of our capital in April, they came across a man. Astonished and emotional, he begged Zelensky: ‘Please tell Boris that we will be grateful for the rest of our lives. Britain saved us. God, I’m so happy…My children and grandchildren will remember this forever.
Dozens of Christian worshippers, including several children, were killed in a gun raid on a church in Nigeria’s Owo town on Sunday. Initial estimates place the death toll at around least 70 parishioners but that number is set to rise, given that the church in question, St Francis Catholic Church, has one of the largest
Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought but few actually read, recently received some advice. ‘What you write is interesting,’ a friend told him, ‘but couldn’t you make it a little shorter?’ Piketty has answered the call for brevity with a book
Most people date the beginning of Boris Johnson’s current woes to the start of the partygate scandal, and especially to the revelations from 10 January 2022 onwards about the ‘bring your own booze’ event that Johnson himself had attended. But Johnson’s problems can also be seen as having started at an earlier date and from
The greased piglet will soon be sausages. That, at least, seems the obvious outcome of this week’s Tory party confidence vote. With over 40 per cent of his MPs in open revolt against him, even Boris Johnson, the great political escapologist, is running out of road. He may have survived now. But with two by-election
Much as Boris Johnson wants to ‘bash on’, deliver popular populist policies, and characterise Monday’s confidence vote as the catharsis that purges him and his party of the partygate poison, his struggle to re-establish his credibility and authority will be the challenge of his life. First of all, most of the 148 Tory MPs who
Who could argue with the words of the EU’s internal market commissioner Thierry Breton when he says: ‘a common charger is common sense for the many electronic devices in our daily lives’? No longer, it seems, will we have to fiddle around with several different cables, and curse when we have brought the along the
Bradford was chosen last week as the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. This week, Bradford Cineworld – as well as a number of other cinemas around the country – announced that a new movie called The Lady of Heaven was being pulled from schedules following protests by angry Muslims. So is this what we can expect from a
It’s not just in Westminster that Labour is having difficulties with transgender issues. Over in Wales, Mark Drakeford’s barmy army has been wrestling with the same debate, amid claims from Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi that LGBT charity Stonewall has ‘dictated policy’ to her colleagues at Cardiff Bay. And the Welsh Tories have clearly spotted an opportunity
Love Island, which started again last night, flirts with virtue just a little more obviously each year. The show is racially diverse, and overwhelmingly working class, despite featuring the odd medic. Hugo Hammond, who was born with a club foot, became the show’s first disabled contestant last year. The latest series features a deaf contestant, Tasha Ghouri, a ‘dancer’ with
Another day, another ridiculous Boris Johnson statement. This morning, the cabinet discussed whether the NHS was to become like Netflix, and predictably everyone has got very excited. It’s worth having a look at what actually happened at the meeting, though. The official readout is that Sajid Javid — not Johnson ― updated ministers on ‘the
Boris Johnson insists that his victory in last night’s confidence vote means he will be able to ‘draw a line under issues our opponents want to talk about’. But what the result actually shows, as Boris undoubtedly knows, is that even some of those who backed him in the vote now want him gone. Why? Shortly after the
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It is the day after the night before when Boris Johnson narrowly survived a confidence vote. Today he held a meeting with the Cabinet to tell his colleagues it is time to ‘move on’. ‘This looks like a slow Tory suicide to me’ – Fraser Nelson Some critics have pointed to the fact that shortly
A round of tax cuts? A splurge of infrastructure spending? Or perhaps a whizzy way of subsidising housing? Boris Johnson could even decide to forgive student debts, and hand out a massive Christmas bonus for pensioners, craftily dressed up as a cost-of-living rebate. There are no doubt lots of such ideas being kicked around in Downing Street
Perusing the list of declared Boris-backers yesterday, Mr S was struck by the omission of several high-profile names. The erstwhile uber-loyalist Matt Hancock for one: the former Health Secretary was previously one of Johnson’s most ardent supporters, in his desperate bid to return to the cabinet. But even more intriguing than the womanizer of West
All eyes in parliament were on Committee Room 10 last night as Tory MPs queued up to cast their vote on Boris Johnson’s premiership. Between 6:00 p.m to 8:00 p.m they trooped in and out, with Johnson himself turning up shortly after 7:00 p.m to confirm that he does, in fact, still retain confidence in
The worst possible outcome for the Conservative and Unionist party is also a pretty lousy result for the country. That this needs saying – that Tory MPs need reminding of this – is itself yet another data point supporting the proposition that Boris Johnson’s leadership has thoroughly corrupted the party. So what to do now?
What is happening in the UK right now is similar to the later Berlusconi years, the opera buffa phase of Italian politics with bunga-bunga parties, and worse. Readers may remember Berlusconi’s infamous put-down of recession warnings in 2009, when he remarked that he was not worried because the restaurants were still full. I remember having
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The results are in. 211 Tory MPs expressed confidence in the Prime Minister, while 148 said they had no confidence in Boris Johnson continuing to lead the Conservative party. While this is technically a win, it is a narrower victory than Theresa May (who looked splendid in her ball gown tonight) got in her no-confidence
How does Boris Johnson bounce back from 148 members of his own party expressing no confidence in him? The Prime Minister is claiming the fact he won the result means he can now move on and focus on the government’s priorities. But privately Boris Johnson’s allies concede the result is worse than they anticipated. ‘He’s
Boris Johnson has just insisted that he has had ‘an extremely positive’ and ‘decisive result’ in the vote of confidence in his leadership. He said the government can ‘come together’ and ‘put behind’ it all the rows of the past few months and ‘focus on the stuff that the public actually want us to be