All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
D-Day is finally here. Like the rest of SW1, Mr S will be tuning into Dominic Cummings’s appearance at a Commons joint committee later today. Kick off is 9:30 a.m. with four hours of theatrics expected to focus on his criticisms of the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. The political editor of ITV Robert Peston
Politically it must have seemed an easy promise for Theresa May to make in the dying days of her premiership: to commit Britain to a legally-binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, rather than the 80 per cent reduction previously stipulated in the Climate Change Act. It was the summer of 2019 and
What a mess. Ministers have today been defending the decision to place eight areas in what is being called a ‘lockdown by stealth’, after it turned out that the government had quietly published guidance to slow the spread of the Indian variant without telling anyone in those areas. That guidance, which pitched up on the
Amid rumours that parliamentary bosses are mulling the closure of MPs’ favourite bar, Mr S is pleased to report that some traditions remain intact. An advert appeared last week on the government contracts website for the ‘provision of frozen desserts and afternoon tea sweet selection.’ The body demanding this service? None other than the mother
Multiple reports have confirmed that the Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau is dead. Shekau’s demise came after Boko Haram last week clashed with Isis in Sambisa forest in northeast Nigeria. Some reports suggested that the Boko Haram leader detonated a suicide vest rather than be captured by the Isis militants. Isis’s West African Province (ISWAP)
The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims. Professor Singh
Dominic Cummings will not pull his punches when criticising the Prime Minister when he appears before MPs on Wednesday morning. In evidence to MPs on the combined health and science committees, he will allege Boris Johnson said ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds’ when delaying lockdown in the autumn. Cummings will say that the PM insisted he
The Spectator’s internship scheme for 2021 is now open. It’s CV-blind and name-blind: we don’t ask about where (or whether) you went to university. We don’t ask about your age, nationality or immunological status. We don’t even ask your name: we anonymise all entries. In journalism, all that matters is whether you can do the
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Islamophobia ‘remains a problem’ in the Conservative party, a report has found. Professor Swaran Singh, who analysed more than a thousand complaints of misconduct for his investigation, said that some Tories needed a ‘completely new mindset’. Boris Johnson himself gave evidence to the inquiry, and when asked about his column saying a group of black
Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on ‘controversial stickers’ appears to suggest as much. ‘On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,’ said a message on Kirkcaldy police’s Twitter feed, posted last week. ‘Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact
The EU’s decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone’s economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU’s foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear. Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that
Everything about the video seemed wrong. ‘It’s likely his nose is broken because the shape of it has changed and there’s a lot of powder on it. All of the left side of his face has powder,’ said the father of Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich. The details of the story are now known: the exiled
It has been a tough few years for Emmanuel Macron. Elected on a tidal wave of optimism in 2017, the famously fickle French public has since soured towards the country’s youngest ever president. The ‘yellow vest’ movement, continued Islamist extremism and now the Covid pandemic have all damaged Macron’s approval ratings, which have hovered around the -20 mark
On Sunday evening an act of appalling state kidnapping took place over the skies of Europe. Four alleged KGB officers and a Soviet-era MIG-29 fighter jet forced a Ryanair flight, travelling between two EU capitals, to divert to Minsk. The hijacking was a carefully planned, outrageous operation. The Belarusian KGB (sadly not an anachronism) had
In 2022, a year after its centenary, there is the chance that Northern Ireland could end up with a nationalist, republican, Sinn Fein First Minister. The latest survey of popular opinion in the province, polled by LucidTalk, currently has Sinn Fein as the largest party on 25 per cent, nine points clear of the DUP
I’ve bemoaned the ‘no Tories please’ line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way for university freshers to virtue signal their wokeness. It’s a phase many go through, and, more’s the pity, do not all grow out of. But as of late, a new, equally lacklustre profile-essential has emerged
The diversion of a Ryanair flight bound for Lithuania from Athens and the arrest of passenger Roman Protasevich – an influential Belarusian blogger critical of the country’s dictatorial regime – is the latest tyrannical action to lead to expressions of grave concern and tempered outrage from the West. However, the fact that the passenger aircraft
Is the EU-China investment deal dead? It was last week sunk down by 599 votes to 30 in the European Parliament, but that’s not being taken very seriously in Beijing if the national press is anything to go by. China’s state media is a fair proxy for what the famously opaque ruling party is thinking,
It has been a bruising afternoon for the BBC in the House of Commons. An urgent question was granted on the findings of the Dyson report into the Martin Bashir affair and the subsequent cover up of how Panorama obtained its Princess Diana interview in 1995. Tory MP after Tory MP has queued up to
If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite
Belarus forcing down a civilian airliner flying between two EU, and Nato, capitals is a grave threat to the international order. If any flight crossing the airspace of an autocratic regime is vulnerable to such an attack, the world begins to look a very different – and more dangerous – place. The challenge to the
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When Dominic Cummings appears in front of a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former aide is expected to attack Whitehall’s institutional structure, a lack of government transparency in the pandemic, and the Prime Minister himself. In a still growing Twitter thread, the former aide has laid out his critique of how the government handled Covid-19.
Valerie Vaz’s month goes from bad to worse. The Labour MP was one of just two frontbenchers sacked by Keir Starmer a fortnight ago in the wake of the party’s Hartlepool defeat. The surprise move prompted political journalists to joke that sacking Vaz as shadow leader of the House had been just the response red wall voters
Imagine for a moment that Cuba picked the next Pope. That is the scenario which Lobsang Sangay, the then-Sikyong (the Tibetan government-in-exile’s head of state), asked the world to consider several years ago in light of growing concerns that the Chinese Communist party (CCP) would seek to select the next Dalai Lama. Now such a
The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by
Covid deaths are down to a trickle, but what about the indirect consequences of the pandemic: deaths that come from people failing to access timely medical treatment for other conditions? Cancer Research UK has estimated what it believes to be the backlog from disturbance to cancer services and the reluctance of some people to seek
Word reaches Steerpike of a dastardly plot to rob MPs of their favourite watering hole. The Strangers’ Bar is located in the heart of the Palace of Westminster and has been plying honourable members with subsidised booze for generations. But now parliamentary bosses are feared to be considering the closure or dramatic overhaul of Strangers, under the pretext
It’s a tale worthy of Kafka. Dr Pete Newbon, a lecturer in humanities at Northumbria University, is being investigated by his employer for making fun of Jeremy Corbyn. Dr Newbon tweeted a picture of the former Labour leader reading to a group of schoolchildren from Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Only the
As the government puts the final touches to its social distancing review and Foreign Office ministers ponder the best response to the situation in Belarus, it’s a scheduled select committee appearance that is the subject of the most animated chatter in Westminster. Dominic Cummings is due to give evidence before the joint health and science
After the UK finished bottom of Eurovision on Saturday, you might have thought British hopeful James Newman was the big loser of the night. But step forward, Rhiannon Spear, SNP Greater Pollok representative, who managed to embarrass her newly re-elected party with a late night display of classlessness. The SNP’s national women’s convenor posted: ‘It’s ok
All those esteemed generals of hindsight screeching ‘more governance’ as the cure to BBC’s cover-up of the Martin Bashir’s dishonesty 25 years ago share with Lord Dyson a misunderstanding about the essential cause of the Panorama catastrophe and all the ensuing BBC scandals including those involving Jimmy Savile, Cliff Richard and Alistair McAlpine. Namely, ‘Birtism’.
It has not been a happy week for the BBC. The corporation has spent the last four days grappling with the fall out from Lord Dyson’s damning report into the Martin Bashir affair and Prince William’s angry response. Now a fresh controversy has blown up in the BBC Monitoring unit. Digital journalist Tala Halawa has
Priti Patel: The BBC’s reputation ‘has been compromised’ Today’s political shows were dominated by the fallout from the Dyson inquiry into the BBC and its relationship with the journalist Martin Bashir. The findings of Lord Dyson’s report have already seen Tony Hall, the BBC’s former director-general, resign his post as chair of the National Gallery.