All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics, which begins on Friday, looks set to be one of the worst in the event’s history. A book detailing all the scandals and mishaps of the games would be longer then the Tales of Genji. Won way back in 2013, it wasn’t long before allegations of suspicious payments materialised. Since then there have been:
There is growing nervousness in Whitehall about what the number of people having to self-isolate might mean for various key industries. This, rather than hospitals being overwhelmed, is fast becoming the biggest worry among policymakers. This concern is leading to talks about what can be done to prevent key workers from having to isolate. I understand that
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Yesterday in what was the quickest public turnaround in government history. The prime minister and the chancellor are now in isolation after getting pinged for being too close to the Covid ridden health secretary Sajid Javid. There is something a little ironic about the leaders of the country being locked up on what was initially
Greta Thunberg has declared the floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to be the product of man-made climate change, adding ‘We’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency, and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent.’ Well, that’s sorted out that one, then. We hardly need Angela Merkel
Welcome to ‘freedom day’, or more properly ‘chaos day’ – with businesses warning they can’t operate because too many employees are being ‘pinged’ and told to isolate, and the clinically extremely vulnerable terrified to leave their homes for fear no one will be wearing a mask. The funny thing is that all this madness was
It was 60 years this week since the first Prime Ministers’ Questions took place. What began as a sedate affair under Harold Macmillan has now become the centrepiece of the weekly parliamentary calendar, beginning at 12 p.m. every Wednesday afternoon. Over the years there have been numerous zingers, gaffes, probing questions and shameless defences, contributing to the
What a celebration of diversity I witnessed in Paris on Saturday as tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through the capital. Organisers put the figure at 50,000, the government at 18,000; I’d say the former is the more accurate estimation. It took two hours to walk the one and three-quarter miles between the start of
It’s been a long pandemic for young people – who’ve had their lives put on hold to prevent the spread of a disease which mainly affects the elderly. So one can certainly sympathise with those wanting to let their hair down as Covid restrictions were lifted last night for ‘freedom day’. That certainly seemed the
Poor Robert Jenrick. This morning we learnt that, like the rest of the public, the housing secretary (and his department) is not signed up to the exclusive pilot scheme that was set to allow Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to skip quarantine. If Jenrick gets pinged, the rules will apply to him, just as they
Perhaps ‘freedom day’ eve was never destined to run smoothly. Nevertheless, the breaking news this morning that both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had been contacted by NHS Test and Trace falls in the realm of absurdities that one just couldn’t make up. It had initially been announced that Johnson and Sunak would be
After several hours of rage that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were going to be able to avoid self-isolation — despite being contacted by NHS Test and Trace — the pair have performed a screeching U-turn. They’ve now said they will ignore the pilot that they were a part of and stay at home like
It’s hard to break into the global top ten of insufferably arrogant political acts. You need to do something really memorable — something to match Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection, assembled while her husband presided over an increasingly impoverished country. Or the Soviet regime’s creation of special reserved ‘ZiL lanes’ in Moscow to speed government high-ups through
It’s the eve of so-called ‘freedom day’ and the government has been forced into a U-turn over its use of a pilot testing scheme. After Sajid Javid tested positive for Covid, both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were contacted by NHS Test and Trace having met with the health secretary on Friday. However, rather than actually self isolate,
I was bemused when I first saw the photograph of spaced-out chairs and vaccination booths in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Was this an art installation designed to probe the relationship between personhood and state? Were we supposed to question the transformational power of medicine, in a live enactment of biomedical transubstantiation in the
Jess Phillips thinks that transwomen — like me — are not female, but we should be treated as women. She has probably succeeded in upsetting both sides of what has become a toxic debate. Politicians entering these shark-infested waters do so at their own peril. If, like Rosie Duffield or Joanna Cherry, they stand up
Following yesterday’s news that health secretary Sajid Javid had tested positive for Covid, it seemed only a matter of time before other cabinet ministers were similarly forced to self-isolate. Javid had a ‘lengthy’ meeting with Boris Johnson on Friday afternoon, just hours before his symptoms developed. So, surely the Prime Minister will be expected to
This month’s announcement of a new economic advisory council formed by the Scottish government came with the usual flow of superlatives. The 17-member group will publish a strategy paper later this year to help deliver the ‘transformational change Scotland needs’, according to economy secretary Kate Forbes. We are promised ‘bold ideas’ that will bring ‘new,
Each Tour de France produces many striking vignettes, and Thursday’s from the finish at the bleak mountain top ski resort of Luz Ardiden in the Pyrenees was one of the best. At funeral pace, the diminutive Manx cyclist Mark Cavendish crossed the finish line dead last, 32 minutes behind the stage winner Tadej Pogacar of
As the government prepares to lift nearly all legal Covid restrictions on Monday, ministers are at pains to emphasise that the pandemic is not over. A helpful reminder can be found in the news that Sajid Javid has today tested positive. In a video posted on Twitter, the Health Secretary — who is double jabbed
I am going to have to boil this down as crudely as I can, because it’s a complex subject with a simple message, but the Pope is attempting to make it as hard as possible to say, and thus attend, the Old Rite Mass. This is the form of Mass most Catholics went to before the
There are just six days left before the Commons rises for recess but there’s still time for one last election. The 1922 Committee, that bastion of Tory backbenchers, is currently holding elections to fill two vacant slots on its executive, with the results announced on Tuesday. Ministers, whips and paid vice chairmen of the party do
A last-ditch effort to broker peace in Afghanistan will be made in the Qatari capital of Doha this weekend. A senior Afghan government delegation which includes Abdullah Abdullah, chair of the country’s High Council for National Reconciliation, and former national president Hamid Karzai will engage in talks with the Taleban. Afghanistan’s unending 42-year civil war
Half a century ago, Willie Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’. I can think of no finer description to apply to Keir Starmer’s summer tour of Britain, during which we are told he intends to listen to the concerns of voters in a bid to win back their trust.
Not content with winning Euro 2020, many Italians have spent the days since the final engaged in a febrile orgy of moral supremacy. Italians are not just much better than the English at football, you see (which is fair enough, although they did only win on penalties), but many Italians are insisting, even more excitedly, that
When European governments openly disobey courts, ears prick up. When two courts simultaneously contradict each other on the same day and descend into an unseemly shouting-match, all bets are off. Welcome to the mad world of Poland’s legal relations with the EU. The ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, PiS, is cordially detested in
Colin Pitchfork, the child rapist and murderer who was sentenced to life in prison in 1988, will soon be a free man. On 31 November 1983, Lynda Mann was raped and strangled by Pitchfork in Leicestershire; on 31 July 1986, Dawn Ashworth was raped and strangled by him in a neighbouring village. Both girls were
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American troops have all but left Afghanistan, months ahead of their 11 September deadline. The country looks ready to fall into a full-scale civil war, with the Taleban overrunning government forces and seeing off local pockets of resistance. Will Biden keep America out, and will he walk away from Iraq too? Freddy Gray speaks to
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In our last Coffee House Shots before the so called ‘Freedom Day’ on Monday, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson share their thoughts on just how free it will feel, what’s the right call on vaccine passports and would a further delay be the right thing to do rather then open and close again later?
Andy Burnham is very much the flavour of the month in Labour circles at present. Having left Westminster in 2016 when it became clear he wasn’t going to become leader any time soon, he has undergone something of a renaissance as mayor of Manchester. In this capacity he gets to govern an overwhelmingly left-leaning city
Is the NHS about to be privatised? That’s the charge from some campaigners as the Health and Care Bill starts its journey through parliament. Certain doctors, mainly on social media, are calling on MPs to scrap the Bill because they claim it will open up the NHS to more privatisation and allow private companies to skim
In his ‘levelling up’ speech in Coventry this week, the Prime Minister insisted time and again that this was no ‘zero sum’ game. Improving the fortunes of the poorer parts of the country would not entail levelling richer parts of the country down, he said: ‘Levelling up is not a jam-spreading operation. It’s not robbing