All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I found this shaggy dog story on the MillwallOnline site, posted by a mate called Life With The Lions. ‘It is just before the start of the Scotland vs England game, at Wembley stadium, in the Euro Championships 2020. Harry Kane goes into the England dressing room to find all his teammates looking a bit
Even after the one metre rule and the limits on numbers are removed on July 19th, we will not be back to anything approaching normal life. From self-isolation to travel we will not be returning to the status quo ante. Another way in which life will be different, as I say in the Times today,
The end of Edwin Poots’s 21-day spell as leader of the DUP sums up the ordeal of being a unionist leader. Elected as a hard-line replacement for Arlene Foster, he has departed now after being seen to have given too much away to Sinn Fein over the Irish language. Who will replace him? The early
They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. If that’s the case, there must be an awful lot of people who are close to the health secretary, Matt Hancock. Hancock has not had the best of weeks. On Wednesday, Dominic Cummings released a series of WhatsApps which appeared to show
Tory MPs in prosperous southern seats will be feeling rather nervous this morning. The Lib Dem victory in Chesham and Amersham, see Katy’s blog here, is another illustration of how the decline in tribal voting means there are far fewer safe seats than before. One immediate consequence of this result is that it will harden
Meghan Markle isn’t one to think small. In a statement on her Archewell website to thank those who put her book, The Bench, at the top of the New York Times‘ children’s picture book list, she wrote: ‘While this poem began as a love letter to my husband and son, I’m encouraged to see that
Boris Johnson wakes to a shock Tory defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Overnight, the Liberal Democrats have turned the seat yellow for the first time in its history. The Lib Dem candidate Sarah Green managed to overturn a majority of 16,000 in the Buckinghamshire seat that has only ever been Tory — after the
Only 20 days after winning the party leadership by one vote, Edwin Poots has resigned as DUP leader. The immediate trigger for his departure is him nominating a First Minister today in spite of the opposition of a majority of both DUP MLAs and MPs. (They were unhappy about the late night Irish Language Act
The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, isn’t normally given to waffle, which makes his maiden appearance on GB News all the more remarkable. Asked by Andrew Neil who – government or homeowner – would have to pay the estimated £10,000 per household cost of replacing domestic gas boilers with heat pumps to help reach the target of
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New DUP leader Edwin Poots faces his first challenge today as he tries to push through a controversial candidate for First Minister. There are now rumours that the party may launch a vote of no-confidence in him, only a month after he became leader. How much trouble is the party in? Katy Balls points out that
You might think that a cabinet minister and privy councillor whose reputation for truthfulness had been brought into (very public) question would be inclined to keep their public utterances strictly on the straight and narrow. You’d be failing to allow for the enthusiastic approach of the Health Secretary. Matt Hancock used his presentation to today’s
Regular readers may be aware that in recent months I have been having a running-spat with a Canadian lawyer called Stephen Toope. I am rarely exercised by Canadian lawyers, but this particular one is the current Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and he seems intent on running that crown jewel of an institution into the ground.
Has the EU Commission lost any sense of moral value? This week, Hungary, an EU member state, voted to impose bigoted and oppressive laws on its LGBT citizens. This amounted to a clear breach of many of our domestic laws – and it is a breach of the shared Human Rights laws. Yet the EU’s response
Last month’s Queen Speech was noteworthy for how little it contained, with the only rabbit out of the legislative hat being (appropriately enough) the Animal Sentience Bill. But now the proposed legislation, which would give vertebrates a legal right to feel happiness and suffering, has started to attract serious scrutiny as it enters the committee stage of
Late last night, the UK government and Sinn Fein went over the heads of the DUP and agreed on a solution to the thorny issue of Irish language legislation. The Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis promised to step in and pass the legislation if Stormont fails to do so. An ultimatum has now been given
Boris Johnson delayed 21 June, he said, because the data did not merit a full reopening. The specific data government is tracking to make these decisions remains unknown, so we are left to guess. But it’s hard to imagine the decision was disconnected from the rising Covid infection rate across the UK, due to the
It has been almost 45 years since Tam Dalyell first asked the West Lothian Question. It is a damning indictment of devolutionary unionists that they are still flailing for an answer. Dalyell, a Scottish Labour MP with the uncommon foresight and courage to oppose his party’s embrace of devolution, first posed it during the parliamentary
Who pays? It is one of the most important questions in politics, especially when it comes to the sort of expensive zeitgeisty ideas that governments love to take a reputational ride on. When Margaret Thatcher was Tory leader, she tried to exempt her party from this charge of vulnerability to fashionable notions that come with
In the global market for government debt, worth an estimated $92 trillion (£66 trillion), it amounts to little more than a drop in the ocean. The European Union this week issued the first €20 billion (£17 billion) of bonds to pay for its Coronavirus Rescue Fund. The money itself doesn’t amount to very much one way
Turkey 0 Wales 2 (Ramsey 45, Roberts 90+5) Apologies to those of you who have been expecting my annual list of the world’s most loathsome countries, which I usually publish at this time of year. Various stuff has got in the way – not least this tournament. Once it is over I’ll get down to
For those who lean to the right and live in France, Tuesday night was magnificent. Not only did Les Bleus open their European Championship campaign with a 1-0 victory against Germany, but their boys defied expectation by not taking the knee before kick-off. The build-up to the match had been overshadowed by an announcement on Monday
Goodbye and good riddance to the Leeds ‘Managed Zone’ in which punters were given amnesty to buy the most disenfranchised and desperate women. Following a seven-year campaign by feminists, residents and some of the women who had previously been prostituted in the zone, this week Leeds City Council announced that the zone will not be
Few MPs in the House of Commons have been as eloquent on either side of the lockdown argument as Charles Walker. The MP for Broxbourne returned to the chamber yesterday afternoon to take aim at the scientists sitting on Sage — the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. Walker — who has accused Boris Johnson of treating
Chancellor Rishi Sunak agreed to sit down with Andrew Neil on GB News last night for what turned out to be a fairly brutal grilling. The Chancellor floundered under interrogation on the pensions triple-lock, the cost of climate-friendly policies and the Tories’ big-government instincts. However, one of the more uncomfortable moments came when Neil pressed
How significant is the UK-Australia trade deal announced this week during Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s visit to Britain? Well, Australia already has 17 genuine free trade agreements, including with the United States, Japan and China. But the free trade agreement with the UK is undoubtedly one of the highest quality agreements Australia has ever reached.
It is complete nonsense to say that the word ‘woke’ has been banned from the Sun. No such conversations have taken place — with Ally Ross or anyone on the paper. We cover ‘woke’ stories on the front page regularly, including today, and we use the word throughout the paper and in leader columns. There
When Rishi Sunak told Andrew Neil this evening that he had his eyes on the future, he was ostensibly talking about the nation’s finances. But it was difficult not to conclude from his interview on GB News that he wasn’t also keeping at least one eye on his own future, too. A particularly striking exchange
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Another day, another Dom bomb. In Cummings’s latest release, a number of WhatsApp messages reveal communications between himself and the Prime Minister, with the latter describing the health secretary Matt Hancock’s performance as effing ‘hopeless’. Is this damaging to Hancock? Or is this the sentiment that you can expect from senior people who work at close
The meeting between U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Geneva started cordially enough. A quick handshake, toothy smiles for the cameras, and some standard words of diplomacy. ‘I would like to thank you for the initiative to meet today,’ a slouching Putin told an attentive Biden. ‘Still, U.S.-Russian relations have accumulated a lot
Finland: 0 Russia: 1 (Zhukov, 45) Following an earlier, epic, encounter between these two plucky teams, Adolf Hitler commented: ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ He had noted the parlous performance of the Red Army during the initial stages of the 1939 Winter War and thus
When Dominic Cummings gave seven hours of evidence to a Commons inquiry into the government’s Covid response, it was Matt Hancock who received the most criticism. The former No. 10 senior aide’s accusation that the Health Secretary was negligent – the most serious charge being that Hancock had misled the government over testing and care homes
Covid changes its identity more often than Grant Shapps. The latest strain emerged with the appealingly exotic name ‘Indian’. Now it’s been given a more military-sounding tag, ‘the Delta variant.’ Today’s PMQs featured a tussle over the date on which this dangerous mutant sneaked through the UK’s borders. Sir Keir Starmer waved a file of
When Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s former chief advisor, gave evidence to the Covid-19 ‘lessons learned’ joint select committee last month (over the course of seven hours) his revelations seemed explosive. Specifically, Cummings alleged that the health secretary Matt Hancock was guilty of incompetence, interference and repeated lying. He told the committee: ‘The Secretary of