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The Isis caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated at a cost of billions of dollars and the loss of thousands of lives. And yet the ideology of violence and hatred espoused by the Islamic State lives on and has spread into cities in the West like a poison with no antidote. The black flag
Keir Starmer’s government won’t be the first to engage in gerrymandering when it seeks to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, inviting into the polling booths a group which most people suspect will be more inclined to vote Labour. But could Labour’s elections Bill end up being more radical than that? The Labour-linked
Another day, another Labour drama. Now it’s Independent MP Rosie Duffield making waves after giving a rather revealing interview to TalkTV. The animosity between the former Labour politician and the current party leader has spanned years, with public disagreements over women’s rights, policy decisions and sleaze scandals. Are there any circumstances in which the left-leaning
Kemi Badenoch has only been Conservative leader for two months. The next general election is likely to be held in 2028 or 2029. Yet there have been persistent rumblings that she must set out clear policies if she is to win back support from voters who left the Tory fold. In The Financial Times, Robert
You might have forgotten about Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Twixmas Twitter spat, but the Reform UK leader certainly hasn’t. Mr S would remind readers that, during the Christmas period, a fight on the right broke out between the two party readers after Reform announced it had officially overtaken the Conservatives’ membership total – which
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Happy New Year and – of course – happy new long-term social care plan. Not only has Labour announced a ‘longer-term’ solution to a problem the party itself has acknowledged is urgent by setting up a commission that won’t report until 2028, but it has also taken steps to make that reform even harder to
To the Montecito monarchs who, no matter how much they protest about the press, just can’t seem to stay away from the spotlight. Not content with her failed podcast Archetypes – which one Spotify exec fumed should have been called ‘the f***ing grifters’ – or the couples’ documentary, rather creatively titled ‘Harry and Meghan’, the
When Donald Trump won the US election, the writing was on the wall for Nick Clegg at Meta. Now, just a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Clegg has stepped down from his role as president of global affairs at the social media giant. He will be replaced by his deputy and Republican Joel Kaplan, as
Whack! That’s the sound of social care reform once again being hit into the long grass. Thud! Another hit sends it into a thicket of scrub. Not only has Labour announced a ‘longer-term’ solution to a problem the party itself has acknowledged is urgent by setting up a commission that won’t report until 2028, but
In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking
Wales has long been an embarrassment for any aspiring Labour education secretary. While the Conservative government’s school reforms shot England up the international league tables – in the PISA rankings it rose from 25th to 13th in reading and 27th to 11th in maths between 2009 and 2022 – performance in Labour-run Wales and in SNP-run Scotland has
Days before Christmas, the BBC published an article on its website headlined ‘Elon Musk’s curious fixation with Britain’. The broadcaster was anxious to discuss why Donald Trump’s right-hand man was taking such an interest in British affairs from across the pond. It turns out that Musk – who will be Trump’s efficiency tsar when he
Happy new year Nick Clegg. The onetime Deputy Prime Minister has spent much of the past decade collecting oodles of cash from the social media giant formerly known as Facebook. Clegg has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior executives at Meta since October 2018, living out of a £7 million mansion in Silicon Valley.
When John Bercow finally left the Speakership at the end of 2019, MPs breathed a sigh of relief. At last, they thought, no more endless partisan showboating from the Speaker’s chair. Yet, over time, his replacement has faced a mounting chorus of criticism. Lindsay Hoyle’s interruptions at PMQs seemed to become more frequent, prompting sketch
All is not well in Labourland. Now it transpires that 20 councillors have quit Sir Keir Starmer’s party in a rather extraordinary protest at the direction of the party under the new Prime Minister. Those involved will now sit as independent councillors in Broxtowe Borough Council in Nottinghamshire. Dear oh dear… The disillusioned lot have
Are we about to find out the full foolishness of Ed Miliband’s policy of blocking licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea? While it may come as a surprise to some, until New Year’s Eve Europe was still receiving gas supplies from Russia – not through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline
Labour’s crackdown on people smugglers comes as New Year’s Day Home Office figures show the number of small boats crossing the English Channel increased by a quarter on 2023. A staggering 36,816 people were recorded as having made the journey on small boats in 2024, with the last group of just under 300 people arriving
Who would want to be Prime Minister, when even an innocent holiday can lead to a PR disaster? Keir Starmer had to cancel his summer holiday last year because he couldn’t be seen to be swanning off to the sun while towns in the Midlands and North were erupting into rioting. Surely, then, a few days
New year, same problems. Already Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the firing line again – this time facing criticism for private school VAT adverts. Now the Treasury has been accused of breaching impartiality for saying that Starmer’s move to apply 20 per cent VAT to private school fees ends a ‘tax break’. Dear
Donald Trump is an unconventional politician and he responds to terror attacks unconventionally. When bad things happen, he often goes on the offensive. ‘Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!’ he posted on his Truth Social media account last night, after 15 people were killed in the New Year’s Day
State failure was a consistent theme of British politics in 2024. So as the new year begins, attention has turned to perhaps the most egregious instance of that malaise in modern times: the horrific scandal of grooming gangs in dozens of UK cities. Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister, has rejected calls for a government inquiry
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Happy New Year! And it could prove to be a very happy new year for Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. They provided some of the stand-out political drama of 2024, with Lee Anderson’s defection and Farage’s return, before winning five seats at the general election (as well as a hefty chunk of the popular
US president Joe Biden has confirmed that a terrorist who killed 15 people during the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans was ‘inspired by Isis’. Biden said that Shamsud-Din Jabbar – who also injured at least 35 people after driving his pick-up truck through crowds of revellers – had expressed a ‘desire to kill’ in
As many of us lurched blearily into 2025, desperately trying to remember how, exactly, we’d managed to cause offence to our nearest and dearest in the hinterland between the old year and the new, there was another unwelcome surprise waiting in the wings. In the late afternoon of 1 January, just as the nausea and
Once Jess Phillips was the queen of Twitter, harrying and hounding the Tories at every chance. But these days it’s a very different story. Having been handed government responsibility for safeguarding back in July, the Home Office minister swiftly parked a social media back lash after suggesting she got better NHS treatment for her Gaza
There has been much indignation at the roll-call of those ennobled in the New Year Honours. There’s been bewilderment that Gareth Southgate, England’s failed football coach, has been given a knighthood. There’s been anger that Sadiq Khan, who has presided over an escalation of knife crime in the capital, has been similarly honoured. There’s been
A social media post on 30 December: photographs of admittedly-splendid new year decorations in Moscow, archly captioned ‘back to 2021.’ The poster is alluding to the fact that obscene and extravagant references to Putin’s war in Ukraine – notably the letter Z, which has come to symbolise it – were notably absent from city decorations
As an English teacher, one of my favourite poems to teach, to pupils of almost all ages, is Chinua Achebe’s ‘Vultures’. In the poem, the speaker describes various images that uncomfortably combine love and violence: a vulture picking apart a corpse before nestling up to its mate; a Commandant at Belsen buying chocolate for his
It’s been an eventful year in British politics, with a snap general election and multiple leadership contests keeping political journalists across the country busy. And how have political party leaders fared? With the help of the Spectator’s data hub, Mr S has examined which party leaders, both north and south of the border, have had
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The former US President died has died age 100 surrounded by his family in Plains. Known as the longest-lived US President in history, The Spectator’s political correspondent James Heale and Freddy Gray discuss Jimmy Carter’s legacy both in and out of office, how he compares to Joe Biden as one-term Presidents, and the way Jimmy Carter’s Christianity
Some of football’s greatest names have been knighted for their achievements in the game. Sir Alf Ramsey received his gong for leading England to World Cup victory in 1966, an achievement unrivalled to this day. Sir Alex Ferguson became a footballing knight for turning Manchester United into serial winners of the Premier League. This exclusive
When Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves visits Beijing in January on a mission to improve ‘economic and financial cooperation’ she could well find her hosts surprisingly well informed about the global financial system and Donald Trump’s plans for it – thanks to China’s hyperactive and increasingly aggressive army of hackers. Chinese hackers are becoming
