All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
If it wasn’t miserable enough being told that I have to spend the next month at home, now I have ‘Pete’ from Octopus Energy emailing me and asking if I would mind terribly turning off a few appliances between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. If fact, he says, if I can halve my energy usage during those
Boris Johnson is holding a press conference at 5 p.m. on the new England-wide lockdown. This follows last night’s vote where thirty-odd Tory MPs voted against the new measures. But listening to that debate, it was clear that even among many of the Tories who voted for the lockdown there is deep scepticism about the
Remember, remember the fifth of November. Except it’s not really possible this year, is it? Given that we’re not even allowed to meet up in our gardens, the chances of anyone watching an effigy of an unfortunate 17th-century gentleman go up in flames today are zero. In one way, I can’t say I am sorry.
These days Rishi Sunak’s appearances before the House of Commons tend to mark changes to pre-existing economic support schemes. His proposed winter economy plan didn’t survive a month before alterations had to be made. But even by recent standards, today’s statement marks a big shift for the Chancellor. Not only is the furlough scheme back — despite
If the US election was a television drama, the drum-roll end credits of the penultimate episode played this week and we are now waiting for the denouement. Only, there was never supposed to be a cliffhanger. An exhausted nation should have chosen boredom. Biden was meant to have been the clear victor and the political
SNP politicians often get an easy ride when they appear on politics programmes south of the border, where most of the discussion tends to revolve around the performance of the Westminster government. Unfortunately, that was not the case for the SNP MP Alyn Smith, who appeared on the BBC’s Politics Live this afternoon. Near the
England has only been back in national lockdown for a matter of hours and already economic support packages are rolling in — not for the duration of this lockdown (furlough was already confirmed until 2 December) but for the months to follow after the country exits lockdown. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has abandoned a return to
I am happy to see that President Trump is acting on the maxim of the month: Don’t concede if you didn’t lose. Any other GOP president would be on the defensive now. ‘Yes, there was voter fraud, but, but, but…’ That dangerous conjunction is a fledging concession just waiting to spread its wings and fly.
Zoliborz is one of Warsaw’s most prestigious addresses. Its leafy streets are popular with journalists, university professors and, as of last week, thousands of protestors. The suburb is home to Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s former prime minister who has led the ruling Law and Justice party for close to two decades. Despite holding no government office
Even before the final result of the US Presidential election was known, the British left was ready with its hot takes. Momentum, which continues to proudly hold aloft the flickering flame of Corbynism, was amongst the first out of the traps, claiming that Joe Biden’s failure to achieve a landslide victory confirmed, ‘what we already
The Bank of England includes as one of its ‘conditioning assumptions’ in its forecasts today that the Bank Rate – the interest rate that is the benchmark for all rates – becomes negative for the first time in history next year, at minus 0.1 per cent. It describes a world in which banks are charged
At the time of writing, several key states are still tabulating or finding votes (depending on what side of the aisle you prefer). Joe Biden presently looks to be headed to the White House as the 46th President of the United States. Yet oddly there is no exuberance flooding out from Democrats or their voters.
Here is what is not happening in France. France is not ‘at war with its Muslims’. Muslims are not being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. Emmanuel Macron has not ‘strongly boosted the legitimacy of all kind of obsessive Islamophobes’, nor is he contributing to ‘the Islamophobic swamp into which France has sunk’. The French
The 2020 election results have been rolling in. Joe Biden has won California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio,
The first rule of Pundit Club is: election results always mean what your political prejudices want them to mean. Since I am a stickler for rules, and since everyone else is getting in on it, here is my tuppence-worth on what the results so far tell us about the US presidential election. If Joe Biden
A New Yorker cartoon shows Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit. Until last night, his enemies could enjoyably salivate over that prospect. Today, it might look to them as though president Trump is not going to jail, after all. We cannot say yet whether that’s because he has won outright, or because he has lost
He was winging it. Definitely. The PM almost certainly spent half the night watching the electoral quagmire in America. And at today’s PMQs he seemed flaccid and repetitive, full of diverting orotundities. Usually, he readies himself with facts and figures to spew out. But he’d done no homework, and he committed an unforced blunder from
Theresa May has continued her campaign of criticism from the backbenches, questioning the government’s thinking over England’s month-long lockdown. The former PM pointed out the problems with the now-infamous 4,000 deaths a day graph used by Vallance and Whitty at Saturday’s press conference. In fact, she went a step further, pointedly telling the Commons: ‘For many
The countries that formerly composed the Soviet Union states are predominantly divided into three camps: those still strongly affiliated with Russia; those who have already ascended to EU and Nato membership; and the unfortunate remainder that strive to join the West, but which continue to struggle with domestic setbacks and a lack of resolve from
Today’s PMQs was not an enlightening affair. Keir Starmer tried to drag out of Boris Johnson an admission that the England-wide lockdown would continue past 2 December if the virus was not in retreat. But Johnson dodged that question. Johnson’s own side, while grumpy, is not in outright rebellion Of more concern for Labour will be
High Street chains are closing all the time. The restaurant chains are shutting their doors. The gyms are going out of business and it doesn’t look as if all the airlines will survive. There have been lots of different industries that have been wiped out this year. But now we can add one more to
The government’s £12 billion test and trace system has been described by its scientific advisory committee Sage as making a ‘marginal’ difference to the transmission of Covid-19. This is not least because test results are taking a long time to arrive — of tests conducted at testing centres in the week to 21 October, only 47
For the supposed information operations masterminds who can bend American politics to their will, the Russians seem no better at predicting the outcome of the elections than the rest of us. But they are still going to make the best of the current uncertainty. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the nationalist showman-politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky
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Dominic Raab refused to comment on Donald Trump’s claims of election ‘fraud’ this morning, after the President said he planned to contest the result in the Supreme Court. Boris Johnson also refrained from being drawn into a conversation about the race, saying at PMQs that the UK would not comment ‘on the democratic processes of
Wow, for a white supremacist Donald Trump has done very well among black and Latino voters. Literally Hitler, as some woke agitators loved to call him after he won the election in 2016, seems to have boosted his support among black men and black women and, most strikingly, among Latinos, who appear to be swinging
The US presidential election currently sits on a knife’s edge. It could go either way, and if you were in Trump’s camp right now, you might be justified in feeling optimistic. It wasn’t supposed to be this way – the polls yesterday had Biden up nine points nationally, and ahead in almost every major battleground
Second lockdowns are increasingly difficult for democratic governments to impose and maintain. Violent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Spain and Italy have hit the headlines recently. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that French political leaders ordered France’s second lockdown to begin at midnight last Thursday. It did not help that Macron like Boris had repeatedly said
It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already
President Trump came out fighting after his Democratic challenger Joe Biden told supporters he believed he was ‘on track to win’ the US election. Giving a speech inside the White House, Donald Trump said he believed results to be a ‘fraud on the American people’ and stated ‘we will be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all
While many swing states still hang in the balance, it’s Florida that has shifted decisively to Donald Trump. As I hinted on Monday, it was Trump’s surge among the Latino vote in Miami that delivered him the state. The margins are quite astonishing – while Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county, saw a Clinton win
The 2020 US presidential race was an ugly, ferocious dogfight. So it only makes sense for the contest to end the same way it started. Americans went to bed unsure who their next president was going to be. At the time of writing, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are neck-and-neck (223-212 in favour of Biden
Making political predictions can be about as foolhardy as walking into a Las Vegas casino and predicting success at the blackjack table – better to pipe down, be humble, and watch how the action develops. But if there is one thing we can bet our money on, it’s that a defeated Donald Trump (assuming, of course,
Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory stunned the world. It also uprooted the electoral map: Trump won narrow victories in states which had voted Democratic for decades. This year, many forecasters have been keen to stress the unpredictability of an election that may well redefine that map again. Holding an election in a pandemic makes predictions