All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
13 min listen
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
Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have come under fire over slides used during the weekend announcement of the second Covid-19 lockdown. Today, the pair hit back. A chart suggesting there could be up to 4,000 deaths per day by December under a reasonable worst-case scenario was described by Oxford expert Carl Heneghan as ‘now proven to
The best way to understand contemporary Britain is to stop thinking of it as a liberal democracy. If we lived in Russia, Hungary or Venezuela we would have few problems in understanding the manoeuvrings around the BBC. The governing clique wants the state broadcaster to be run by a fellow traveller, who has paid his
With voting day finally here, what can the state of the US economy tell us about tonight’s result? While the United States has been hit hard by Covid-19, the country’s economy is showing signs of improvement – and the latest stats could be good news for Donald Trump in his bid to defy the odds and win
Stonewall UK was established in 1989 in response to the now infamous Section 28, which prohibited councils from intentionally promoting homosexuality or teaching about the acceptability of homosexuality in schools. In the years since its founding, Section 28 has been repealed, the age of consent has been levelled, and equal marriage was secured in 2013.
Sometimes what a politician leaves unsaid tells us more than what he does say. Take the different reactions to the wave of Islamist terror attacks across Europe by Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. The Prime Minister’s statement of sympathy with Austria over the atrocities in Vienna last night may seem at first glance to cover the bases: ‘I
It’s not uncommon for Conservative politicians to complain privately that Nicola Sturgeon has proven herself to be a better communicator than Boris Johnson during the pandemic. However, it is unusual for a Tory to say so publicly. This is what Douglas Ross did this week in an interview for ITV News. On top of saying that ‘most objective people’
With Austria’s latest Covid lockdown due to begin at midnight, Viennese citizens were enjoying a final night of freedom. And then the shooting started. The temperature was warm for this time of year, and people were sitting at pavement tables outside the bars and cafes, enjoying the balmy weather and obeying the coronavirus guidelines. What
16 min listen
As England heads into a second lockdown, today brings a glimmer of hope. Liverpool will be the first UK city to undergo mass testing, including a fast turnaround saliva test. John Connolly talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about whether Moonshot, this time around, is more realistic. Tell us your thoughts on our podcasts
With England returning to a full national lockdown, calls for a different response — a so-called ‘segmentation strategy’ — have also reappeared. The idea behind such an approach is that a ‘vulnerable’ section of the population is effectively sealed off from the rest of society. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV2 is allowed to spread among the remaining population, generating herd immunity
In the current circumstances it is strange to recall that, until very recently, a common complaint of devolved politicians in Wales – as well as academics studying devolved politics – was a lack of media attention and profile. The ill-wind of Covid-19 has blown few people much good, but has unquestionably done a lot to
By tomorrow morning, he should be back on one of his golf courses. Or prepping for a new series of the Apprentice. Or quite possibly spending more time with his lawyers. Either way, if the polls and bookmakers are to be trusted, Donald Trump will be the first sitting president to be ejected from office
20 min listen
With Americans heading to the polls on Tuesday, the final polls continue to give Joe Biden a clear lead. What do they say, and what are the early signs on the night that his support might not be as strong as expected? Freddy Gray speaks to YouGov’s Marcus Roberts.
Boris Johnson’s statement to the House of Commons this afternoon was a reminder of how much more difficult this second lockdown will be politically for the government. Before he could begin, he had to sit through the Speaker ticking the government off for the fact that news of the lockdown had leaked to the media
Let us imagine for a moment that Emmanuel Macron takes the advice of many in the Anglophone world and bans the publication in France of any further caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, might praise the president of France for his courageous decision ‘to act with respect for others’ and the New
As we get closer to the American election, Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are sounding notes of cautious optimism. Others, in Texas and Georgia, are daring to dream that Joe Biden’s national poll lead (mainly driven by suburban women) might flip those consistently red states to their column. In Florida, on the
That the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. There are few clauses of Magna Carta that are still in force today. Most have been whittled away by the stultifying hands of generations of bureaucrats. But one clause still stands in its in 800-year-old majesty: that
Our approach to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a scientific folly. While some mortality is unavoidable during a pandemic, the failure to properly protect the elderly and other vulnerable has led to over 45,000 UK and 225,000 US deaths and counting. Added to that total is the extensive collateral damage on health from lockdowns, which
Which Tory politician is Labour most afraid of? While it’s Boris Johnson who Sir Keir Starmer most regularly goes up to bat against at the despatch box, these days Her Majesty’s Opposition appear most focused on criticising Rishi Sunak. Take Starmer’s speech this lunchtime to the Confederation of British Industry. While the Labour leader criticised the Prime Minister for
The graph presented by chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance during Saturday’s press briefing suggested that, in the absence of a new lockdown, deaths from Covid-19 could reach 4,000 a day by Christmas. To put this scenario in context, deaths in the first wave back in April peaked at just over 1,000 a day. Back
18 min listen
After Boris Johnson announced that England would be put into another nationwide lockdown this Thursday, backbench Tory MPs quickly made their opposition known. Graham Brady, chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee, said the restrictions would be denounced ‘as a form of evil’ if enforced in a totalitarian state. But with Labour’s backing meaning the measures
Imagine there’s no Covid. It’s not that easy even if you try, since the pandemic fogs up everything now. But what would the presidential election look like if the novel coronavirus had never escaped Wuhan? Who would be winning? It‘s easy to think that President Trump would be cruising towards re-election. He would be swanning
How, then, does Britain treat its Jews? It’s a question that I, and many others in the community, once believed had been settled to the point of irrelevance. But when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, we realised that maybe the story wasn’t quite so simple. Things are clearer now. Last week the Equalities and
During the 2015 general election campaign, when I was directing operations at the London HQ for Ukip, I had an ‘absolutely brilliant’ idea. The next day Nigel Farage would be campaigning on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, where he was standing for election. On our grid, it was earmarked to be Small Business Day