All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
‘UK Prime Minister visits Scotland’ shouldn’t really be a news story. But so infrequent have prime ministerial visits been in recent years that it is. The fact it is news that the Prime Minister is in Scotland today has allowed Nicola Sturgeon to fire off a bunch of rather sarcastic tweets about how, given his polling
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The Prime Minister visits Scotland today as parliament goes into recess. The Union is in grave danger, as a previous episode discussed. But can the government woo back the wavering Scots? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
Last week the Prime Minister was photographed oafishly browsing in an Uxbridge shop, wearing a lurid blue mask. In the past, he has defended the right of people to go around looking like letterboxes; in kind we should uphold his right to go around looking like an attenuated Smurf. Aesthetic eccentricity has always been his
As MPs head home for the holidays, Keir Starmer goes into the recess having put clear water between himself and his predecessor. As well as apologising to anti-Semitism whistleblowers, Starmer declared at Prime Minister’s Questions that the party was under ‘new management’. That management appears to be landing well with voters – with Starmer leading over Boris
From tomorrow, you’ll have to wear a mask in shops as well as on public transport. There is a case to be made for masks at this point in time, both in terms of slowing the spread of the virus and giving people the confidence to go out. But one of the things that does,
The last time a U.S. President lost re-election, the year was 1992 and the victim was George H.W. Bush. President Donald Trump is currently doing everything in his power to make sure he isn’t the first incumbent in 28 years to vacate the White House after a single, four-year term; if that means ditching the
When the cabinet met on Tuesday in the Locarno Suite of the Foreign Office, one item was top of the agenda: the Union. The reason? Over the past four months, support for both Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish independence has risen. There is genuine worry in government that a few wrong moves could see Scotland on
The number of people – particularly women – seeking help for domestic violence soared during the coronavirus lockdown. We’ve known that for a while. But there has been an assumption that as lockdown eases, so will the pressure for abuse victims. New figures from the charity Refuge suggest that this assumption is wrong. There has been
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe? But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are
Boris Johnson’s end of term address to Tory MPs offered a preview of what the government wants its agenda to be this autumn. He told the backbench 1922 committee that his generation had ‘had it far, far easier’ in terms of getting on the housing ladder. He argued that they had to ‘build, build, build’
There was an urgent question about jobs at PMQs today. One job in particular. The questioner, Maria Miller, was concerned that she hadn’t yet been hired to head a government department. She made her bid for promotion by strewing petals and scented bouquets at Boris’s feet. She reminded us that on Friday, 24 July, the
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Keir Starmer was keen to put clear blue water between himself and Corbyn’s Labour party today, on both the apology to anti-Semitism whistleblowers and the Russia report. Will this cut through to the voters? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
The Prime Minister wants us back to normal by Christmas. If he is serious, then his government needs to take a big step forward in how it communicates evidence on Covid-19 with the public. Every day we get new insights about the coronavirus from research and statistics. Yet, for some reason, the government is holding
In the last Prime Minister’s Questions before the summer recess, Keir Starmer put the most distance between himself and his predecessor to date. On the day the Labour party agreed to pay damages to seven former employees who sued the party in an anti-Semitism row, the Labour leader used his appearance opposite Johnson to make
Watching the BBC drama Mrs America about the 1970s fight for the Equal Rights Amendment is a reminder that progress is rarely permanent and that feminist battles for women’s liberation always attract backlash, as well as open hatred and disdain. In the show, the right-wing Republican and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly does battle with second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley
If anyone thought the Labour party was through with the psychodrama of the Jeremy Corbyn years, they would have been bitterly disappointed by proceedings at the High Court this morning. In court, the Labour Party officially apologised for its own treatment of whistle-blowers involved in a BBC Panorama investigation into the party’s handling of antisemitism cases,
When Dominic Raab stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons this week and announced that the Government had suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong ‘immediately and indefinitely’, he was met with audible support in the Chamber. The decision was brought up again the following day at a press conference with US
The Russia report was supposed to prove once and for all that the Kremlin rigged the EU referendum, Boris Johnson is an FSB asset and Dominic Cummings a bot operated from Saint Petersburg. Anything but the glum reality that the Leave campaign was more effective than its rival. That is not to say Vladimir Putin’s
If you’re over the age of 20, TikTok can be a bewildering experience. Fire up the app and you’ll be bombarded with a bottomless feed of short, inane and loud videos that play on a loop. But flick through a few videos and maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to see the appeal. It’s an endless
Dame Vivienne Westwood took part in an unusual protest on Tuesday, to try and prevent the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. To raise awareness for Assange’s plight, the 79-year-old fashion designer spent part of the day suspended in a cage outside the Old Bailey, dressed in a yellow suit to symbolise the canary
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The long-awaited Russia report is finally out, so what are the revelations within it? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and the New Statesman’s Political Editor, Stephen Bush.
Just imagine what would happen if real money was at stake. Over the last four days, the leaders of the European Union have been furiously haggling over their Coronavirus Rescue Fund. France’s President Macron has been banging the table angrily, the Dutch have taken on the role vacated by the British of the ‘bad Europeans’,
As the long-overdue intelligence and security committee report into Russian interference in the UK is finally published – after a needless and politicised delay – most eyes are (rightly) focused on claims around Brexit, Russian infiltration of the British establishment and killings on UK soil. But there’s a section of the report that, while less
So there you go. There is still no hard evidence that Russia interfered in the EU referendum. What’s more, it would be ‘difficult — if not impossible — to prove’ the existence of Russian meddling. Can we now, please, put the Russia-Brexit conspiracy theory to bed? The quote above comes from the Intelligence and Security
The release of the Russia report has long been a cause championed by some Remainers. The idea took hold that sitting in some select committee chamber was a report detailing how the 2016 EU referendum was influenced by Russian state actors to such a degree that it materially affected the result. The government has been
The report into Russian interference in British politics was finally published on Tuesday morning following a nine-month delay. Here are the five most interesting takeaways from the report: 1. The government ‘actively avoided’ investigating Russian interference During this morning’s press conference, intelligence and security committee member Stuart Hosie made the extraordinary claim that ‘no one in government knew if Russia
No one comes that well out of the long-delayed Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) Russia report. Well, maybe except for Vladimir Putin. After all, while his Russia is clearly the villain – paranoid, determined to be ‘seen as a resurgent “great power”’ and hostile to the ‘Rules Based International Order’ – there’s a sense of
The intelligence and security committee has this morning released their report into Russian interference in British politics. You can read the full report here:
In 1944, Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl sent the US government a 30-page report detailing an extermination facility in Poland where Jews were being murdered en masse. The document included maps pin-pointing the exact locations of gas chambers and crematoria. Rabbi Weissmandl pleaded: ‘We ask that the crematoria of Auschwitz be bombed from the air… Such
Conservatives once knew that command and control didn’t work. Even if they didn’t know it intellectually, one former Conservative minister told me as he looked in disbelief at the chaos of Johnson’s dictatorial administration, ‘they felt it in their bones’. This nominally Conservative government has centralised control, Soviet style, into a triumvirate of Boris Johnson,
Why might a top medical adviser be dropped from the government’s daily coronavirus press briefing? This was the question that MPs were keen to answer after England’s chief nurse gave evidence to the public accounts committee on Monday. Ruth May, who was interrogated by the committee chair Meg Hillier, failed to appear at the daily Downing Street
How excited should we be about the latest news of the Oxford vaccine? At least this time – in contrast to previous updates, which have tended to come via Downing Street briefings – we have a paper in a scientific journal, the Lancet, to go by. The paper reports that 1,077 people took part in
It is often written that the Labour party has an enormous electoral mountain to climb in order to win a majority at the next general election – or possibly, even the general election after that. What isn’t evaluated enough is what this means in hard, psephological terms. Winning substantially in Scotland appears to be getting