All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In last year’s Conservative leadership contest, Boris Johnson offered a hint of the style of management he would bring to the office of Prime Minister when he said his favourite moment in a film was the ‘multiple retribution scene in The Godfather’. Since then, Johnson and his team have confirmed in their actions that they are a
Boris Johnson’s policy of local lockdowns will no doubt come under increased scrutiny after new restrictions were imposed on Greater Manchester and parts of East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Labour politicians have been quick to criticise the short notice of the overnight announcement while local residents have complained of confusion over the changes. It comes at a time of growing
My weekend plans have been ruined by Matt Hancock. The government has announced new lockdown restrictions for over four million people – banning separate households from meeting indoors – in Greater Manchester (where I live) along with parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. What does that mean in practice? When announcing the lockdown on Thursday
The Scottish Conservatives are now in crisis. Jackson Carlaw has resigned six months into his leadership and less than a year on from Ruth Davidson’s departure. The party is polling 35 points behind the SNP with another Scottish Parliament election due next May and a string of polls have shown a majority of Scots are
Yesterday was a historic day for Big Tech. For the first time, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple were forced to bend the knee before members of the US Congress, to answer questions about their monopolistic activities. ‘These platforms enjoy the power to pick winners and losers, shake down small businesses, and enrich
In the past few minutes, Jackson Carlaw has quit as leader of the Scottish Conservative party. In a resignation statement, Carlaw said that he had made the decision after concluding he was ‘not, in the present circumstances, the person best placed’ to lead the case for Scotland remaining part of the UK ahead of the Holyrood
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New figures show that England had the highest excess death rate across Europe in the first half of 2020. With another coronavirus wave looking imminent, can the government figure out why this happened in time for a second spike? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
On 12 May, the government stopped publishing international comparisons of its Covid-19 death toll in the daily press briefings. The argument was that the data wasn’t helpful, and perhaps even misleading: the way calculations were carried out varied country-by-country, with each nation on a different timescale when experiencing the peak of infections and death. There
I ❤ JK Rowling. There, now I’m a hate-monger, too. A digital advert reading just that — ‘I ❤ JK Rowling’ — has been removed from Edinburgh Waverley station, the city’s main rail terminus. The ad was taken out by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a women’s rights campaigner better known as Posie Parker, who paid for a
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has taken on the mantle of ‘Dr No’ across the capitals of Europe after he took a tough stance on the EU’s coronavirus bailout fund. But in the Netherlands, most people supported his stance on EU integration. At the talks, Rutte successfully led the ‘frugal five’ countries – the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden,
While cries of ‘authoritarian dictator’ have been lobbied at the President by America’s progressives over the past three and a half years (he usually has an accusation or two to throw back), US institutions have largely ticked on as normal. But as we come to the end of Donald Trump’s first (and possibly only) term as
Mary Wakefield’s piece in today’s magazine – How the Catholic Church betrayed the dying – is right and eloquent in pointing out that there were Catholics dying in hospital from Covid who weren’t given the last rites for the absolution of their sins and the viaticum, the eucharist or food for the last journey. It
Another Labour leader, another role for Lord Kerslake. The former head of the civil service has been appointed to lead a review into the Labour party’s organisational structure. Bearded Bob has been charged with transforming Labour into a more ‘agile, cohesive and purposeful’ organisation to ensure the party can ‘fight and win the next general election in 2024’,
The Pentagon will fulfil President Trump’s demand to move almost 12,000 US troops out of Germany. About 6,400 forces will be brought home and 5,400 shifted to other countries in Europe. While Pentagon officials claim the action is part of a plan to strategically ‘reposition’ forces in Europe, the move is widely seen as an attempt
How does one measure health in the midst of the extraordinary times we live in? The usual markers: visits to doctors, waiting lists, and number of people in hospital, have all changed beyond recognition and there is mounting concern that amidst the justifiable concern over coronavirus, other diseases are being forgotten. Trying to determine what
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Fears of a second wave dominate Westminster chat, but how much of it is the government trying to fight the last battle? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls over the difficult task the government has to balance the lessons learnt from the first wave of the pandemic, to the economic concerns prompting
Every week, the papers report a new tax supposedly under consideration by the Treasury. This week, it’s the idea of an online sales tax. The suggestion being that a tax on internet shopping could serve as a potential replacement for business rates. While No. 11 is keen to play down the likelihood of its happening, the
There is no point putting lipstick on a pig: the relationship between the United States and China, two powers holding a combined 40 per cent of the world’s GDP, is at its most depressing and alarming since the establishment of their diplomatic relations in 1979. As soon as you think bilateral ties couldn’t get any
Somewhere, possibly in the land of big sheds, just off the M1 in Leicestershire, must be a burgeoning NHS surplus store. Its shelves will be groaning with ventilators and testing kits which turned out not to work, surgical gloves, bibs and masks which turned out to be defective – and quite possibly, in months to
If only God had clearly decreed exactly what sort of music he wanted us to make in church. For uncertainty on this matter is highly problematic. If only he had said, for example, unaccompanied female voices on weekdays and an all-male choir on Sundays, with nothing composed before 1800 and no stringed instruments, except at
‘Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening in Europe,’ the Prime Minister tells us. ‘Among some of our European friends, I’m afraid you are starting to see, in some places, the signs of a second wave of the pandemic.’ Really? It rather depends on what graph you’re looking at, and over which period. On Saturday,
This morning, the Guardian published a column by Owen Jones, discussing the recent antisemitic tirade of the grime artist Wiley, who has since been suspended from Twitter and banned from Facebook. The column, headlined ‘I joined the Twitter boycott – but racism on social media is just the tip of the iceberg’ condemned Wiley’s remarks,
There have been a great many political betrayals of late, but there is nothing worse than seeing the government propose a policy that makes Jamie Oliver this happy. The celebrity chef’s face lit up when he appeared on Sky and Channel 4 News this week, as he relished the fact that the government is going
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Boris Johnson said there are signs that a second wave of coronavirus will soon sweep through Europe. Should Brits still go on their holiday abroad, and could the UK cope with another lockdown? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews.
The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, took some time out from presiding over the worst collapse in economic history last week to deliver a short lecture on how women leaders have proved better at dealing with Covid-19 than men. According to the impeccably politically correct French politician, they were more ‘caring’, better
Much of Westminster is now off for the summer, but it seems someone forgot to tell the noble lords of the upper chamber. Earlier this afternoon, the Labour peer Lord Rooker took aim at the PM, accusing the Tories of taking suspect Russian donations. Lord Rooker had initially asked about UK-Russian trade following the release
On a visit to Nottingham this morning, Boris Johnson warned that a second wave of Covid-19 could be on the verge of ‘starting to bubble up’ in Europe. Meanwhile, he defended his government’s lightning-speed reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine for travellers entering the UK from Spain. But concerns of a second wave are not solely related to
A similar phenomenon is developing with the Covid recession as happened with Brexit. News outlets – the BBC in particular – are choosing to focus on dire economic predictions at the expense of more positive real-world data. Yesterday, we heard no end of it when EY forecast that the economy would not reach its pre-Covid
The Israeli Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem is located in a leafy neighbourhood of stately villas, many of which date from the era of the British mandate and combine Bauhaus and Arabic architectural styles. Over the last few weeks the neighbourhood has come to resemble more of a protest camp, festooned with a mix of
One of Julian Assange’s many gifts to the law was to establish in the case of Assange v. Swedish Judicial Authority that where a woman consents to sexual intercourse on condition that the man is wearing a condom, he commits the offence of rape – in English as well as Swedish law – if they
It’s happening again. Despite having lost four general elections in a row, supporters of the Labour party have already convinced themselves that Boris Johnson is doomed and they are on course for victory next time. Their reasoning was expertly set out by Andrew Rawnsley, still the doyen of left-of-centre commentators, in his Observer column on
Poor Grant Shapps. Having hopped on a flight to Spain on Saturday morning, the transport secretary discovered that his family’s holiday hotspot would be placed on the government’s Covid quarantine list from midnight. Shapps tells the Sun that he has spent the last 48 hours of his summer hols locked in emergency calls with industry bods and transport
