All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak will deliver an economic impact assessment to the House of Commons in which the Chancellor is expected to announce a number of measures to stimulate the economy. With a £1.5bn package pledged today for the arts industry, the expectation is that Wednesday’s event will cement Johnson’s government as a comparatively high spend to the
Will Labour ever stop pushing for punitive taxation? Not content with gifting the Conservatives an 80 seat majority in December, the supposedly more moderate Labour party under Keir Starmer is already dreaming up ways it can extract large sums from our pockets. Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds floated a ‘wealth tax’ at the weekend, so that
Imagine this: you are a victim of domestic violence, and your partner regularly strangles you to the point of unconsciousness. During each attack you think you are about to die. You lose control of your bladder during these attacks, and afterwards find it hard to speak, feeling like you have swallowed broken glass. You suffer
Pantomime has been an essential part of British theatre for generations. Not only is it often a child’s first, magical experience of the stage, but it is also arguably one of the few consistently profitable sectors in the industry, that often props up theatres and other shows that don’t have the same financial heft. It
This week would normally be the time when state and private schools go their separate ways, when privately educated children go off on their holidays while the state school lot carry on for another couple of weeks of term. Except this time, the divergence happened in March, when lockdown started and the educational apartheid began,
The government had plenty of good news to share with the arts world today, after it unveiled a £1.57 billion support package for cash-strapped theatres and venues who are unable to open because of the coronavirus crisis. The £880m in grants and £270m in loans are the latest of several whopping support schemes signed off
This is a week of bittersweet anniversaries for the Labour party. It is now 72 years since Clement Attlee’s government created the National Health Service, its most popular achievement. It is also 75 years since Attlee led the party to its first ever landslide victory, a triumph that made the NHS possible. But if these
His name is unknown, but resonates like that of a character from Astérix the Gaul. Jean Castex is France’s new prime minister, with a government reshuffle to follow. In ridding himself of the stolid and popular Edouard Philippe, Emmanuel Macron is playing his last hand in the presidential poker game to reset his troubled presidency.
One of the rare upsides of living in a country run by nationalists is that nationalists are not great at hiding their true feelings. When you’ve got a superiority complex, it’s hard to prevent it from bursting out, often at the most inopportune times. Efforts to explain to outsiders that the SNP isn’t actually a
At 5pm, we are being encouraged to head to our windows and doors to clap for the National Health Service on its 72nd birthday – the idea is that we’d be doing, once again, what we did in lockdown. Except we wouldn’t. The original gesture was to show thanks to the many healthcare staff (and
Matt Hancock – ‘I’m pleased with what happened yesterday’ The Health Secretary was Sophy Ridge’s first guest this morning. Pubs and restaurants were allowed to reopen yesterday, prompting concerns from some quarters that the public would overindulge themselves. Ridge asked Hancock how he felt so-called ‘Super Saturday’ had gone: MH: From what I’ve seen… very,
I’m watching television more uncritically than usual but still can’t stomach the format of Live at the Apollo. It features some clever comedians, but its artificiality, cutting to the audience to show canned hilarity — or worse, canned celebrity hilarity; or worse still, genuine hilarity — is a turn-off. It’s not the comedians’ fault that
As the first Black Lives Matter protests began to take place in the UK, following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, several organisations and individuals quickly saw that they could jump on the movement’s bandwagon. Shortly afterwards, several organisations had adopted the logo and backed the official Black Lives Matter UK campaign. Even the English
It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how
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Downing St has announced that it will be televising its afternoon lobby press briefing, come October. Inspired by the daily coronavirus briefings, it’s a shake-up that supporters say could improve transparency. On the podcast, Katy Balls speaks to former No 10 comms chief Craig Oliver, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson. They also take a punt
20 min listen
This week, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire on charges of sex trafficking and perjury as part of the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Freddy Gray discusses Maxwell’s surprise arrest and her relationship with Epstein with Alana Goodman, senior investigative reporter at the Washington Free Beacon and co-author of A Convenient Death: The Mysterious
The Labour Together election review makes grim reading. Unless Labour can take back a large part of Scotland, it needs a swing in England so large that it takes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seat in Somerset. We’ll have to take back not only the Red Wall but the Blue Fen. Realistically, the report says, there are three
Across Britain, the rainbow pictures are coming down. But in some houses, they are being replaced with new, more political placards. ‘This home supports a pay rise for NHS heroes,’ the poster says. It’s unlikely that any politician will be brave enough to say so but it’s worth asking a question in response: is now
A new problem is looming for Sir Keir Starmer: a leader of the opposition needs some shop windows if he is to get more punters through the doors and his will shortly be getting boarded up. Prime Minister’s Questions is usually more important to opposition leaders than it is to the actual PM because he
The Lib Dem leadership showdown between Layla Moran and Ed Davey has become something of an ideological battle over the soul of the party. Moran is explicitly courting disgruntled left-wingers, telling Business Insider that under her leadership the party would be ‘even more radical than Labour’ and is pledging to match the Corbynite promise of free broadband. Meanwhile,
Update: It has been reported that the former BBC and ITV journalist Allegra Stratton will be Downing Street’s new press conference host. This morning, Boris Johnson confirmed on LBC that the government is planning to introduce daily televised press briefings not too dissimilar to White House press conferences. Replacing the off-camera afternoon lobby briefing, the conferences aim to build on the
My wife and I were introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell by Sir Evelyn and Lady Lynne de Rothschild, and we subsequently met her on several occasions — generally in the presence of prominent people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, presidents of universities, and prominent academic and business people. We never saw her
Post-Brexit, the UK needs to find allies on trade liberalisation. One obvious place to look is the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership. The UK is keen to join this group of 11 countries, as Liz Truss reiterated at a Policy Exchange event this afternoon. The Singaporean trade minister emphasised how keen he would be to see the
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One day to go until ‘Super Saturday’, when pubs and restaurants in England (except Leicester) will reopen. But polls show that only a small minority of Brits will go back to the pubs. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about what this would mean for post-pandemic recovery.
The daily coronavirus briefings from Downing Street were wildly popular by one measure, drawing in millions of viewers, but were they any use? Like them or loathe them, it seems that we will be seeing plenty more of them. Boris Johnson has decided that, from October, the ‘briefings sessions’ should be televised. Journalists and former spin
When George Osborne stepped down as editor of the Evening Standard, it was unlikely the former chancellor was going to fall on hard times. Not only did Osborne have another eight jobs to fall back on, he was handed a plum position by the Standard as its new editor-in-chief. But now, less than a month
Germany’s government had been busy making big plans about all that it wanted to achieve during its EU council presidency which started this week. But then Covid-19 hit, and all these ideas went out the window. Now the talk in Brussels is that Germany’s council presidency has turned into a ‘corona presidency’. But what will this
On Tuesday evening at 11 pm, the chance for the UK to extend the Brexit transition with the EU expired. Britain and the EU must come to some sort of deal before the end of 2020 or what amounts to a no-deal Brexit will happen. What is interesting about this is how much a no-deal
Boris Johnson has declared the government’s latest war on obesity. It’s a continuation of the war on ‘junk food’. It’s a timely move, as in lockdown we’ve all been snacking and munching straight from the fridge, during the most ghastly yet boring year in known living memory. Most of us have got fatter as a
Common wisdom states that a new pathogen, once introduced into a vulnerable human population with no immune defences, will evolve over time to grow more benign and live in amity with its host. After all, the argument goes, a pathogen will depend on its host for its own survival, so causing mass disease and death
As Boris Johnson attempts to move attention back to his pre-coronavirus election agenda, one of the biggest blockers that remains is the failure to get all pupils back to school. Having revised down a previous ambition to get all primary school children in the classroom before the summer holidays, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson held a
