All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Labour’s leadership candidates were grilled by Newsnight’s Katie Razzall last night. Avuncular Sir Keir Starmer, with his greying thatch and bulky frame, looked like a body-builder gone to seed. He spoke in a bluff, commandeering tone that suggested the leadership is his already – and he knows it. His main rival, Rebecca Long-Bailey, seemed ill at
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Plenty of questions were already circulating about next month’s Budget, even before Sajid Javid’s dramatic resignation as Chancellor – and Rishi Sunak’s appointment as his replacement – this morning. With this shock change in Number 11, we know even less than we did: what are Sunak’s policy plans? How involved will Number 10 be in
Boris Johnson’s Cabinet reshuffle has been blown off course this lunchtime after Sajid Javid quit as Chancellor. Javid resigned after being presented with an ultimatum by the Prime Minister. After a fortnight of negative No.10/No.11 briefings, Javid was told he could stay in his post on the condition he agreed to a SpAd restructuring. This
Why has Sajid Javid quit as Chancellor? Because he wanted his political advisers to be his own courtiers and servants, as is the tradition, and not those of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief aide. To the contrary, Johnson agreed with Cummings that Javid’s current special advisers should be dismissed and replaced with new advisers
Boris Johnson had been getting increasingly irritated by the number of unhelpful stories in newspapers quoting a ‘senior Treasury source’. Number 10 didn’t blame Sajid Javid for them, but – rightly or wrongly – his team. It all reinforced Boris Johnson’s desire for a joint Number 10/ 11 operation. He wanted a relationship between the
In my 40 years as a feminist activist campaigning to end male violence, I have never felt so engulfed in a culture of woman hating. I first met feminists in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1979, shortly before Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, was finally arrested, weeks after he murdered and mutilated his 13th victim,
Boris Johnson’s much-lauded Cabinet reshuffle has arrived. The sackings are now finished and the new hirings are underway. The biggest news by far is the loss of Sajid Javid. This is how things currently stand: Sackings and resignations: Sajid Javid – Chancellor of the Exchequer Julian Smith – Northern Ireland secretary Geoffrey Cox QC –
If Labour had chosen Liz Kendall instead of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, she’d be prime minister by now. She was young. She had ideas. Inevitably, she got 4.5 per cent of the vote. It is therefore my solemn duty to inform Lisa Nandy that I consider her the best candidate for Labour leader. On balance,
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Things got pretty tasty at PMQs. Jeremy Corbyn was well prepared and emerged, messily, as the victor. It started badly for the Labour leader. Ironic cheers rang out when his name was called. Up he stood. But instead of building to a joyous climax, the cheers dropped to nothing. Stark silence followed. This seemed amusing
Labour’s leadership contest has been attracting less and less media interest as it goes on. Despite this, Jeremy Corbyn’s successor won’t be announced until April so there’s still over a month of the contest to go. Part of the reason for the lack of excitement is a growing sense that it isn’t really a contest
Jo Swinson’s dismal election campaign was unlikely to have been helped by her inability to define the word woman. But if there are any lessons from Swinson’s ability to alienate people on the subject of gender, it seems Labour is determined not to learn them. Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner are vying to become leader
Pope Francis today issued his official response to October’s ‘Amazon Synod’, which discussed a plan to ordain married men in the region. He was expected to endorse it and thus open the door for the ordination of married men throughout the whole Catholic Church. (It’s already permitted in Eastern-rite Churches.) Instead, his apostolic exhortation ignores
A good barrister will always keep his options open. And the Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Cox, has the letters Q and C at the end of his name, so he must be a good barrister. During an event this morning Cox laid out the case both for his continuation as Attorney General, while also hyping
Dominic Cummings’s two catchphrases ‘take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ have transformed British politics. Now the PM’s top aide wants to do the same with the British economy through the creation of another ARPA. But will it work? The first Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the US in 1958. The previous year
When Boris Johnson said no to another referendum on Scottish independence, Alex Neil, a former health secretary in the Scottish government, called on Scots to force the PM’s hand by emulating Mahatma Gandhi. Passive resistance, “securing rights by personal suffering” as Gandhi put it, was the way, thought Neil, to shame the British oppressor into
There has been a revolt in Ireland. Not a huge one. It isn’t a Brexit-sized rebellion. It isn’t an all-out populist protest against the establishment of the kind we have seen in the US and various European countries in recent years. But still, the result of Saturday’s general election is a brilliant blow against the
During his first run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders won big in New Hampshire. Claiming 60 per cent of the vote, Sanders trounced establishment favourite (and eventual nominee) Hillary Clinton by 22 points. Bernie’s Granite State victory last night wasn’t as large, but it was a victory nonetheless. By
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The persecution complex of the British left is both a psychological reality and the outcome of a cynical strategy. No one can doubt that the left feels victimised. But left-wing politicians have an interest in pretending that dark forces predetermine its defeat. If they are to keep their supporters in line, they can never take
There are those – most of my acquaintance in Ireland, frankly – who can think of nothing worse than Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald as leader of the next Irish government. She’s embracing the prospect; in a walkabout in Dublin’s fruit and veg market in Moore Street, she said, as you’d expect, ‘I may well
I got my first Irish passport a few months ago. It felt like a vaguely transgressive gesture because my primary British identity was forged on the Northern Irish border where many Unionists like me paid for their UK citizenship in blood. In the event, if anything, I felt proud of the way this document allowed
Since the election, few issues have divided opinion among Tory MPs more than HS2. Boris Johnson’s decision to press ahead with the scheme to Crewe will have its detractors. The reason so many smaller, local infrastructure schemes are also being announced today is to try and reassure Tory MPs that this is not an either
The politics of HS2 are difficult for Boris Johnson, especially since so many Tory MPs hate the £100 billion-plus cost, the destruction of ancient pasture and woodland and the perceived harm to their rural constituents. But the bigger political consideration for Boris ‘another-blue-brick-in-the-red-wall’ Johnson is the perception of whether today’s modified version of HS2 is
It will be big, shiny and it will make a difference. Even with its astronomical and rising cost and its wobbly economics, it is possible to see the gut appeal of HS2, especially to a big spending government such as this one which can borrow freely at virtually zero cost. After all, it needs to
This is an article about the power of language in the transgender debate, about how the trans agenda has been advanced by the skilful capture of language, and about a government minister who has rejected that capture in favour of facts. It’s a bit complicated, so bear with me while I try to explain a
If you thought Boris Johnson’s and Dominic Cummings’s culture war against the so-called London elite had ended with his decisive election victory, that it was simply a useful campaigning trope, you may have to rethink. Because Johnson’s chief aide Cummings reinforced the government’s excoriation of media and lawyers when addressing Downing Street officials this morning,
‘You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride’ is how Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol summed up his colleagues’ wish to keep Judea and Samaria but not the Arabs living there. I feel much the same about right-wingers losing their shizzle over a report in the Sunday Telegraph about new taxes being mulled
Ireland has given its own twist to the populist uprisings across Europe, with its election ushering in a grim time for Anglo-Irish relations. The results from Saturday’s poll – in which Sinn Fein took 24.5 per cent of the vote; Fianna Fáil, 22 per cent; and Fine Gael, 21 per cent – could also cause
Ireland has given its own twist to the populist uprisings across Europe, with its election ushering in a grim time for Anglo-Irish relations. The results from Saturday’s poll – in which Sinn Fein took 24.5 per cent of the vote; Fianna Fáil, 22 per cent; and Fine Gael, 21 per cent – could also cause
The people have spoken. Now, what do they mean? That is the first question to be asked in the wake of this Irish election and, as is so often the case, not all the answers to it are elementary and some of them are contradictory. This was both a startling election result and an unsurprising
Oh dear. Nothing seems to be going right for the SNP these days. Not only has Nicola Sturgeon lost her finance secretary after he sent inappropriate texts to a teenage boy, but her party is now facing a police investigation in Belgium. The naughty Nats appear to have caused a diplomatic incident after they decided