All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Why should Damian Green have to apologise? The former First Secretary of State had an extremely awkward interview on the Today programme this morning in which he offered one of those ‘I’m sorry if’ qualified apologies for his behaviour towards Conservative activist Kate Maltby. ‘If she felt uncomfortable… then obviously I’m sorry about that,’ he
I am confused by what David Davis’s new principles to ensure fair competition between Brexit Britain and the EU are supposed to achieve – especially the part on consumer protection. The Dexeu secretary said: ‘The UK will continue to be a leading advocate of open investment flows after we leave the EU. But it cannot
Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please
Labour is a movement of organised sentimentality. Its default sound is a coo. Its default gesture a hug. For generations the party has wrapped itself in fuzzy feelings. You only have to hear the applause for councillors who have served the party since Clement Attlee’s day to understand the part cloying, part inspiring, solidarity that
Oxfam’s boss has learned his lesson – or has he? In the wake of the revelations over the Haiti sex scandal, the charity’s chief executive Mark Goldring adopted the rather unwise decision to come out fighting: ‘The intensity and the ferocity of the attack makes you wonder, what did we do? We murdered babies in
I don’t really object to bad policy, it’s the rotten politics I can’t stand. There would be something almost amusing about a Conservative prime minister gravely intoning, in effect, ‘Labour are right; please don’t vote for them’ if it weren’t so head-thuddingly stupid. Remarkably, however, this is the position into which Theresa May has put
It’s safe to say that David Davis’s turn at navigating the roadmap to Brexit has not gone completely to plan today. The aim of the speech was to reassure businesses and Brussels that the UK will maintain high standards and regulations – with a pledge to keep a level playing field on state aid and competition policy.
I would rather watch flies buzzing around a light bulb for two hours than Formula 1. At least the flies sometimes change direction and don’t jet off to Monaco as soon as they’ve finished. They just die, instead — an infinitely preferable denouement. The drivers used to die sometimes in Formula 1, which provided a
I am not surprised that Jamie Oliver is closing twelve of his twenty-seven branches of Jamie’s Italian, and his flagship restaurant on Piccadilly, Barbecoa, which I reviewed last year, and damned, because the food was bad and the atmosphere non existent. (Well, it was almost empty; you cannot create joy in a void). I knew
The row about Jeremy Corbyn and a Czech spy shows no sign of dying down. Following a former Czech spy’s claim that Corbyn was paid by the Eastern bloc to spy on Britain in the 1980s, the Labour leader has denied the claim and instructed solicitors to respond to ‘any false and ridiculous smears’ appearing online.
Theresa May’s launch of a review into university funding shows she has her priorities all wrong, says the Sun. It is true that the funding system for higher education ‘is broken’. ‘But it is nowhere near a priority for Britain, Theresa May or the Tories,’ according to the paper. Yes, ‘some fees should be slashed’.
Spaniards want a new prime minister. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the latest opinion poll carried out by Metroscopia for the Spanish daily El Pais, which revealed that 85 per cent of the electorate think someone else should have a go at leading the conservative Popular Party. Long-time supporters of the PP are
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If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want
That the Tories are having to shift their policymaking far left even of the Milibandesque positions that Theresa May took before the snap election is quite obvious. Today’s education speech by the Prime Minister involved an admission that the current system, drawn up by the Conservatives in coalition, isn’t working. The problems that the Tories
This letter was first printed in this week’s issue of The Spectator. Sir: Matthew Parris is correct (10 February). There is no shortage of housing stock, and no feasible programme of housebuilding will fix the housing market. The generations endowed with housing wealth through tax and lending policies continued by all parties since 1959 have no
Oh dear. We’re only two months into 2018 and already the winner for ‘headline fail of the year’ appears to have been found. The Irish Herald today publishes a report on a man who ‘lived’ in a flat with his ‘dead wife’s body in a wardrobe for 48 hours’. Rather unfortunately the accompanying half page
The never-ending churn of stories explaining why it is awful to be a woman has a new focus. A survey of workplace ‘decision-makers’ published this week has exposed the shocking news that some employers think maternity leave can be a bit inconvenient. That’s right: some sexist and uncaring bosses do not feel delight when mum-to-be
There are two competing theories about how the Soviet Union collapsed. One holds that Ronald Reagan’s moral leadership against communism and bolstering of US defences weakened Moscow’s will and buried them economically. The other contends that Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and wise diplomacy brought down the Iron Curtain in spite of the cowboy in the
What does Theresa May want post-18 education to look like? The Prime Minister’s plans for tuition fees are getting the most attention today, but her big education speech has a lot more in it than just the cost of university degrees. Indeed, May is criticising the ‘outdated attitude’ that university is the be all and
Democratic debate functions best when it is accepted that there are people of good will and good arguments on both sides. In the Brexit debate, this sense has too often been missing. There’s plenty of blame for this to go round. To put it crudely, too many on the Leave side have been too quick
After last month’s purge of the Department for Education and following months of speculation among Tory MPs, No 10 have finally showed their hand on university education. The Prime Minister is to launch a year-long review of university and adult technical education. The aim is to de-toxify the party among young voters who are worried about
The row over Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged contact with a Czech spy rumbles on. In its editorial, the Sun condemns the Labour leader, who it says has questions to answer over his ‘dealings with foreign spies and diplomats’. Labour is no stranger to ‘dodging basic questions’, the paper argues. But while it can get away with
Theresa May hasn’t had many opportunities to talk about domestic policy since the snap election. It’s probably fair to say, too, that the Prime Minister hasn’t exactly seized what opportunities there have been, either. This week, though, the Tories are talking about education, offering their response to Labour’s very attractive tuition fee pledge, and letting
Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief representative in the Brexit negotiations, sat down with Andrew Marr to discuss at length the UK’s future relationship with the EU. Verhofstadt told Marr that a trade deal between the United Kingdom and the European Union will not be finalised before the 29th of March 2019. Instead, Verhofstadt hinted
Since Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo was crowned queen of the I’m a Celeb… Get Me Out of Here jungle, the (majority of) Conservatives have been on a mission to hug their celebrity supporter close. In that vein, Toff was the centre of attention at this month’s Black and White ball, where she attended as Stanley Johnson’s
Although it’s the Conservatives nowadays who are best known for in-fighting, this weekend we were offered a reminder of the divisions in Labour. At a meeting of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a row broke out between the Momentum contingent and the moderates. The subject of the row was – once again – Ann Black,
When I saw the photo of Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black holding a photo of an ultrasound, and all the subsequent headlines proclaiming ‘Tom and Lance are having a baby’ I thought one thing above all: ‘That’s strange’. Not ‘eww’, or ‘gross’, or ‘what a way to get over certain negative recent publicity’, but
For this year’s Valentine-themed challenge you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a well-known figure here]’. There was no obligation to write in the style of Eliot, but a few brave souls did so. David Shields’s ‘Love Song of Kim Kardashian’ (‘I have measured out my life
The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is headquartered in London, in the splendour of Marlborough House. The Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Lady Scotland, is British (and also Dominican). Britain is about to take the chair of the Commonwealth for the customary two years, and so the next Heads of Government Conference —
Theresa May was pushing at an open door in her Munich speech when she warned against ‘rigid institutional restrictions’ harming security cooperation after Brexit, I say in The Sun today. Member states are reluctant to follow the Commission’s tough line on this as they know how valuable the UK’s contribution in this field is. I
Jeremy Corbyn began the 2017 election campaign 20 points behind the Conservatives in the polls; he ended it just two per cent behind in the actual vote. The remarkable turnaround has been attributed by many to his effective use of social media, which allowed him to broadcast his message to people whom traditional campaigning fails
Peter Oborne, The Spectator’s associate editor, is something of a legend in Pakistan — as least among the defence establishment types we met there. That’s because every year he takes a cricket team on a tour of the country. Last September, in Miranshah, they played a ‘Peace Cup’ match against an XI consisting of current
The success of the military campaign against Isis in Syria and Iraq has left behind a diplomatic and legal problem: what to do with the British citizens who travelled to join and fight with Isis, but who have survived hostilities. The problem has been brought to a head by the capture, by a group of
