All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Since the early nineties, mid-morning reality TV has been something of an obsession for many Brits. From Jerry Springer to Vanessa, Trisha to Kilroy, our desire to find out who had cheated on their neighbour – or who has a drug problem – has meant these shows have been a consistent fixture on our screens.
Doris Day has died at the age of 97. When I heard this news I wasn’t transported to a scene in one of her movies with Rock Hudson. Instead, I remembered sitting in the dark English countryside during the very first few hours of this millennium, carefully removing a lit cigar from my sleeping brother’s
A Labour activist – since elected a councillor – sharing neo-Nazi material declaring that ‘the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933’. A video of a Labour MP rousing a rabble with the incendiary suggestion that ‘Zionism is the enemy of peace’. An activist for the self-proclaimed anti-racist party suggesting a march on their local
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, “you have large tumours in numerous places. We can’t operate or cure you. You have 18 months to live”. With those words, I burst into tears. In that mundane hospital room, my life changed. The job I love – I worked as boss of a private bank – was gone.
After weeks of cross party talks between the Conservatives and Labour, Downing Street have finally announced that Theresa May’s beleaguered Brexit deal will once again be put to a vote. A No. 10 spokesman said: ‘This evening the Prime Minister met the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons to make clear our
The Bermondsey by-election of 1983 is widely regarded as one of the nastiest, most scurrilous election campaigns in British history. Peter Tatchell, queer-rights activist and bona fide national treasure, stood for the Labour Party against Simon Hughes, who stood for the Liberals. Tatchell was the target of a ceaseless campaign of smears, innuendo, hatred and
With Theresa May set to leave office this year, the race is on to find her successor. Cabinet ministers are at pains to emphasise their leadership credentials. On Tuesday evening, Amber Rudd used a speech at think tank Onward’s first birthday party to share her views on the current situation. The Work and Pensions Secretary
Huawei is nothing if not inventive in its efforts to land the contract to run Britain’s forthcoming 5G mobile phone network. This morning it has published a report by the Oxford Economics Group which claims that the company added £1.7 billion to Britain’s GDP and accounted for 26,200 UK jobs in 2018. It is an eye-catching
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has launched an impressive new commission on inequality. What’s most impressive about the project is not the Nobel-winning array of commissioners, it’s the fact that the IFS is trying to broaden public and political understanding of what inequality is. And in so doing, it also describes a political trap that
I have been fairly quiet for a bit because I have been struggling to say anything useful about what is going on – or perhaps, more accurately, what is not going on. You see we are living through, and in, the mother of all paradoxes: a time when everything and nothing is happening. On a
Over in the states, the Republicans are often disparagingly called the ‘party of the one per cent’, referring to their alleged support for the richest tier of the country’s wealthy elite. But it appears that in the UK, another party could take their throne when it comes to representing the smallest section of society possible.
Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pretends to stand for the traditional values of old England: Parliamentary sovereignty, patriotism and decency. However little the uninitiated thought of Farage, they would expect his candidates to condemn the IRA murdering children in Warrington and to take a strong line against child pornography. Not so. Or rather, not always. Claire Fox (top
It’s fair to say that Theresa May’s decision to indulge in cross-party talks with Labour have not gone down well with Brexiteers in her party so far. This itself is no surprise, the talks involve two very unpalatable things for Tory MPs: working with Jeremy Corbyn, and adding a customs union to the Withdrawal Agreement (which
More than two decades have passed since I worked alongside Danny Baker on the original BBC Radio 5 breakfast show. I learned a lot from Baker, a presenter who was able to sound so informal on air and generous in drawing whoever was in the studio into whatever was happening. “Joshing”, he called it. As the
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe is once again at a crossroads. In 1989 and the years that followed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Germany was unified. The newly independent, once Communist states – including my home country of Poland – embarked on the road to democracy, free markets, and
Unusually, the government made an announcement today on domestic policy, with Theresa May promising to end the ‘postcode lottery’ for domestic abuse victims by forcing English councils. Still more unusually, this announcement has been welcomed with sincerity by the sector it is aimed at. It must be an unusual feeling for ministers, even on a
With Theresa May’s departure expected later this year, the race is underway among her Tory colleagues to position themselves as her likely successor. The weekend papers were filled with ministers at pains to prove their credentials – with Liz Truss calling for one million homes to be built on the green belt and Matt Hancock
Where do you stand on the foster couple who sent their foster son to school in girls’ clothing, aged three, despite express requests from his teachers not to do so, and encouraged him to think of himself as a girl? The same couple had allowed their youngest biological son to do the same age seven,
The failure of Western universities to stand up for free speech is now so commonplace it’s difficult to feel much outrage when another dissenting professor is tossed to the wolves. But on this occasion the university in question is so distinguished we really ought to sit up and take note. And for once, I don’t
In August 2007, three months after coming to power at Holyrood, the SNP launched its National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future. We have been talking about little else since. Among the many national conversations postponed is one on immigration. The CBI has tried to kick-start such a discussion by warning that, within 20 years, just
Nigel Farage: This BBC is ‘in denial’ Andrew Marr was joined by Nigel Farage, whose Brexit party is in strong contention to win the European elections that are now required to take place on 23rd May. One poll has even put the fledgling party polling higher than the Conservatives for elections to the UK Parliament.
The weekend papers are filled with grim poll predictions for the Conservative party – and good news for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. An Opinium poll suggests that the Brexit party will win a larger share of the vote in the European elections than the Tory party and Labour combined. With regards to a general election,
The call for poems about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet produced a mostly predictable line-up — from Chesterton, so-called ‘prophet of Brexit’, through Larkin, Betjeman, Brooke, Housman and, of course, Kipling. But it was an American, Ogden Nash, whose pen portrait of us prompted me to set this challenge: Let us pause
Anyone watching the BBC’s News at Ten on Monday would have been surprised to learn that economic growth poses a dire threat to the future of life on this planet. We’re used to hearing this from climate change campaigners, but I’ve always taken such claims with a pinch of salt, suspecting that the anti-capitalist left
Sun Tzu said that if you defend everywhere you defend nowhere. Gavin Williamson’s strategy was to attack everywhere: to send the army in against knife crime, to turn every encounter with a Russian frigate into The Hunt for Red October, to threaten to send an aircraft carrier to the China sea and — according to
Is the United States, the oldest democracy in the world, bumbling into a constitutional crisis of its own making? Like most things in life, it depends on where you sit. For the Democratic Party, the answer is somewhere between a “we are getting there” and a “yes, we are living it.” Donald Trump is not
I see that the Lib Dems were also involved in trying to put up a joint candidate with the Greens, Renew and the ludicrous Change UK for the Peterborough by-election. This really is the tail wagging the dog. Leave the Greens aside for one moment, Change and Renew are not parties in the accepted sense
Theresa May has one last hope for getting her Brexit deal through. As I say in The Sun this morning, she can bring the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to parliament and try and get MPs to vote for it. Not John Bercow, or anyone else, can stop her from using this as a fourth attempt to
In 2012 I finished a meeting in Berlin and headed to Tegel airport. Apparently mine was a historic flight, since the airport was to close that very week. Future flights would soon land at the wondrous new Berlin Brandenburg airport, which would be opening ‘within months’. Seven years later, planes still fly into Tegel. The
It is difficult to decide whether to condemn Chris Daw QC for his defeatism, or for his wilful ignorance of the true state of law enforcement in this country. There is no ‘prohibition’ of drug possession, as he claims. Hardly a week passes without some police force declaring that it is not interested in applying
If the recent remonstrations around climate change have been anything to go by, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the government has been dragging its feet on the environment for some time. Doubtlessly, one could quibble about whether more could be done in less time, but – sorry protestors – the idea that nothing is
As I walked through central Oxford at the weekend, an unfamiliar sight greeted me from the top of one of the university’s central buildings: the flag of the European Union had found its way amongst the spires. It fluttered gently in the breeze on the Clarendon Building, only yards from the Bodleian Library in the
