All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
General Synod has repealed the old law that every Anglican church must hold a Sunday service. It’s not really the end of an era, because the law has been flouted for decades: many rural vicars are in charge of a large handful of churches and cannot hold services at all of them every week. It’s
Islamabad Six months into Imran Khan’s premiership and the new Pakistan prime minister has been plunged into his first major foreign crisis. Last week, a suicide bomber attacked Indian soldiers in Kashmir, killing more than 40 paramilitary troops. Simultaneously, another suicide attack massacred 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard near the Pakistani border of Iran’s
Brexit is back in the Commons next week. As I write in The Sun this morning, two of the big questions are: what will Eurosceptic Tories accept in terms of changes to the backstop and will the Cooper amendment pass. A document circulating among Tory Eurosceptics sets out what MPs should and shouldn’t regard as
I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the imaginatively
Where will these nice Independent Groupies end up? If the SDP example applies, they will wander through the political wilderness, some of them coming to rest in existing parties. All the following were in the SDP. Greg Clark is a Tory cabinet minister. Danny Finkelstein is a Tory peer, excellent journalist and wordsmith to David
On 22 December 1963, the Sunday Times published an article by Enoch Powell in which he had an imaginary conversation with Benjamin Disraeli. Here is my (RR) take on what Powell (EP) would make of Brexit: Enoch Powell: Have I been proved right, yet? Richard Ritchie: What did you have in mind? You made quite
Of all the points made on the case of Shamima Begum, the most relevant has been utterly absent. That is, who might actually be responsible for this appalling young woman being who she is and where she is. In recent days the government’s own extremism commissioner, Sara Khan, has made an uncommon set of interventions.
I’m for Brexit. As a Young Conservative in Wadhurst, I wanted to leave the EU. When John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, I saw it as a betrayal of such massive consequence I briefly joined the Labour Party — and was later forced to confess this indiscretion to Tory associations up and down the country.
Whatever the arguments over the Government’s decision to revoke Isis bride Shamima Begum’s British citizenship, the teenager’s future now depends on one thing: will the courts determine she is a dual national who is eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship? If so, Sajid Javid’s decision is lawful, as this means that the loss of her British citizenship will
It’s Andrew Adonis’s birthday and how better for him to mark the occasion than with a tweet about Brexit? Adonis, who has busied himself as chief cheerleader for the campaign to stop Brexit, took to Twitter today to deliver his verdict on how he thought momentum towards a second referendum had grown beyond all doubt:
Theresa May is currently busy trying to work out a way to get her Brexit deal through Parliament. Should the Prime Minister succeed in the coming weeks, No. 10 will then move to the daunting task of somehow getting all the accompanying legislation through. Both of these tasks are regarded as incredibly difficult yet even
At any other time, news that Honda intends to close its Swindon plant in two years’ time with the loss of 3,500 jobs would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy for those affected, their families and businesses it supports. But the story was used by both sides in the Brexit wars to
Ian Austin has become the ninth MP to quit Labour, blaming the party’s culture of anti-Semitism. He tells the Express and Star: ‘The Labour Party has been my life, so this has been the hardest decision I have ever had to take, but I have to be honest and the truth is that I have become
Here we go again. This morning another Labour MP has announced they are quitting Jeremy Corbyn’s party over its handling of anti-Semitism allegations. Ian Austin – the MP for Dudley North – has told his local paper that he has grown tired of the ‘culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance’ in today’s Labour party: ‘I
Next month Ukraine goes to the polls in its seventh presidential election since it achieved independence in 1991. Five years on from Euromaidan, and the resulting Russia invasion, the country remains bitterly divided between pro and anti-Europeans. Yet, this will be the first election not to feature a powerful, pro-Russian force amongst the frontrunners. Although, of course,
This week the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, decided not to allow Shamima Begum to return to this country, stripping her of her British citizenship and arguing that she is instead the responsibility of Bangladesh. His decision to do so has not been universally popular, but others have argued that the UK should not go easy
This week has been a relief from the usual Brexit conversations. The long talked about rumours of a centrist party have finally materialised, as eight Labour MPs and three Tory MPs defected from their former loyalties. Already, polls are in claiming that the Independent Group is more popular than the Lib Dems. But just how promising
My hopes of an invite from Jeff Bezos to the opening of Amazon’s proposed but now cancelled ‘HQ2’ at Long Island City in New York were slim, since I was thrown out of his existing Seattle HQ on the orders of the online giant’s PR police. But I disagree with rising-star Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
The days of black-clad militants rampaging through cities, parading captives as war trophies and doing wheelies in U.S.-made Humvees are over. The Islamic State – which once presided over eight million people in a reign of terror across territory as large as the United Kingdom – is now confined to an orchard in the dusty
An advert in the Netherlands features a hairy beast warning about the looming departure of Britain from the EU. Move over Project Fear, this is Project Fur: a campaign aimed at urging businesses to brace themselves for a no-deal Brexit. So what do the Dutch make of the big blue Brexit monster? While the British media
There is a great opportunity in front of the Tories. As I say in the magazine this week, there’s 12 more years in power for the taking for them because of the split in the Labour party. But seizing this opportunity will require the Tories to temper their passions on Brexit. There are two Brexit
On my show last night, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid captured why nine of his ministerial colleagues have told the Prime Minister they may have to resign next week (though he won’t be joining them). Javid said that a no-deal Brexit would be damaging for the UK, that he didn’t want it, that the risk
Derek Hatton’s journey from Militant councillor to not-quite Labour member has been something of a rollercoaster in recent days. After being banned for 32 years for being part of the Militant tendency, it was revealed that Hatton had been readmitted to the party on Monday. Two days later, Labour said that he had been suspended
I learned two fascinating things about the Labour and Tory refuseniks in The Independent Group from my guests on the Peston show last night (at 11.05 on ITV) – though quite how much of it made it on to the show I am not sure, because we had a hard stop at the end of
This weekend’s presidential election in Nigeria is becoming a cliffhanger worthy of a Nollywood movie, even before the decision to delay the election just five hours before the polls were due to open. In the early hours of Saturday, as most Nigerians slept, the country’s Independent National Electoral Commissions (INEC) decided to postpone the presidential
Shamima Begum, the jihadi bride seeking to return to Britain, represents an awful problem for the UK – but isn’t she our problem and shouldn’t we deal with her under our own justice system? How, morally, can we strip her of UK citizenship and dump her on Bangladesh, which she has never visited? James Forsyth’s
Banks are trying to change our ways. Our own recently wrote to tell us that it will no longer send us cheque books unless we positively demand them. And now a battle is beginning to close down cash machines. It is reported that there are none at all in Stoke; and when I accosted an
If there were a modern remake of the TV series Fawlty Towers, it would probably contain an episode called ‘The Socialists’, in which the one-liner ‘Don’t mention Venezuela!’ would become a running gag. Mentioning Venezuela in the presence of a self-described socialist is considered boorish and impolite these days. Yes, a lot of people on
What does Theresa May want to get from Brussels? At Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn pressed the Prime Minister on what type of concession she would be seeking from the EU on the backstop. May refused to divulge many details but the word in Whitehall is that the UK government is ready to present a
Three weeks ago, Anna Soubry and a small number of Tory Remainers gathered in a corner of the Pugin room of the House of Commons, all looking devastated. They had just failed to force the Cooper amendment upon Theresa May’s government. Meanwhile, their arch enemies, the ERG Tories, had succeeded in passing the Brady amendment.
In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the American journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. In it, he uses the best available scientific projections to underpin a picture of what the world would look like if it heats up by four degrees or more. Not
And then there were eleven. The Independent Group has been enlarged today by the defection of moderate Tories Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen, who gave as their reason the Brexification of the Conservative Party. ConservativeHome’s executive editor Mark Wallace and others might dispute many of the charges, but the splitters describe a mood in
Mr Steerpike has a great degree of sympathy with those who have been trying to keep up with Labour’s contorted Brexit position. First the party had its six tests – designed to be impossible to fulfil, then five demands – set out in a letter to the prime minister, and now a confusing hodgepodge of