All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
News comes this morning, after much speculation, of an organised attempt to create a new British political party, called United for Change, funded by LoveFilm entrepreneur Simon Franks. It doesn’t have any MPs yet, apparently, and may not have any when it launches this autumn. Is there a hole in the market for a new
As Cabinet ministers and Tory MPs line up to attack Boris Johnson over his burka comments, some are wondering if another politician would merit such a backlash. Right on cue, Johnson’s former PPS Conor Burns has popped up to take a pop at his colleagues. Burns says some of his colleagues don’t even seem to
Boris Johnson graces the front pages of not one but seven newspapers this morning as the row over his burka comments rumbles on. It’s not gone unnoticed in eurosceptic circles that Remain Tory MPs have been the quickest to pile in on the former foreign secretary over his letterbox comparison. This has led to suspicion
As a Muslim woman observing Islam, I am fully supportive of Boris Johnson’s rejection of the niqab. And I wonder how many of the former Foreign Secretary’s critics understand my religion, what this form of dress represents and the subjugation it implies. To defend the niqab and to defend Muslim women are, I can assure
Barely had the ink dried on Stephen Robinson’s imaginative apologia for Boris Johnson — he is compared, courageously, to Churchill — than the former foreign secretary reminded us of his capacity for blunder. In his Telegraph column Johnson assailed the ‘burka’ for leaving Muslim women ‘looking like letter boxes’ and ‘bank robber[s]’. I say ‘burka’
Theresa May visited Scotland on Tuesday to hold Brexit talks with Nicola Sturgeon. Not that you would know this from reading today’s papers as they are all about Boris Johnson. The Boris and the burka row rumbles on for a third day – after the former foreign secretary refused to apologise for his comments on
This is the English version of a piece of mine that was first published in DIE WELT on 4 August 2018, in which I attempt to explain to German readers why anti-Semitism, of all things, is dominating politics in Britain, of all places. Germans visiting Britain before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party
In case you missed it, Apple’s market capitalisation has now hit the $1trillion mark – something which is as mind boggling as it was inevitable. Everyone with a newswire, Twitter feed and website seems to have latched onto the milestone. You’d have thought they’d all successfully predicted this event on 1 April 1976, when the company
It all started so well. When the BBC decided that the good weather had gone on long enough to make it newsworthy, they invited the Met Office’s Stephen Belcher on to Newsnight, no doubt hoping that he would fan the flames with some lurid claims about how we were all going to fry in years
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which Labour refuses to adopt in full, is very clear about one thing. That denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination constitutes discrimination. In the past though this fact appears to have been lost on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Footage has emerged of the leader, speaking
It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader): ‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as
Whether Labour moderates are planning a coup in a Sussex farm house or simply getting together to discuss policy, it’s clear that they are unhappy with the way Jeremy Corbyn is running Labour. Since they failed to oust Corbyn as leader in 2016, Labour’s centrists have generally kept a low profile. But for some, keeping
A truly bizarre thing happened yesterday: Boris Johnson was branded an Islamophobe and a bigot for writing in defence of Muslim women who wear the niqab. In his Telegraph column, Johnson said it was wrong for Denmark to ban the niqab and burqa in public places because the state should not be telling any ‘free-born
Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell took to social media last week to lament the loss of reasonable discourse in politics. After speaking on Iain Dale’s LBC radio show he praised the host, saying: Good chat with @IainDale @lbc on Brexit just now. I always feel he is one of those people with whom I
Labour’s anti-Semitism row and Theresa May’s no deal Brexit woes have had to take a back seat this morning thanks to talk of a good old fashioned Blairite coup. The Daily Express reports that 12 Labour MPs – including Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie and Liz Kendall – are embroiled in ‘secret plot to oust Jeremy Corbyn’.
Finding a savings account that allows you to collect any interest at all – while still having access to your cash when you want it – can be tricky. There are some options out there, though. Here are the best Easy Access savings accounts on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.
On the day that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, Arsenal were hosting CSKA Moscow for the second leg of a Champions League group stage match. The game ended a goalless draw with the home side left frustrated by a series of squandered chances. Watching the game that evening from his box above the stands was Boris
What are we to make of a 19 per cent fall in both Facebook and Twitter shares at the end of last week, with Facebook shedding a barely imaginable $120 billion of value in a single day? Of course there are factors relating to performance: Twitter user numbers have been declining and Facebook’s profitability is
On Monday, August 6, the long-arm of the U.S. Treasury Department reached into Europe and violently shook the continent. The first wave of U.S. secondary sanctions on entire sectors of the Iranian economy are now back in force, which means major European conglomerates and large-sized businesses have a potentially existential choice to make. Do we
Boris Johnson caused a stir this morning with an article in the Daily Telegraph. The former foreign secretary used his weekly column to argue that the Danish government were wrong to bring in a burka ban. Johnson said that although he thought that it was frankly ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around
Boris Johnson has found himself in a spot of bother today over an article in the Telegraph. The former Foreign Secretary uses his column to say that he disagrees with the Danish government’s decision to ban burkas. However, he has been criticised for also saying that Muslim women wearing burkas ‘look like letter boxes’. A
While David Cameron has reportedly busied himself of late telling friends how his old mate Michael Gove is ‘mad’ and behaved like a ‘lunatic’ during the EU referendum, his comrade George Osborne appears to take a rather different view. Rather than hold a grudge, the former Chancellor was spotted on holiday with Gove last month.
Good news for people who want the government to make it easier to build homes? The papers today carry news that local authorities are proposing nearly half a million (459,000) homes on green belt land, up from 425,000 a year ago. While on the surface more homes at a time of housing shortages might seem like
My anecdote last week about upgrading to BT’s ‘superfast’ broadband provoked several readers, unasked, to tell me their own unsatisfactory experiences. So I thought we should compile a Spectator dossier on the subject — as we did to good effect on the issue of high street bank branch closures, on which your combined report reached the desks
Where’s the F in News, new on Radio 4, is ‘an energetic, intelligent female-anchored show with a female panel’, according to its BBC description, of ‘fresh and funny challenges’. I listened to the latest episode. The panel of two comedians, one restaurateur and the Labour MP Jess Phillips were unanimous in their prejudices. The subjects
There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every
I completely agree with David Harris. Like him a Remain voter and a Londoner, I was utterly shocked by the result of the referendum, spending some hours trawling the online results in an attempt to understand what had happened. It was a salutary experience, yielding many surprises (Sevenoaks voted out!) and forced me to reappraise
Since Chequers, the UK has been making a big diplomatic push to try and move the Brexit talks along. As I say in The Sun this morning, this has had some success. Inside government, the view is that the chances of a deal are inching up. There is also cautious optimism that the British message
You have a tight deadline and if you miss it there will be trouble. Only it’s a Friday and you’ve got plans so you do a slapdash job and copy and paste from a previous piece of work hoping no-one will notice. This at least appears to be what happened to Jeremy Corbyn on Friday.
I’m fairly certain the Pope’s a Catholic but Andrew Cuomo is anyone’s guess. Barely had the Holy Father revised Church teaching to declare capital punishment ‘inadmissible’ than the New York Governor tweeted this: The death penalty is morally indefensible and has no place in the 21st century. Today, in solidarity with @pontifex and in honor
As I’m writing this, I can’t stop thinking about my sixteen year old self: a naïve, optimistic teenager who had just joined the Labour party, sure that Ed Miliband was going to put the country to rights, and that being one of the party members who would help him do that was an honour and
Google the words ‘Universal Basic Income’ and you will be find high praise and excitement from a wide-ranging collection of people. Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and now John McDonnell have all announced they believe that ‘free money for all’ is a good policy. UBI has fans on both the left and the right. Dutch author
After a tawdry week for Labour which saw a flurry of fresh allegations of anti-Semitism in the party’s upper ranks, Jeremy Corbyn has finally broken his silence. Writing an op-ed for the Guardian, the Labour leader admits that there is a ‘real problem’ – and says the party has been too slow in tackling anti-Semitism
When does a religion become an ethnic group? You may consider the premise of this question absurd – after all ethnicity is immutable, faith a choice. Bizarrely however, this has become the subject of a major dispute amongst British Sikhs. It hinges on whether or not a Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick-box should be included by the
