All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There is a mental health crisis in the UK. The symptoms are often body related, and the causes are complex, but a new orthodoxy now labels some of these people as transgender. This means that instead of getting psychological care, increasing numbers are encouraged to take potentially dangerous hormones on their way to transitioning gender.
Donald Trump is becoming a restaurant critic. This morning he weighed in on the Red Hen restaurant, which is located in Virginia and denied service over the weekend to his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. According to Trump: It’s understandable if the Trump administration is feeling somewhat henpecked. A newly aroused left is engaging in
Despite the good weather and England’s good World Cup result, it hasn’t been a relaxing weekend for all. Step forward Gavin Williamson. The ambitious defence secretary has found himself in the line of fire, with the Mail on Sunday splashing on reports that he has threatened to topple the prime minister unless defence spending is increased
The Health Secretary joined Andrew Marr this morning for a discussion on the NHS, but it was Hunt’s remarks about business that have caught the headlines. The pan-European aviation company Airbus and car manufacturing giant BMW have said that a no deal Brexit could potentially see them leave the UK, and the organisations have said
This time last year, Jeremy Corbyn was standing on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury to adoring chants of ‘Oh-Jeremy-Corbyn’. Last weekend, Corbyn-mania attempting a resurgence at JezFest – Labour’s very own music festival – but failed to deliver the Labour leader another Glastonbury moment – with only faint chants to be heard. Happily, Corbyn can take
After any major interview, I turn with great interest to discover from Twitter whether I am currently a sinister Marxist undermining the Tories; a foam-flecked believer in the hardest of hard Brexits; or a mildly outdated Blairite propagandist. Maybe, I’m all three. Or, just possibly, I ask the questions, rather than taking responsibility for the
The departure of David Dimbleby from Question Time is certainly sad from the point of view of the panellist. He was, in recent years, one’s sole protector. Calm, humorous, very slightly bored (but too polite to show it), David reminded one by his mere presence that there is a world of sane and civilised people outside the
The CEO of Penguin Random House, Tom Weldon, says in his letter to The Spectator last week that his ‘diversity’ goals are needed because ‘some authors face more barriers than others in getting published’. Coming after his assertion that talent is the first and foremost consideration for a publisher, the most obvious barrier is surely
But on the down side…… 1. Still too little quality and threat from open play. 2. Raheem Sterling is very short of confidence for someone with a bad muthafucka AK47 tattooed on his leg. 3. The defence can still be horrendously dilatory and loose. As we saw with the Panama goal and three times in
Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel prompted me to invite you to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s Constance Chatterley instructing Mellors in the
Enjoying the football? The politics of it, obviously. The Switzerland-Serbia game was a cracker in this context. The innocents in the BBC box obviously bought the fiction that this was a Swiss team though the two Swiss goals should have put paid to that notion. The hand gesture from Shaqiri when he scored his goal,
Next week’s EU Council will see little progress on Brexit. As I write in The Sun today, migration—not Brexit—is the biggest issue on the agenda for the EU 27. Migration is roiling European politics again. Angela Merkel’s coalition is threatening to break apart over the issue. While in Italy, the new government is threatening to
Spaniards didn’t ask for their new prime minister, but it seems that they’re starting to like him. The most recent polls reveal that Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists, who now make up Spain’s minority government, are the most popular party in the country. Less than a month ago, the PSOE slumbered in third place, behind the then-ruling
Upskirting is such a pretty word: it sounds like a charming village in Yorkshire, or an olde worlde custom, like swan-upping. Actually, it is nasty, and not as new as people claim. Fragonard depicts it in ‘The Swing’ (though obviously the young man had no camera). Margaret Thatcher, who was most reluctant to wear trousers,
Maybe it’s a sandwich chain, or a price comparison website, or a bioscience breakthrough: but the start-up was your baby, and you’ve worked night and day to prove its potential. Now it needs capital to go to the next level — and you need liquidity for family needs, as well as a plan for long-term
The new US ambassador has set the cat among the pigeons this morning with the Telegraph splashing on his call to Britons to stop being ‘defeatist’ about Brexit and instead be inspired by Trump. The comments from Woody Johnson were made as part of a new Channel 4 documentary – Inside the American Embassy – out
When Love Island contestant Hayley Hughes used a conversation about Brexit to ask whether there would still be trees after Britain leaves the EU, there was widespread ridicule. With the reality star now out of the ITV2 villa, Hayley appeared on Daily Politics to be given a Brexit education via the BBC’s Adam Fleming. ‘I’m
I can think of many people who deserve to be in jail but perhaps not Stanislaw Skupien. The homeless Pole was watching the London Marathon in April when he suddenly fancied a go himself. He clambered over a barrier and started running. When 300 yards form the finish, he picked up a race number which had
Are ministerial resignations even interesting any more? There are more of them in Theresa May’s government than there are solid policy announcements or indeed any sort of decision at all. Today it was the turn of Greg Hands, who announced that he was stepping down as a junior trade minister in order to vote against
The 30th March 2019 is the date in every Leave-backing MP’s mind. It is the first day Britain will be legally outside of the EU. But as I say in the magazine this week, Cabinet Brexiteers are concerned that this date may slip. One tells me that the UK is ‘likely to face at some
How do you find the money to pay for a £20bn NHS funding pledge? Usually such discussions – and eventual calculations – would be made before the money was announced. However, Theresa May decided to ditch the rulebook this week when she unveiled her government’s funding package to boost health spending by an average of 3.4
On Monday evening, I watched a man in a smart shirt and trousers put his friend in a headlock while bellowing at the top of his voice. In the central London pub I was in, guttural roars filled the room; the floor shook with people jumping up and down. A few minutes later and a
In Britain today, home ownership rates stand at a 30-year low. More and more families with young children are renting, while recent research from the Resolution Foundation found that one in three millennials are unlikely to ever own their own home. At the same time, Britain ranks fifth on infrastructure spending when compared to its
In recent days, Lionel Shriver has been in trouble. Her criticism of the publishing industry’s diversity drive has led to her marked as a racist and even dropped from a literary judging panel. She argued that ethnic quotas harm rather than help diversity – is she wrong? As Robert Mueller’s investigation continues, several dodgy links
Last night, some women got together in a room to talk about law and politics and sex and gender. The meeting, in Hastings, was organised by a group called A Woman’s Place UK, which is concerned about the way politics and public debate is developing with regard to the legal rights of transgender people and
Has there ever been a time when the leaders of France and Great Britain are so diametrically opposed in character and style? One is weak and indecisive, a Prime Minister who avoids confrontation, the other is forthright and forceful, a president who relishes a fight. Emmanuel Macron seems to take a perverse delight in upsetting his
Well, stone me. A new “populist” government in Italy actually does something to stop the NGO taxi service which ferries migrants masquerading as refugees from the Libyan coast to Sicily 350 miles away. It does what no Italian government has dared do before and refuses to allow an NGO ship with hundreds of migrants on board, nearly
German conservatives are in disarray. Caught between the migrant crisis and Merkel’s looming departure, they are fighting over their own political future. On the surface, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their smaller sister-party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), argue over whether German police forces should be allowed to reject certain asylum seekers at
It’s summer party season in Westminster. Tonight it was the turn of Policy Exchange with the think tank securing a speech from Theresa May. In a buoyant mood after narrowly dodging a Tory rebellion on the EU withdrawal bill, the Prime Minister spoke about the need to respect the EU referendum result. However, May’s speech
I blame Bercow. The Speaker has introduced a strange new custom to the Commons. He likes to point out his guests in the public gallery and to encourage MPs to join him in saluting them. Now everyone’s at it. Before today’s session Jeremy Corbyn had bagged himself an imam from a north London mosque and
One of the laws of Brexit is that every Commons division and Cabinet meeting billed as being a ‘crunch vote’ or ‘crunch talks’ ends up postponing the crunching again, and again and again. This afternoon, Dominic Grieve announced that he would ‘accept the government’s difficulty’ on the matter of a meaningful vote and ‘support it’.
The Remain rebels have this afternoon backed down and found a compromise to the government’s meaningful vote amendment that they can live with. So, was it all worth it? That’s a question Phillip Lee may well be asking himself – following his decision to resign his junior ministerial post last week so he could speak
Remember Safia Akhtar? Back in May, Mr Steerpike reported how the Birmingham Labour candidate had ‘waltz[ed] to victory’ in the local elections and been elected as a Labour councillor. Given that the Labour representative once said there was ‘no proof’ that Isis existed, not everyone was thrilled by her appointment. After Khalid Masood murdered five people including
PMQs today was a missed opportunity for Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn chose to go on the NHS, rather than Donald Trump’s border policy. But this needn’t have been a mistake. Corbyn, after a rather long preamble, started off by asking what taxes would rise to pay for this increased spending. Theresa May replied that Philip Hammond