All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
He is bare-chested, muscular and not unattractive. A Palestinian flag blazes in one hand, a slingshot is strained taut in the other. All around him is smoke and press photographers. Aed Abu Amro, a 20-year-old Gazan, is rioting on the boundary between the Hamas-run statelet and Israel’s southern frontier. The terrorist organisation has been fomenting
With the Budget due on Monday, today’s highlights have come chiefly from the leading Treasury figures of the two major parties. Sophy Ridge was joined this morning by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Hammond, who is known to be wary about the UK’s impending departure from the EU’s economic framework, told Ridge that tomorrow’s Budget
Should you be allowed to say that the founder of one of the world’s largest religions was a paedophile? According to the European Court of Human Rights the answer is ‘no’. In a decision issued this week the Court in Strasbourg ruled that this statement is defamatory towards the prophet of Islam, ‘goes beyond the
There is much shock professed about the metaphors used to describe Mrs May’s political plight — talk of the ‘killing zone’, or her being stabbed, and worse. I feel this shock myself, but in fact such metaphors are routine in politics and almost always have been. Think, for example, of Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the
Sir: What James Forsyth calls ‘the EU plan’ to keep Northern Ireland in the customs union after Brexit (‘The Irish problem’, 20 October) would no more ‘ease Northern Ireland away from the UK and push it more towards Dublin’s orbit’ than it has already done itself through numerous legislative differences. With regard to social issues such
Monday’s Budget comes at a delicate point in the Brexit negotiations. I say in The Sun this morning, that a bolder government and Chancellor would turn this timing to their advantage. They would use this Budget to give a preview of what the UK would do in the event of no deal. No deal planning
For the latest competition you were invited to supply a demotivational poem. This was your opportunity to come up with a bracing antidote to the worldview peddled by an eye-wateringly lucrative self-help industry that feeds on a mix of insecurity and the aspirational narcissism du jour. You came at the challenge from various angles, but
This year’s Orwell Lecture will be delivered by the novelist Kamila Shamsie. She will be complaining, it is announced, about this government’s talk of citizenship being ‘a privilege and not a right’. (Actually, it is both.) No doubt she will have interesting points to make, but it is a pity that Orwell’s flame is always
For all the praise heaped on Peter Hain for revealing the details of a legal case subject to injunction, there’s been depressingly little acknowledgement of what this really means: namely that a senior politician has fundamentally undermined the rule of law. Hain – who, unlike many of his peers, has never been a lawyer– has
If there’s one thing trans women really don’t need in our lives, it’s bollocks – but that’s exactly what the Labour Party is offering us. Last week, Jeremy Corbyn used a speech at the Pinknews Awards to announce that it is now official Labour policy to give literally any person the right to self-declare their
The Conservatives used to be known as the party of business. Theresa May still seems to be trying to keep up the pretence, saying in her conference speech that the Conservatives are ‘a party that believes in business’. But the proof is in the pudding, and this pudding is turning sour. Fast. The Budget rumour
It’s over a year since the #MeToo scandal of sexual harassment broke. It has shaken up our culture and relationships in so many ways over the past 12 months. It isn’t going away, either, as the allegations about Sir Philip Green this week have shown. But it has now reached a point where it could
Campus censorship is a myth. That’s the new line being spun by student union officials and university leaders in response to the campaigners, commentators and politicians raising concerns about the increasingly censorious culture on British campuses. The extent of No Platforming, Safe Space censorship and newspaper bans, they say, is being exaggerated by right-wing hacks
Somehow it has already been two years into a Trump presidency, and America is facing midterm elections. Will Democrats win in a landslide? We also delve a little deeper at the political faultlines behind the Jamal Khashoggi story – is Turkey taking advantage of his death? And last, is the use of wild animals in
Do you remember that brief couple of weeks in British history when we all had to say ‘I agree with Nick’? It seems a long time ago, and now Sir Nick Clegg is off to Silicon Valley to be the head of Facebook’s global affairs and communications team. Some sneer, but the move makes perfect
When Piers Morgan called Daniel Craig an #emasculatedbond for carrying his daughter in a baby carrier, Twitter responded in the best way possible. Apart from feminists scoffing (and yes, I was one of them), dads from all walks of life tweeted pictures of themselves with babies in carriers. Society has shifted, but Piers didn’t get
The FTSE100 fell by more than 10%, which is generally regarded as a ‘correction’. How does that compare with other ones recently? Dec 1999–March 2003 -49.6% Oct 2007–March 2009 -47.5% April 2010–June 2010 -16.1% Feb 2011–Sept 2011 -16.7% March 2012–May 2012 -11.8% April 2015-Feb 2016 -21.9%
‘Uncertainty is draining investment from the UK, with Brexit having a negative impact on eight in ten businesses,’ says Carolyn Fairbairn of the CBI. OK, let’s pause for a chorus of ‘She would say that, wouldn’t she?’ But even if we shade off for ‘scaremongering’, her survey (of 236 firms) is bleak: ‘44 per cent
Most people were scandalised by John McDonnell’s proposal to promote a four-day working week. But before we get incensed about giving people more leisure during their working life, we need to ask another question. If it really is so vital to the economy that people spend more time at work, then why does the government
The British press has been unable to name the famous businessman who has taken out an injunction against the Daily Telegraph to prevent it reporting on the multiple allegations of sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying against him. But such laws do not apply to parliament where, in the House of Lords, Peter Hain named this person
The consensus in the Conservative party is that Theresa May’s visit to the 1922 Committee last night hasn’t materially changed anything. Those who want her gone are still plotting her demise. A larger group of her MPs are very frustrated and unhappy. And there are still a good number of loyalists prepared to make supportive
On his television show the Apprentice, Alan Sugar is known for taking his contestants to task, whether they’re pitching a hopeless product or simply talking absolute rubbish. But the businessman clearly has a bit of a blindspot when it comes to his own incoherence. In a speech in the House of Lords this afternoon, the
If you want to know how fractious things are getting in the Cabinet just consider this. On Tuesday, as I report in the new issue of the magazine, Claire Perry, the energy minister, accused others in the Cabinet of using the discussion over the backstop to advance their own leadership ambitions. This is a remarkable
If you think about it, it is obvious that The People’s Vote march last Saturday in London could not have been attended by 750,000 people, as its organisers allege. That is the equivalent of every man, woman and child in Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge (to take three Remain-voting cities). Sky News reported that the organisers
Oh dear. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s interview on the Today programme started off a little oddly this morning, with the presenters noting how rough he looked in the studio – apparently he had tripped over fly-tipped rubbish outside his house. The Labour MP joked that although he was arriving rather than leaving the studio looking
Theresa May should offer to go to the 1922 Committee every week between now and March 2019. Her appearance led to a, predictable, rallying round. There was the usual desk banging and lots of calls for unity. I’m told there were about half a dozen questions on tone and language following the hideous quotes given
In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin about his new book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, in which he argues that it’s not only height and weight and skin colour that are heritable, but intelligence, TV-watching habits and likelihood of getting divorced. I asked him about
Mrs May survives. That’s the sensational news from today’s PMQs which was conducted in a remarkably sedate and leisurely atmosphere. The Tory leader came under little pressure from Jeremy Corbyn. And she got no grief at all from her own back-stabbers, sorry, back-benchers who seem to have decided to delay her dethronement until Hallowe’en, or
So, just a week after starting work on releasing the gas trapped in the shales beneath Lancashire, energy company Cuadrilla Resources decided to stop work, at least for the rest of the day. Soon after they had started pumping water into the rocks a mile below the surface, there were a series of microseismic events
The conventional wisdom that we live in echo chambers always seemed too convenient an explanation of political polarisation to be true. Believers could convince themselves that their causes lost, not because they were faulty or fantastical or outright wicked, but because their opponents had brainwashed a majority of the electorate to reject them. For all
Given relations with her own party, Theresa May will have been far more worried about the second half of Prime Minister’s Questions than the first. On the basis of the backbench questions that were asked, the session went pretty well. Only one Tory MP raised Brexit at all, and that was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked
Will tonight’s 1922 Committee meeting be a firework display of Tory anger? Theresa May has decided to face her MPs after days of feverish speculation that some of them might be about to force a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. There are plenty who have much to complain about on many different
The speculation that Theresa May is perilously close to the 48 letters required for a confidence vote has – as Steerpike documents here – been going on for some time. That’s not to say it won’t happen. Morale is at low point within the party. But as a consequence of that, the sheer number of
When Mohammed bin Salman was first made Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the West rejoiced. It looked as if, finally, a young reformer with 21st century values was taking the reins of the state. After he allowed women to finally drive, the West hoped the Saudis would free jailed journalists, meaningfully engage with Europe and America