It’s not hard to see why migrants come here. For those who make it across the Channel illegally, there is only a small chance of deportation. About 72 per cent of the predominantly young males who leave the safety of France can expect to have their UK asylum claims granted. The success rate is more
I always advise younger journalists never to use irony or make jokes on social media, so when I was effectively sacked for alluding to an edible fruit of the palm family, I should have known better. And of course I did know better. I deleted my three-word tweet within minutes. But screenshots live for ever.
The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for new technology, an opportunity to develop weapons and find different ways of fighting. Nations that are supposedly neutral have been sending weapons to the front line to find out just how they work in the heat of battle. This is a relatively new trend in
It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill
Imagine you’re scrolling through Twitter. You see a new coat and, on impulse, tap ‘buy’. Purchase confirmed. Later, you open Twitter again to order a taxi to a restaurant and once there, you scan a QR code to see the menu, from which you order directly to the table. All of this is charged to
The far right in Germany isn’t all angry young men with shaved heads, baseball bats and black boots. There are those who appear respectable, even intellectual. The Reichsbürger movement includes accountants, teachers and academics; many members are middle-aged. It’s a fractured network with vastly diverging world views, united in their belief that the current government
When the small boats crisis began, it was seen by some in government as a positive sign. ‘It was an emblem of success,’ says Robert Buckland, who was solicitor general at the time. ‘If you remember, the previous mode of entry for migrants was on lorries.’ Heat scanners had been introduced at the Channel Tunnel
According to excerpts from Out of the Blue, the cursed biography of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, Truss is dependent on two things for comfort: Instagram and espresso. On a trade delegation to New Zealand, she’d ‘had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador’. Coffee is
