Newsnight

I thought you’d like to see this, in case you haven’t already. This is David Aaronovitch being made to look like an utter fool on Newsnight because he doesn’t know what he is talking about. He doesn’t get Brexit, or Trump, or the Chatham House survey which I reported on a couple of days ago. He is in a state of denial – a familiar state for David, because however good a writer he may be, he has the analytical capacities of a wardrobe. And not a very good wardrobe, either. A DFS thing, I would reckon. Wrong about the Iraq War, wrong about Islam (until he conveniently changed his

With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’ on Newsnight just before my older brother published his tax returns showing the impressive sums he’s made in journalism and publishing. I can only imagine how the antlers of rival 12-point stags such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts must have drooped as they calculated how many copies the full-time Mayor and MP and bestselling ‘popular historian’ must have shifted to earn royalties running into the hundreds of thousands. Having heard him toot about his eye-watering advance for his forthcoming Shakespeare, I felt only admiration that he paid almost a

BBC Newsnight sent a crew to North Wiltshire today, to interview voters about the budget. Gladys Pek Yue Macrae, a former Conservative Party branch chairman, said she is fed up because she expected Tory policies to be the result of a Tory majority. Instead, she said, “I find I have a socialist Chancellor. Conservatives are for small government and each individual being responsible for their own destiny. Why do we have a sugar tax? If people should not be eating sugar, then they should not eat sugar.” As her husband, Alan Macrae, put put it: “Surely Conservatism is all about freedom of choice? It’s not about the government telling you what you should

Last night Sadiq Khan appeared on Newsnight to discuss his bid to be the next Mayor of London. Evan Davis grilled the Labour mayoral candidate on his extended family’s supposed links to extremists as well as his approach to business which appears to be at loggerheads with Jeremy Corbyn’s: ED: Corbyn has said ‘now is the time more than ever to call for public ownership and control of the banking system’. This is only 2012, this isn’t ancient history he was saying it. I mean you’re at a completely different end of the party SK: Let me tell you something, Jeremy Corbyn’s name is not on the ballot paper on May

While Hilary Benn has been called a lot of names in recent months by hard-left activists after he voted in favour of airstrikes in Syria, Mr S suspects that the moniker given to him on tonight’s episode of Newsnight will be a first. Introducing an interview with Benn on the war in Yemen, Newsnight‘s Evan Davis appeared to be feeling creative with regards to the shadow foreign secretary’s name — referring to him as ‘Hilary Big Benn’: ‘And a little earlier I spoke to the shadow foreign secretary Hilary Big Benn and I began by asking him what he wants the British government to do now in light of the criticisms in the report.’ Mr S

Yesterday Ken Livingstone found himself at the centre of a media storm after he suggested that Kevan Jones — a Labour MP with a history of depression — required psychiatric help, after he dared to question Livingstone’s appointment as co-chair on Labour’s defence policy review. As Jones — along with Jeremy Corbyn — called on Livingstone to apologise, a series of media appearances followed where he did no such thing. At first he said Jones should ‘get over it’, later explaining he was just standing up for himself as any self-respecting south London lad would. Eventually a grovelling statement appeared on Livingstone’s Twitter account where he apologised ‘unreservedly’. So whichever brain at Labour HQ decided it

The Tories have announced that Mark Clarke, an activist who founded the RoadTrip campaigning organisation, has been booted out of the party for life. Clarke has found himself at the centre of bullying and intimidation allegations following the death of Elliott Johnson, a 21-year-old activist who is thought to have killed himself. Clarke, along with two other activists, was barred from this year’s party conference. Conservative HQ has put out the following statement, referencing new information that has ‘come to our knowledge this week’: ‘In the light of information that has come to our knowledge this week, Mark Clarke’s membership of the Conservative Party has been cancelled for life.  This

It’s fair to say that during Nick Clegg’s time in the coalition, the former deputy Prime Minister appeared to make a number of catastrophic mistakes when it came to the wellbeing of his party. However, when asked in an interview on Newsnight what he would list as his biggest regret, the former deputy Prime Minister chose not to dwell on policy blunders such as the Liberal Democrat’s disastrous tuition fees U-turn. Instead Clegg said his ‘biggest mistake’ was sitting next to David Cameron at PMQs: ‘I think maybe my biggest mistake was sitting where I did at PMQs and maybe I should have sat somewhere else.’ Clegg says that his seat of choice next to

With charter renewal looming, the BBC is under increasing scrutiny from the government to justify its licence fee. So it’s fair to say Thursday night’s Newsnight Yemen special did little to endear the corporation to some members of the Tory camp. The programme — led by the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse — looked into Yemen’s ‘forgotten war’; highlighting the Saudi-led coalition’s bombing campaign over Yemen to drive Houthi rebels from the city. It reported how the airstrikes — which have hit some civilian targets — are supported by Britain as the country sells arms to Saudi Arabia. Alas, this focus has not gone down well with Daniel Kawczynski, the Tory MP who is a member

Concern about how the Labour leadership contest has been run is spreading throughout the party. The former home secretary Charles Clarke, who has voted Kendall 1st, Cooper 2nd and Burnham 3rd, told Newsnight he was very disappointed in the contest and raised the prospect of legal challenges to the result: ‘I think it’s been a disaster unfortunately. I am very sad about it. I wrote about it immediately after the election — it was very important to get through to have a process where people had confidence in the election process. ‘We’ve got legal challenges, I think there may be still further legal challenges about the process; issues about who can, who