Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
When Rishi Sunak presented the latest attempt by a prime minister to get tough on anti-social behaviour, it wasn’t the graffiti-cleaning or the ‘gotcha’ fly-tip cameras or the labelled jumpsuits that caught my eye. It was the inclusion of begging. Admittedly, you had to go pretty far down his pledge list before you found it. Perhaps someone
Was it Vladimir Putin or wasn’t it? ‘Vladimir Putin’ was certainly shown on television being helicoptered into Crimea this week, meeting ‘the people’ and driving himself around reconstruction sites in the devastated city of Mariupol. In the wider world, though, there was widespread scepticism that it was the real Russian President. Clips were posted on
The more junior doctors have tried to justify their three-day withdrawal of labour over the past week, the more damage, or so it seems to me, they have done to their cause – whatever that cause may be. On the final day of their strike – in pursuit of a 35 per cent pay rise
Let me confess: when I learned that a woman pedestrian had been sent to prison for causing the death of a cyclist she had forced off the pavement, only my second thought turned to the horror experienced by the victim and sympathy for her family. My first, entirely selfish, thought was: there but for the
Responding to Sir John Saunders’ third and final report on the bombing at Manchester Arena, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary called it a ‘difficult day’ for the Home Office. In saying so, she was clearly referring not just to the general failure of the authorities to prevent the attack, which cost 22 lives, but specifically to
It had to happen, didn’t it? After the railway workers, the train drivers, the nurses, the ambulance crews, the civil servants, and in all likelihood the junior doctors, here come the teachers – although not quite as enthusiastically as their union leaders might have wished. The National Education Union, representing 300,000 teaching staff has announced
UK officials from the Prime Minister downwards have condemned the execution of Iran’s former deputy defence minister, a dual British-Iranian national, in the strongest of terms. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has described it as ‘a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime’. The chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia
The greatest danger presented by the rail strikes – for the Government, that is – has passed. The trade unions, chief among them the RMT, fronted by the alternately reasonable and hectoring Mick Lynch, threw everything they could at ministers in the run-up to the holidays. It did not work. Much the same applies, to a
Today’s strike by nurses may indeed be the biggest action – or inaction – of its kind in NHS history. But there is a distinct sense of having been here before. The nurses’ grievances been a daily theme of news broadcasts for weeks, as though, as a group, they are uniquely affected by the double-digit
If you’ve managed to avoid the dimly-lit pictures of people’s back gardens, count yourself lucky. Yes: snow has arrived in the capital. The Foreign Secretary made a point of thanking London-based diplomats for showing up to his speech in Westminster yesterday – or, as he put it, ‘battling through’ two or three inches of snow
As if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not already presented quite enough dilemmas for other countries, suddenly there is another one. How sympathetic a reception should Russian men trying to avoid call-up in their home country be granted abroad, and specifically in the UK? This quandary has arisen following Vladimir Putin’s announcement of what he
Over the six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the ambitions of President Zelensky and his compatriots have only grown. From an early readiness to engage in talks – first in Belarus and then in Istanbul – Kyiv has progressed to an insistence that Ukraine can win, and from there to a definition of victory that includes not
Forget fund-raising concerts donating spare clothes and offering your spare room to a refugee family. There’s a better way of showing your sympathy for Ukrainians: you can now sponsor weapons, and arm it with your very own message. For up to £2,500, Brits can send a personalised message to the crowdfunding site Sign My Rocket,
The theme of the week has to be ‘coming home’: first the women’s football trophy, and now one-time Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, who says he will share his time between the two sides of the Atlantic. He had recently hinted at a return, describing himself as ‘at heart, European’. Some might question this as a
Launching her campaign for party leader and prime minister, Liz Truss said something that barely registered amid the big tax-cutting promises, but made me prick up my ears in a very positive way. She talked about trying to make sure that parents and other carers were not penalised by taking time out of paid work.
Much has been made of the decision to place the Metropolitan Police in what is often referred to as special measures, where it joins five other forces from England and Wales. The many ways in which the Met has fallen short have also been amply aired, from the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving
Boris Johnson has been accused of shamelessly using the war in Ukraine for his own political ends. The timing of his contacts with president Volodymyr Zelensky suggests there is plenty of evidence to support this claim. At the end of last week, within hours of his ethics adviser’s resignation, Johnson ducked out of a planned meeting with Northern
Of all the setbacks for the Conservatives in London, the loss of Westminster Council was probably the least expected and the most emblematic. To be sure, as in much of the capital, the Conservative vote had been declining, but the prospect that control would actually change this year seemed unlikely. But it did, and as
National symbols are usually proudly emblazoned for all to see. That’s the point of them. One, though, seems rather to have crept up on us in recent weeks, being flashed almost like a secret tattoo and then quickly covered up again. It is the letter ‘Z’ that Russians have started using to denote national solidarity and support
Russia is now as closed off to the world as the Soviet Union was before Mikhail Gorbachev made his first tentative steps towards glasnost more than 40 years ago. Pretty much all the progress that post-Soviet Russia had made towards becoming a ‘normal’ country has been reversed within the space of two weeks. Vladimir Putin’s presumed legacy –
