Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
In this, as in all things, Paul Keating was right. It was the former Aussie Prime Minister, a Beethoven of political invective, who called his country’s Green Party ‘a bunch of opportunists and Trots hiding behind a gum tree trying to pretend they’re the Labor Party’. Keating’s acid scherzo could apply just as readily to
Len McCluskey has seen off a challenge to be elected to a third term at the helm of Unite. And what a seeing off it was. When the votes starting to come in, and reportedly showed the top two contenders neck-and-neck, McCluskey’s rival was promptly suspended. Gerard Coyne was stripped of his duties as West Midlands
I worked on the first TV debate of the Scottish referendum. I was involved in countless more. I was to be found on the production team for televised clashes during the 2015 general election and the 2016 vote for Holyrood. So I speak with some experience when I say TV debates are a terrible idea.
Kelvin MacKenzie’s baffling compulsion to pick at Liverpool has brought him up a cropper again, with the Sun pulling his latest polemic on Everton FC player Ross Barkley. MacKenzie has compared the footballer, recently victim of an assault in a nightclub, to ‘a gorilla at the zoo’ and added that, in Liverpool, ‘the only men
I’m not a member of a trade union, but I should be. As a freelance journalist, my employment situation is precarious — yet it still wouldn’t occur to me to join the National Union of Journalists. My reasons are both personal and political, but mostly practical: the NUJ talks tough but, in the end, seldom
No sooner had Pepsi skooshed open its latest ad campaign, the internet burped it back up. The soft drink giant’s new commercial features Kendall Jenner (ask a young person) emerging from a crowd of protestors to offer a can of Pepsi to an officer on a police line. The advert is more sugary than the fizzy beverage it hawks.
Listen to Douglas Murray and James Forsyth debating Ken Livingstone’s non-expulsion: In the past, Labour has been quick to take a stand against bodies where racism, sexism, and homophobia were allowed to fester. Discrimination was discrimination, and institutions in which it routinely took place were culpable for it. But anti-Semitism now routinely takes place in the
In the early, sunlit days of New Labour, the left-wing comedian John O’Farrell had a skit on how the Tories, after a generation of dominating British politics, found their party and its principles rejected by the electoral mainstream. ‘Now the Conservatives are like a lunatic fringe party,’ he said. ‘Soon we can expect to see
I’ve had just about enough of being told how to feel about what happened last Wednesday. I feel angry. I still feel shock. I feel a keen ache for the families of those murdered, especially the loved-ones of PC Keith Palmer. I feel that cold spite that works its way into your heart at times
Ulster is where memory burns long and forgiveness comes slow. The death of Martin McGuinness will pass without the spilling of sorrow by many Unionists in Northern Ireland and here in mainland Britain, where the IRA’s terror campaign paid regular, outrageous visits, there will be those who mutter a cold ‘good riddance’. Douglas Murray writes: ‘[W]hile
It wasn’t quite our answer to the West Wing — too young, too cynical — but it filled a Bartlet-shaped hole in the TV schedule. Party Animals followed a clique of sexually bipartisan political advisers at Westminster in the dying days of New Labour. Matt Smith and Andrea Riseborough played researchers to a Caroline Flintish
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Right there, those four ridiculous words, are why it shouldn’t have worked. What was this? Some low-camp Russ Meyer knock-off? Joss Whedon’s generation-defining TV hit debuted 20 years ago tonight. Its anniversary is being marked by the fans who adored it and the critics whose cool detachment it drove a stake
‘They will hate you because of who I am,’ Jesus says in the Gospels. He forgot to add: ‘And the ones who don’t have a clue will point and laugh.’ It’s a lesson Carol Monaghan has learned abruptly. Monaghan is MP for Glasgow North West and a member of the Scottish National Party. A former
Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was instrumental in saving the Labour Party, back when the Labour Party was something that could still be saved. It was Kaufman who pithily pegged the 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. He knew the phrase would hang around the far-left and dog any attempt to
The most dangerous place in Washington DC, the old joke goes, is between a politician and a television camera. It’s a wonder there are any such places left, so intimate have the third and fourth estates become. Periodically, American journalism gets itself into a funk over its proximity to power and the consequences for integrity
Given our seamy obsession with serial killers, real and fictional, one would expect the crimes of Stephen Port to have made more of a mark on the national psyche. Port was convicted in November of the rape and murder of four young men in Barking, east London over a 15-month period. His modus operandi was
Yakov Blotnik, world-weary custodian of the synagogue in Philip Roth’s short story ‘The Conversion of the Jews’, has a simple outlook on life: “Things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews”. The Blotnik Test confronts us as the new administration in Washington begins to take shape. We’ve just seen the first hints of what to expect at today’s joint press conference
John Bercow is a curious little poppet. He’s come a long way since his spotty days of undergraduate hangem’n’floggery in the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation banned by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Today he’s more likely to be found welcoming one acronym or another to Parliament or accosting the word ‘progressive’ and roughing
