Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Douglas Ross was not a game-changing leader of the Scottish Conservatives in the way Ruth Davidson was but he announces his resignation as the game is being turned on its head. North of the border the Tories are seeing their vote hold up even as the electoral fortunes of their Sassenach brethren implode. They could
Rishi Sunak says it was a ‘mistake’ to leave the 80th anniversary commemorations for D-Day early. That’s one way to describe ditching a memorial to the liberation of Western Europe to record an election interview for the telly. We have heard the various reasons as to why this was such an error. It was dreadful
Not content with being a referee and leader of the Tories in Scotland, Douglas Ross seems bent on making himself even more unpopular with the punters. In doing so, he has alighted upon David Duguid, the Conservative MP for Banff and Buchan since 2017, who wrestled that once true-blue redoubt back from the SNP after
Much worse than the fact of a banana milkshake being chucked over Nigel Farage is the inevitable discourse it has occasioned. This has mostly involved progressives finding it very funny and others trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to reason with them. This is as good a time as any to reiterate a point I hope to
Full disclosure: I went into the ITV election debate wanting and expecting Sir Keir Starmer to walk all over Rishi Sunak, but from my sofa the Prime Minister looked like the clear winner. How so? He kept it simple: he would cut taxes, Sir Keir would hike them up by £2,000; he would stick illegal
Today we are witnessing a significant failure of the UK state. This morning, the personal finance campaigner Martin Lewis reported that around 30 per cent of families had not received their latest child benefit payment. HMRC, which administers the payments, said it was ‘working to resolve the issue’ and advising claimants to ‘continue to check
The Scottish parliament has voted to suspend former SNP cabinet minister Michael Matheson for 27 sitting days and dock his salary for 54 calendar days. It comes after Matheson was found to have broken the MSP code of conduct on expenses and use of parliamentary resources. Matheson ran up an £11,000 mobile data bill during
The Scottish Conservatives were facing a difficult election this summer but SNP leader John Swinney may have thrown them a lifeline. In choosing to attack Holyrood’s standards committee for proposing a 27-day suspension for nationalist MSP Michael Matheson, Swinney has put his party on the wrong side of public opinion. Matheson was censured for running
Humza Yousaf lasted just over 400 days as SNP leader. Will his replacement John Swinney get that far? The question arises so soon into his tenure because of Swinney’s decision to oppose the suspension of a former cabinet colleague. Michael Matheson resigned as health secretary in February after the taxpayer was left with an £11,000
Writing about the impact on children of having a parent in prison, you always hit the same brick wall: no one knows how many children have a parent in prison, including the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ estimates that ‘approximately 200,000 children’ have a parent in or heading to prison. Ministers have commissioned a review which is
The application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant is an act of lawfare. In seeking the detention of Israel’s political and military leadership during its war against Hamas, Karim Ahmad Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is inviting that body to intervene in the conflict.
As the edifice of gender identity ideology continues to crumble, along comes another example of an institution not only captured but utterly distorted by this regressive and harmful theory. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has lost an employment tribunal case brought by a former staff member whose work life was made a living hell because
Scottish nationalists are not happy. What’s new, I hear you ask. Did they lose another leader? Has Sainsbury’s been selling Somerset strawberries in Stornoway supermarkets? Nothing quite so grave, but they are displeased nonetheless. The cause is Rishi Sunak, who has offended them with his Big Serious Speech at Policy Exchange on Monday. It was just a single
John Swinney, Scotland’s new first minister, has appointed his inaugural cabinet – and it’s almost unaltered from the team headed by Humza Yousaf. The only real change is the appointment of former leadership hopeful Kate Forbes as deputy first minister. She was promised a ‘significant’ role and in addition to the office of DFM she will hold the economy portfolio. Forbes’s
There are a number of very good reasons that Kate Forbes is not standing for SNP leader. Chief amongst them is that she’d lose again. John Swinney is not Humza Yousaf. He has been an MP or MSP continuously since 1997, led the party through four difficult years in the early 2000s, and spent seven
A while back, Lee Anderson got himself into trouble for claiming Islamists had ‘got control’ of Sadiq Khan. Levelling said charge at London’s Mayor was said to be ‘Islamophobic’ but surely more important is that it was wrong. Khan is neither an Islamist nor under their sway. He is a standard-issue identity-politics progressive, and with
After two and a half years in government together, Humza Yousaf has terminated the SNP’s governing pact with the Scottish Greens. The decision was rubber stamped at a hastily arranged meeting of the Scottish cabinet on Thursday morning. It preempts a vote by rank-and-file Green members on whether to walk away from Yousaf’s government after
Questions of power bedevil radical politics. Is entry into government the only way to force change? Do the opportunities of power sufficiently compensate for the trade-offs required to obtain it? Where is the line between compromise and co-option, between pragmatism and power for power’s sake? The Scottish Greens are confronted with these questions in the
‘You got a win. Take the win.’ This is reportedly what US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call following the thwarting of Iran’s Saturday night aerial barrage by Israel and a US-led coalition including Jordan and the United Kingdom. Tehran launched 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles and 30
Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel is an escalation from the fiery but ultimately empty rhetoric we are used to from Tehran. In different times and with a different prime minister in Jerusalem than the gun-shy Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the kind of inflammatory move that could have provoked a much graver Israeli response
