All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
England’s interim manager Lee Carsley has intimated that he will not be singing the national anthem as his team takes on Ireland in the Nations League in Dublin today – his first game in charge. Carsley is at least being consistent in this, he similarly demurred as a player for Ireland and when he was
‘This is a difficult thing to say, but it’s the honest truth – however good your system is and however well-intentioned it is, and however hard people work, they’re going to make mistakes.’ So said former prime minister Tony Blair on Sky News on Thursday – in response to being asked whether the Grenfell Tower
Robert Jenrick appears on course to become leader of the Conservative party within a year of resigning from ministerial office in Rishi Sunak’s administration. That is a telling indicator of how far the Conservative regimes of the last parliament had strayed from the gut instincts of the Tory tribe. Jenrick has been focused on victory
We’re quite happy to think badly of most professions. The corrupt politician, the sleazy hack, the bent copper and the vain actor are all familiar entertainment tropes. But when it comes to those who keep us alive, we understandably don’t find the fact that they may be wrong ‘uns in the least entertaining. It’s the
Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern aren’t household names, but they each have enormous, dedicated followings online. Their podcasts and videos all promote similar narratives: liberal values are destroying the West, Ukraine is America’s enemy, Covid vaccines are harmful and pointless and that Donald Trump, though flawed, is the United States’ last
Benjamin Netanyahu is the great survivor of Israeli politics, but his grip on power is slipping. ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.’ Abraham Lincoln’s saying applies now more
If we are to believe Agatha Christie, then the author was not at all like her creation Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth of St Mary Mead: ‘I never can see why anybody thinks that I resemble Miss Marple in any way,’ she once complained. Instead, Christie – who was born 134 years ago this week
In Ukraine, there is a joke: never waste time memorising the names of ministers – they’ll be replaced soon enough. Volodymyr Zelensky’s penchant for firing and rehiring every few months has become a signature of his presidency since 2019. This week has not been different, with the largest government shake-up since the full-scale war began. Or,
Labour have been encouraging plenty of controversy recently with the growing allegations of cronyism surrounding recent civil service and public appointments. Today, however, it’s a resignation that’s bringing yet more heat upon the flailing government. Northern Ireland’s Veterans Commissioner, Danny Kinahan, appointed in 2020 to champion the cause of 60,000 veterans yesterday left his position
Michel Barnier, the OAP appointed yesterday as Prime Minister of France, is a sensible fellow, even if at 73 he should be putting up his feet after decades in the political trenches. And he has plenty of pensions to draw on. He’s not exciting. Scandal free, socially conservative, a master of dossiers – not intrigue,
Labour may not have been forthcoming about most of their tax and spend plans during the election. But on one topic the party was crystal clear: a Labour government would beef up the nanny state. Politicians weren’t shy about this. It was Wes Streeting’s idea to adopt New Zealand’s (now abandoned) plans for a generational
It’s a day ending in ‘y’, which means another Labour scandal. Today marks the return of Lord Alli, the media luvvy with more money than sense. Alli, famed for perfecting TV ‘presented by morons for morons’, hit the headlines last month for the ‘passes for glasses’ row. Now it seems he has also been making recommendations
It’s not just the Tories facing a big vote next week. Across the House of Commons, MPs will be choosing which of their number should chair the 26 select committees up for grabs. Every MP gets a vote but only backbenchers can stand: nominations close on Monday with voting done on Wednesday. Positions are allocated
More bad news for the BBC. Following the fall-out from the Corporation’s catastrophic handling of the Huw Edwards affair, a long-running controversy threatens to re-ignite once more. Steerpike understands that next week a major report is set to be published on the Beeb’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza, with a 100-page publication by a
When Keir Starmer became Prime Minister he immediately dumped the Tories’ Rwanda deportation scheme. The Labour leader said the £310 million scheme, under which those seeking asylum in Britain would be sent to Africa, was ‘dead’ and ‘buried’. But Germany is now considering resurrecting the plan and using Rwanda as a third party country for
Of all the people who might come forward to attack the memory of the late, lamented Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Ian McKellen – a CBE and Companion of Honour, no less – would not be high on the list. Yet in a candid interview that he has given to the Times, McKellen has labelled the
Another day, another drama. This time Ed Miliband is in the firing line after his opposite number took aim at him in parliament on Thursday. Shadow net zero secretary Claire Coutinho pulled no punches as she attacked Labour’s Energy Secretary over his government’s controversial pensioner palaver, Sir Keir Starmer’s much-lauded GB Energy proposal and exactly
The sounds of protracted artillery battles boom and echo over the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk with a nerve-wracking consistency. From morning until night, the Ukrainians and Russians fire endlessly upon one another from the suburbs. Billboards with a simple message, ‘Evacuate’, daubed in giant red lettering line most of the major routes through the city.
There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a
In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents
The last two and a half years have seen a dramatic revival in trade union militancy, with working days lost through strikes reaching their highest level for more than thirty years. The arrival of a Labour government has already seen markedly more generous settlements than the Conservatives offered – and the new administration has committed
Over to the Mayor of London and his minions. While the Prime Minister has been busy giving pay rises to train drivers, it seems London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan continues to employ Amy Lamé as his night czar on, er, £132,846 per annum – after already receiving, as Mr S revealed, a 40 per cent pay
Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to the Commons – which was presented today and will have its first substantive debate at second reading later in the autumn – is simple: it essentially ends the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords, tying off what some will see as a
Back to Whitehall, where the row over civil service appointments continues to gather pace. It transpires that the Conservatives have called for a watchdog inquiry into recent perks awarded to Labour donors – after one was offered a civil service job and another received a pass to No. 10. It certainly doesn’t seem like this
Michel Barnier is the new prime minister of France. Best known in Britain as the EU’s chief negotiator during the Brexit negotiations, the 73-year-old is the oldest premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and he was unveiled sixty days after the parliamentary elections that threw the Republic into chaos. Le Pen appears satisfied
To the Lords, where this afternoon an urgent question was granted on the subject of hereditary peers. It follows today’s news that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government will remove the remaining 92 seats in the second chamber reserved for the hereditary position in 18 months, meaning these peers will be unable to both sit and
Are you ready for SDS40? You might need to be if you’re unlucky enough to live in a high crime area. This is the anodyne descriptor for the government’s emergency release of an estimated 5,000 offenders this month and next, having served only 40 per cent of their sentence in prison custody. This is the
Japanese dancer Junko Hagiwara has become the first non-Spaniard to win one of Spain’s most prestigious flamenco competitions. Yet when Hagiwara went on stage to collect her prize, in La Union in the southeastern region of Murcia, not everyone welcomed her victory. As well as applause, there were whistles and boos from the audience. The Telegraph
All is not well in Holyrood. The SNP announced its programme for government on Wednesday – but it hasn’t left many impressed. And now it transpires that the governing party is set to face further problems in passing its budget, as it continues to fail to work with its political opponents. Not like the Nats