All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
A number of new Whitehall appointments have been made since the election, but there have been a couple of returning figures too. Sir Oliver Robbins is from the latter camp, with Theresa May’s former Brexit negotiator set to make a political return after accepting a top civil service job at the Foreign Office. He just
Finally, we heard it. At PMQs today, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, dropped the euphemism ‘grooming’ and said ‘rape gangs’ to describe the networks of predominantly Muslim men who prey on underage girls. Sir Keir tried to defuse the issue in his opening comments by dismissing calls for a national enquiry. ‘The Jay inquiry… [took]
Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’. What dark perfidy has been done? What
What goes around, comes around. In producing their latest attack ad, it seems Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative crowd has taken inspiration from their very own political opponents. Back in 2023, Sir Keir Starmer’s lefty lot conjured up a campaign poster in the run-up to that year’s local elections which showed then-Tory PM Rishi Sunak grinning cheerfully
What is a legacy? Is it the sum of our actions? Is it the family and friends we leave behind? Is it banning cigarettes? The consensus for exiting western leaders seems to be that last option. Just days before Joe Biden is to leave the White House, and hand the power back to Donald Trump,
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At PMQs today, the battle lines were drawn ahead of today’s vote on Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which aims to protect children within the education system. Its contents have galvanised opposition parties, who are using the legislation to force a fresh inquiry into grooming gangs. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott has also been
Some things may come as no surprise in theory but cause the heart to sink when they emerge as reality. The surging number of British Jews emigrating to Israel – which doubled last year – is one such example. With antisemitism at record levels, this exodus is hardly unexpected. The British Jewish community is longstanding
Keir Starmer has not seemed in control of the grooming gangs story since it broke, but at Prime Minister’s Questions, he had a rare period of command. This was largely because he is more adept at answering questions than Kemi Badenoch currently is at asking them, and also because the Conservative line on this matter
The tenth anniversary of the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo journalists reminds us that the literary establishment has long been equivocal when it comes to defending free speech. So news this week that the Royal Society of Literature is in ‘meltdown’, after singularly failing to defend its members when under attack, sadly comes as no surprise.
It’s the big question all Westminster is asking right now. Who has got a golden ticket to Donald Trump’s inauguration? The quadrennial bash is happening in just twelve days’ time, with the great and the good all fighting to get a seat. Nigel Farage will be there, keen to show he’s still besties with ’47’
There’s no rest for the wicked. Twitter chief Elon Musk has barely come up for air over the last week with his continued attacks on the Labour Prime Minister over Britain’s grooming gang scandal. As calls for a national inquiry intensify, the tech billionaire has taken to his social media site yet again to take
Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisers are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond. Trump reiterated his
It was only a matter of time before North Korea lit things up again. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked on a five-day sojourn to Seoul, the hermit kingdom welcomed the US official in the way it knows best – by testing another ballistic missile. North Korean state media proudly announced that Monday’s missile
There was much jubilation yesterday among advocates of free speech following the news that Mark Zuckerberg is to relax restrictions on free expression on the social media platforms owned by Meta, including its most popular site, Facebook. This initiative will include doing away with politically-biased ‘fact checkers’, lifting restrictions on contentious political topics, and adding a function similar to ‘community notes’
It was party time in Paris and elsewhere in France on Tuesday evening as hundreds of people celebrated the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The figurehead of France’s far-right died earlier in the day aged 96 and within hours a jubilant crowd had assembled in the capital’s Place de la République. Champagne was uncorked, fireworks
The vibe shift is real. Yes, all the chatter about the re-election of Donald Trump causing a cultural sea change in American life might just have something to it – if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shock announcement is anything to go by. In a five-minute video, Zuck – who also appears to have undergone a Gen
No one can accuse President-elect Donald Trump of failing to be transparent about his intentions and plans. Speaking at a lengthy news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’. He also refused to rule out employing military force to reclaim the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland. He did,
It’s been an eventful week for UK-US relations. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has spent much of it berating the Labour government over Britain’s grooming gang scandal, calling first for Home Office minister Jess Phillips to take the place of far-right activist Tommy Robinson in prison before going on to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer
All is not well in the Royal Society of Literature. It now transpires that the bosses of the prestigious 200-year-old organisation have resigned after a rather tumultuous year – and ahead of an AGM that could have seen a vote of confidence called by outraged former chairs, presidents and directors. The reason for the widespread
The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are
Perhaps it’s tasteless to make the point that maybe nobody will be happier to see Jean-Marie Le Pen buried than his daughter Marine. The founder of the National Front died this morning at the age of 96, discredited, ignored, mentally incapacitated and largely irrelevant, except as a spectre. Today the terms ‘hard right’, ‘extreme right’
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How do you solve a problem like Elon? We have spent much of the past week talking on the podcast about Labour vs Musk, and the tech billionaire’s vocal criticism of how the government is dealing with the grooming gang scandal. But Reform UK are having their own issues with the volatile owner of X.
Is this the development that is finally going to make us shake off our aversion to electric vehicles (EVs)? Local authorities are reported this morning to have granted planning permission for £692 million worth of public chargers, potentially leading to the installation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of EV charging points. A lack of public charging
The new year may have rustled up some surprise stand-offs for the Labour government (mainly calls from X founder Elon Musk for Keir Starmer to resign), but the rise of new problems does not mean the old problems have disappeared. A harsh reminder has been dished out this morning, as long-term borrowing costs reached a
It’s all change at Meta HQ. As Mr S reported last week, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – who has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior execs at the company since 2018 – is now on his way out. Taking, ironically, to rival platform Twitter, Clegg wrote that it was now ‘the right
At conferences and roundtables on counter extremism in recent months, it has been impossible to escape the terms ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation’. For among experts, practitioners, academics, civil servants and police officers, it is the default explanation for understanding not only extremism in Britain, but the wider mood of popular discontent. Over the weekend, this view was lent
Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany
There are now two debates underway about grooming gangs and how the government should investigate them further. The first is the one raging on social media, largely conducted by people who haven’t up to this point shown much interest in the issue but who are busily accusing others of not doing enough. The second is
The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well
The focus on Britain’s grooming gang scandal is very much here to stay. Calls for the government to hold a national inquiry into the matter are intensifying and the Labour government is coming under increasing pressure from opposition politicians in the wake of Elon Musk’s rather heated social media posts on the issue. Victims Minister
He has global experience. He has proven his leadership. And he has the management skills needed to turn around a sinking ship. As Mark Carney makes a bid to succeed Justin Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, he will no doubt make much of his credentials as a ‘rock star’ central banker. There is just one
Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for
He’s gone – but he’s not gone. As per his announcement in Ottawa on Monday, one of Canada’s most disliked prime ministers is finally set to exit the political stage. First sworn in on November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau will resign once the Liberal party has chosen his successor. It is a process that may take
Today marks ten years since two brothers walked into the office of Charlie Hebdo and shot dead most of the staff. It was punishment for the satirical magazine’s blasphemous treatment of the Prophet, according to the Islamist gunmen. The murders shocked the West. Millions of French men and women gathered across the country four days later, and