The Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was today sentenced to death by lethal injection. The jury reached the decision in the city where the killer, 19 at the time, blew up the marathon, killing three and injuring 260. I feel no sympathy for him, but nor do I support the death penalty and I’m constantly amazed by
Lord Ashcroft has likened the current state of the polling industry with that of the Liberal Democrats, but he could quite have easily chosen the Labour party as a comparison. All are in the post-mortem stage: pondering how they got the election so wrong and desperately searching for the path back to public credibility. More
I have more and more time for Simon Cowell. On Britain’s Got Talent on Saturday night he was dishing out his hard-faced reality check to the parade of wannabes who as usual range from silly asses through competent-karaoke to on-the-money in Sycospeak. I also admire the wily care for words with which he crafts his
You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that ‘London is turning into Paris’, what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going
It has been alleged that Nigel Farage never formally resigned from Ukip as part of what party sources have told the Spectator was a stitch up to avoid a leadership contest. It is claimed that the Ukip leader never wrote a letter to the party’s chairman tendering his resignation. He told the media on Friday
The Ukip wars have taken another casualty: the party’s head of communications Paul ‘Gobby’ Lambert. Guido reports that the ‘press office has declared war on the leader’ and it appears Lambert is a casualty of the fighting. Lambert was brought in from the BBC last year to run the party’s media operation but there have
In this View from 22 special podcast, Fraser Nelson and Sebastian Payne discuss the ongoing Ukip wars with Laura Pitel from The Times. Can Nigel Farage survive as leader? Is there still a conflict between Team Farage and other tribes within the party? And what role has Douglas Carswell played, if any, in the briefing wars? You can
All this talk from Labour and the Liberal Democrats about who will be their next party leader appears to have got to the Tory camp. Although the dust is yet to settle following David Cameron’s surprise Conservative majority in the election, Mensch couldn’t help but offer her prediction for who the next Tory Prime Minister will be, when
Anxious viewers tuned into Question Time last night to watch live coverage of the ongoing Nigel Farage crisis. Quite a week for the Ukip leader. Up and down. In and out. And back in again. His pitch for a Westminster power-base imploded on election day. And he promptly quit, as promised. But his resignation fared no
With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall
Nigel Farage’s fight back has continued with an interview on Sky News this morning. Following on from his appearance on Question Time, the Ukip leader described an ‘astonishing’ level of support for him within the party. But he admitted that there is someone high up within the party trying to cause trouble or oust him as leader: ‘I
In the past few minutes, Chuka Umunna has announced he is not standing for the Labour leadership after all, citing ‘pressure’ that he found uncomfortable. This is odd, although Friday is the day when Sunday journalists get to work on big stories, and Umunna may have got wind of something that he felt was particularly
With 190 women elected last week and the number of ethnic minority MPs hitting record levels, Parliament is slowly beginning to look a little bit like modern Britain. Settling in, one male MP, proudly wearing a green new members’ badge, was sitting on the Terrace on his first night in the Commons. He proceeded to
David Cameron still has much to learn about dealing with nationalists. Theirs is a very different kind of politics – one where flags, language and choreography matters. Nicola Sturgeon is hawking a false premise: l’Ecosse c’est moi. That Scotland is her country, that David Cameron can visit (as he does today) in the same way
The row over what to do with its Short money was the tinderbox for Ukip’s internal tensions. Although the war between Team Farage and Team O’Flynn has been bubbling away for months, the question of what to do with the £650,000 of public funds, combined with Nigel Farage’s un-resignation, kicked off a briefing war that brought these fights
This week, The Guardian informed us, a study revealed the ‘scale of the British public’s denial about weight problems’. Data collected by the Association for the Study of Obesity found that ‘more than a fifth of Britons who think their size is healthy or normal were in fact overweight’. This apparent delusion has been attributed
Chuka Umunna has surprised many today with the news that he has withdrawn from the race for the Labour leadership. Explaining his decision he said that the ‘added level of pressure’ had not been a ‘comfortable experience’. Mr S can already hear the sighs from the many Chuka supporters who had seen him as the man to
This article was first published on Apollo magazine’s blog The latest addition to Dulwich Picture Gallery’s permanent collection display was a bargain at $88. For weeks the cheap Chinese copy after Fragonard’s Young Woman – commissioned by contemporary artist Doug Fishbone – stood in for the original, unmarked and slotted into the old frame, as a challenge to
Scotland’s silent majority Sir: Hugo Rifkind’s article (‘Scotland’s nasty party’, 9 May) is a first for the media. It expresses the dismay, disbelief and incomprehension felt at the rise of the SNP by least one — and I suspect many — of the silent majority in Scotland. When will the media confront Nicola Sturgeon’s claim
During the World Championship qualifier of 1959, grandmaster Pal Benko wore dark glasses to counter the hypnotic gaze of his dangerous opponent, world champion-to-be Mikhail Tal. This precaution did him no good (see this week’s puzzle). This is not the only instance when hypnosis has been suspected in chess. In the 1978 world championship,