Could David Cameron have to delay his European renegotiation still further? In his press conference today with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Tory leader said that ‘if it takes longer to make an agreement then obviously what matters to me is the substance rather than the timing’. Cameron and his senior colleagues had been
It’s safe to say this week hasn’t been the best for Labour. As well as a never-ending reshuffle saga, Corbyn was accused of ‘low-level non-violent misogyny’ over the lack of women in the top roles in his Shadow Cabinet by Labour MP Jess Phillips. So with the cabinet officially reshuffled, brains at Labour HQ decided it
Let’s not get sentimental — she would not have liked that — but Florence King, the American writer and splendid reactionary, has died. It is sad because Florence was brilliant, brave and most of all funny. Her best-known work, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, is a tremendous book — essential reading, I’d say, for anyone who wants
Funnily enough, after Ken Livingstone told the Daily Politics that the defence review that he is co-chairing with the new Labour Shadow Defence Secretary Emily Thornberry would consider whether Britain will leave Nato, the party has issued a statement shooting down the former Mayor’s suggestion: ‘The terms of the defence review are still to be
When David Cameron said this week that he is worried his children would not be able to afford to buy their own homes, he struck on one of the greatest economic problems of his premiership. The old British promise is that if you work hard and make the right decisions, you can advance in life
After Diane Abbott falsely claimed that Labour MP Jonathan Reynolds was a former special adviser on last night’s Newsnight, Reynolds hit back by describing her as a ‘sell-out’. Now — just when it seemed Labour’s in-fighting couldn’t get much worse — Ken Livingstone has appeared on the Daily Politics to offer his take on the incident. Asked if Abbott was
Regardless of the background of the men who carried out the attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, it is a pretty horrific story. A series of sexual attacks took place in the city centre by a group of around 1,000 men. More than 150 women have filed criminal complaints, three-quarters of them for sexual assault.
After a tough day yesterday for Corbyn’s team following his chaotic reshuffle, there was only one thing left to do to save the day: send Diane Abbott onto the airwaves. The gaffe-prone shadow international development secretary appeared on Newsnight to wax lyrical about the state of Corbyn’s slightly reshuffled Shadow Cabinet. When put to her that things might
I consider myself to be bad at making predictions, but one of the obvious things about the migrant crisis last year was that public sympathy for the Syrians, spurned in particular by the image of the drowned 3-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi, would soon evaporate. A large number of men from war zones moving into an
You might have been forgiven for thinking that things were going swimmingly economically at the moment, given George Osborne managed to find £23bn down the back of the sofa for a cheery Autumn Statement. So why is the Chancellor giving such a gloomy speech today? Osborne is warning of a ‘cocktail of threats’ from around
Two points stand out from Pat McFadden’s career-killing question to David Cameron. ‘May I ask the prime minister to reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the West do? Does he agree that such an approach risks infantilising the terrorists and treating them
It has been over a month since Parliament voted to bomb Isis in Syria, yet in that time there have been fewer raids than there are Lib Dem MPs. A flurry of three attacks took place immediately following the vote on 1 December, but since then there has been only one — by an unmanned Reaper
Was the Financial Conduct Authority leaned on by the Chancellor to scrap its ‘review of banking culture’? Or did it decide pragmatically that its resources would be better devoted to pursuing individual cases of cheating and criminality? I suspect the answer is a bit of both. Acting FCA chief Tracey McDermott — a no-nonsense northerner
Everywhere you look in Cirencester there’s another animal: a cockerel, a hare, a sheep or a skulking lioness. I rather fancied the big beasts that chase each other lustily around the Roman mosaics in the Corinium Museum, home to one of the liveliest archaeological collections I’ve ever seen. The Romans of first-century Cirencester (Corinium) strike
Was our first date really a boxer’s funeral? You in pitch, me in black—all in all a noirish affair, how we felt so at home with those lump-faced men, the mourners wrapped in silk and onyx watches, their Stygian raincoats soaked. And did their tears heave a river, a torrent, down Amsterdam as the organ
On Sunday morning a friend texted: ‘You watching the big bash, or the domestic stuff down in Australia?’ On one channel, you could be in Cape Town as Ben Stokes slaughtered the bowling attack of the world’s No. 1 side; one click and you were in Brisbane at the Gabba to see the Heat play the
The latest video from Isis introduces a new British executioner, a successor to ‘Jihadi John’, and it is a classic of the genre: bombastic, pompous, ridiculous yet terrifying. ‘O slave of the White House, O mule of the Jews,’ says a man in a ski mask, addressing David Cameron, ‘how strange it is that the
There have been few more pathetic displays of political impotence than the tweets sent by shadow cabinet members paying tribute to Michael Dugher after his sacking by Jeremy Corbyn. Dugher, a classic northern Labour fixer, had taken on the role of shadow cabinet shop steward. He spoke out against Momentum, the Corbynite pressure group, warned
In Competition No. 2929 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem containing some predictions for the next decade, in which the first letters of the lines read NOSTRADAMUS. Although the forecast was bleak — no surprise there — a welcome smattering of more left-field prophecies made me sit up and take notice: Richard Dawkins
Even if Abu Rumaysah does turn out to be the new ‘Jihadi John’, shown on video this week presiding over the murder of five innocent men, I’m not sorry I encouraged him to go to Syria and join Isis. The last time I saw the 32-year-old Briton (born to a UK Hindu family as Siddhartha
