Politics

When you say the name ‘Andy Coulson,’ it’s hard not to think of the phone hacking scandal. The former News of the World editor served five months of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to commit phone hacking in 2014 but has now managed to rebound from Belmarsh to business success, with a PR firm making half-a-million pounds a year. According to company accounts, the one-time Downing Street aide’s new outfit Coulson Partners Limited – for which Coulson is listed as the sole director and owner of 100 per cent of shares – declared total equity of £496,000 at the end of 2021. It pulled in more than a million last

You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist. Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of international economics at the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, and co-author of anti-austerity book Angrynomics, was signed up to a new Scottish government economic advisory council last summer. The group, which had a remit to publish a strategy paper on turbo-charging Scotland’s economy, replaced a previous Council of Economic Advisors set up by

A year ago we scuttled out of Afghanistan. We abandoned the aim we and the Americans had proclaimed so noisily of bringing Afghanistan into the twenty-first century so that the Taliban could never triumph again. We left behind many Afghans who had helped us at the risk of their lives. To most of the world it was obvious that the Americans and their allies had been comprehensively defeated. Our own politicians, generals, diplomats, spies and aid advisers have been tumbling over one another to distance themselves from the mess. At first they tried to argue that it was too soon to reach such a depressing conclusion. After all, the Taliban

The Tory leadership teams rolled into Belfast this afternoon, clad in metaphorical red, white and blue and eager to display their unionist credentials. But while all eyes were on Ulster, elsewhere the real scrap was happening at the Conservative Environment Network where proxies were battling it out for the two final contenders. In team Truss’s corner was Lord Goldsmith, the former MP now ensconced in ermine, while George Eustice, the soon-to-be-departed Environment Secretary, did the honours for Rishi Sunak. The two men have both been jousting for their patrons but there was little sign of courtly behaviour on show. Eustice, who serves as Goldsmith’s boss in the department, accused Truss

Have we yet seen the end of Covid restrictions? It is tempting to think so. For many people, Covid and the lockdowns have receded into history, replaced by Ukraine and the energy crisis. It would be easy, but foolish, to dismiss Tony Blair’s proposals as the ramblings of a bored ex-PM But perhaps we have parked the whole business in our memories a little too soon. Some are already pushing for restrictions to be re-enacted this winter. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has just published a paper, Three Months to Save the NHS, demanding that the government consider re-imposing mask mandates on public transport and other enclosed settings.