All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
This week, Donald Trump steered the global economy away from the free trade era that has underpinned growth for decades. Within hours of his announcement of tariffs on what looked like a bookmakers board from Aintree, China had responded with its own: a 34 per cent tax on all US imports starting next Thursday. The
Seeing the mugshot of Old Etonian Douglas Clifton Brown following his conviction for attempted murder, transported me straight back to 1986. We were in the same house and the same year at school: Clifton Brown and his friend bullied me regularly, making my life hell. Triggered, I went into the attic and found an old
Parents are up in arms. The Prime Minister’s decision to allow all state secondary schools to screen Adolescence, the scary Netflix series about a 13-year-old murdering a classmate for taunting him online as being undesirable, has parenting groups fuming. Keir Starmer believes that showing the drama will teach adolescents about the dangers lurking online which are
The Queen’s College, Oxford, has put in a planning application to add the names of five alumni who died fighting for the Germans to its first world war memorial. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, expressed his outrage at the plan earlier this week. ‘Where will this wokery end?’ he told the Telegraph. ‘War memorials
Has the very online left, the bane of our times, been usurped by the very online right? It’s a poetically appealing idea, for sure – an amusing conceit. But I really don’t think so. Purity spirals and internecine denunciations have been a feature of the last decade or so in the era of woke. This
A former Labour minister was arrested on Friday on suspicion of rape and child sex offences. The Sun on Sunday tonight reports that Dan Norris, 65, MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, was arrested on Friday over claims of historic sexual offences against a girl and a rape allegation from the 2020s. Avon and Somerset Police confirmed he had
‘Revert’ as a noun rather than a verb sounds like one of those Victorian terms that went out of fashion in the 1960s and is now considered a slur. However, this was the term that the BBC website felt was appropriate to describe people who had converted to Islam, in an article published on Friday,
In close to 30 years in political broadcasting, I’ve never had the faintest idea of what was coming around the corner. I might have guessed whatever it was would probably be bad, but that’s about it. Apart from once, in Brighton, at the Labour party conference in 2005. Tony Blair, still then master of all
Javier Milei has reduced poverty in Argentina. This week brought the publication of a tranche of government poverty figures, covering the period from July to December last year. Much had been made of the immediate surge in poverty that occurred in Milei’s first six months in office. The fall – down to 38.1 per cent
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Marine Le Pen, president of Rassemblement National (National Rally) was found guilty this week of embezzling EU funds to boost her party’s finances. The guilty verdict was widely expected, however her sentence was far harsher than even her strongest critics expected – part of which saw her banned from standing for office for five years, with immediate
My beloved Birmingham, the city I called home for 26 years and where my children grew up, is drowning in a sea of black bin bags. It’s a shocking sight to see this once proud city, that was arguably the centre of the industrial revolution, in such a state. Thousands of tonnes of rubbish is
Jerusalem’s Shalem College should have been brimming with life when we visited last month. But this leafy campus was oddly empty. The reason, of course, is that a large contingent of its students are currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as part of the war effort against Hamas. Away from campus, the young
I am 11 years old and in an English class. My teacher asks who wants to read out a passage from Iqbal by Francesco D’Adamo. No one volunteers. She scans the classroom and her gaze lands on me. Wrong kid, miss: I can’t read from left to right. For me, words refuse to stay still;
The ‘blockers’ who have so offended Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have, for the moment, scored another success in thwarting a wealth-creating development – but it is a success which I don’t yet hear the Prime Minister and Chancellor rushing to condemn. Nor, to be politically neutral, did our pro-growth former Prime Minister Liz Truss
The Scottish Liberal Democrats aren’t best known for their ability to grab headlines – but today the spotlight is on them. At the group’s spring conference in Inverness, leader Alex Cole-Hamilton this afternoon unveiled the latest addition to the party: the ex-Tory MSP who dramatically quit the Conservatives on Thursday after blasting their ‘Trump-esque’ style.
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Today marks five years since Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour party. In that time, he has gradually purged Labour of its leftist wing and wrestled the party back to the centre, winning a historic majority in 2024. But, five years on, the question remains: what does Keir Starmer stand for? He came in
Donald Trump has sown the wind – and now America must reap the whirlwind. Beijing has today announced plans to slap an additional 34 per cent tax on all US imported goods from next Thursday. China had already applied tariffs – ranging from 10 to 15 per cent – to a range of American agricultural
France’s media regulator, Arcom, has been asked to investigate the right-leaning news channel CNews over its coverage of Marine Le Pen’s conviction this week. The 24-hour news channel is accused of being too one-sided, too sympathetic to Le Pen, and too critical of the judiciary in its editorial response to the decision that knocked her
This week Donald Trump declared ‘Liberation Day,’ unveiling a barrage of tariffs that had been trailed as correcting unfair trade practices overseas. In a theatrical Rose Garden ceremony, the US president presented a table, detailing a slew of new “reciprocal” tariffs targeting nations right across the globe. A sharp market reaction might lead to a change
There’s a new man about Whitehall. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed Oli de Botton – ex-adviser to David Miliband and the husband of former No. 10 communications chief Amber de Botton – as his Expert Adviser on Education and Skills. The role of the new skills guru will be to advise ministers on the
HMP Frankland, in Durham, is supposed to be one of the most secure jails in the country. The category A prison holds terrorists and murderers, including Soham child killer Ian Huntley. Frankland should be a place of order, where the state is in absolute control. Yet the jail is said to be so overrun with
Yoon Suk Yeol, elected South Korea’s president in 2022, has been removed from office. The Constitutional Court in Seoul has upheld Yoon’s impeachment over his actions in the ultra-short-lived declaration of martial law last December. After lengthy deliberations the court delivered a decisive eight-zero verdict. A snap election must now be held within 60 days
If you thought progressive politics couldn’t get any worse, think again. It transpires that the Labour-led Westminster city council is advising its staff to undergo, er, ‘privilege’ testing and inclusive recruitment training in a bid to hire more people from non-white ‘global majority’ backgrounds. Time well spent… The rather baffling virtual privilege test helps council
Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have
As it turned out, the only thing Liberation Day was actually liberating anyone from was their money. In the wake of President Trump’s imposition of a massive round of tariffs on America’s trading partners the stock market has been in freefall. For the moment Trump is ignoring that. But he won’t be able to forever
It’s official, the bromance between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron is over. It had always been a rocky relationship but on Thursday it ended in a spectacular fashion. The French president, reacting to Trump’s decision to impose 20 per cent tariffs on all EU products, announced: ‘Investments to come or investments announced in recent weeks
Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, has a reputation for genial flexibility and an ability to evade trouble. During his record-breaking 14 years as prime minister of the Netherlands, he earned the nickname ‘Teflon Mark’. But while Rutte has previously demonstrated a rare ability to mollify Donald Trump, is the Nato chief in danger of
Things could have been very different. Since the distant days of the first Trump presidency, Taiwanese tech companies have been shifting production from China to Taiwan due to US tariffs and tech controls aimed at China. For the US, that strategy has borne some fruit. Most countries tend to trade the most with their close
Javier Milei might be a Thatcherite economically, but when it comes to the Falklands he’s about as Thatcherite as a bunch of striking miners. In a speech this week to mark the 43rd anniversary of the Falklands war, Milei announced that he would not only fight for as long as it takes to gain sovereignty
When Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, who is nobody’s fool, offered Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a state visit to Budapest last year, he knew a storm would follow. Netanyahu has now arrived in Hungary – and the backlash has duly followed. Orbán has vowed not only to ignore the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against
Unlocked Graduates, a charity that recruited hundreds of high-calibre graduates into the prison service, was one of the few glimmers of hope in our broken justice system. But Unlocked’s future is now in doubt: its graduate programme is over. The current cohort of prison officers – who are making a huge difference to the lives
Over 100 days since his impeachment trial commenced, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol was unanimously voted out by the country’s constitutional court earlier today. This is the man whose presidency will be remembered for his infamous declaration of martial law on 3 December last year. For his detractors, today is a jubilant occasion and