Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Americano Live: Trump’s first 100 days

As a subscriber-only special, get exclusive access to Freddy Gray, deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, and special guest Lionel Shriver for Americano Live – Trump’s first 100 days. It can be hard to keep up with Donald Trump’s ‘breakneck’ approach to his second term in the White House. What to make of all the headline-making, eyebrow-raising executive orders? Will

The Chris Kaba misconduct case doesn’t make sense

Here we go again. For those who drew up the convoluted regulations around police misconduct, the decision to proceed with a disciplinary hearing against the policeman who shot dead the notorious gangster Chris Kaba makes perfect sense. For most people though, it’s utter madness.  A trial at the Old Bailey, where footage of the incident was

Does the National Theatre really need ‘international reach’?

The new boss of the National Theatre has a big job on her hands. The combination of Covid, funding cuts and rising costs has left it struggling financially. Audiences remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels, with plenty of theatregoers complaining about high ticket prices for mediocre productions. Bubbling away is the eternal question of the National’s role

Lloyd Evans

Is Starmer more afraid of Badenoch or Farage?

We have two leaders of the opposition. Labour can’t decide which is the larger threat. Prime Minister’s Questions opened with a botched query from Labour backbencher Dan Tomlinson. He asked Sir Keir Starmer to comment on a possible pact between the Tories and Reform. An amazing spectacle. An MP so clueless that he can’t ask a

Ed West

Labour’s demographic crisis

It’s local election week in Britain (stifles yawn) and a chance to observe the exciting next generation of political idealists. Among those standing for office in Burnley, Lancashire, 18-year-old Maheen Kamran is an aspiring medical student who was ‘motivated to enter politics by the war in Gaza, where she believes a “genocide” is taking place.’

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Steerpike

Cartoon exhibition cancelled after art deemed too political

Is the era of political satire over? The Kingston Riverside TownSq venue seems to think so. It transpires that the Surrey events space has cancelled an exhibition of political cartoonists’ work called Licence to Offend in case, er, anyone was offended. You couldn’t make it up… The Kingston TownSq venue has cancelled an exhibition of

Voters won’t be fooled by Yvette Cooper’s human rights gimmick

Keir Starmer’s government has grudgingly accepted publicly something it has privately known for months: voters are deadly serious about what they see as uncontrolled immigration. Despite the best attempts of the Prime Minister to make vacuous promises to “smash the gangs”, they can no longer be fobbed off. Labour’s real problem is that on immigration

James Heale

Badenoch attacks Starmer over rape gangs

All politics is local – and no more so than this week. With various voters set to head to the polls across England tomorrow, the different party leaders were hoping to land their last-minute messages at today’s session of Prime Ministers’ Questions. For Kemi Badenoch, the approach seems to have been ‘if it ain’t broke,

James Heale

What is Tony Blair up to?

‘Just what is Tony up to?’ That was what one Labour MP asked, quizzically, when I bumped into them in Westminster this morning. Blair has made quite the splash with his latest political intervention, writing an introduction to a pamphlet that criticises net zero. The former prime minister warns that the debate on climate change

Medical migration is crippling France’s healthcare system

Doctors are sounding the alarm. Across France patients are unable to get appointments and wait times in hospital emergency departments have been known to stretch to more than two days. In Nantes, such was the backlog that four people died in emergency rooms over just a three-week period while waiting to be admitted. This is

Kate Andrews

The tariff climbdown that defined Trump’s first 100 days

Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the Oval Office have upended all universal understanding. The global trade order has been turned on its head. Due process has morphed from a right to a vibe. Capital letters have been torn out of style guides and set loose in the wild west of social media. ‘We

Your guide to the 2025 election results

Tomorrow, voters will go to the polls in Sir Keir Starmer’s first big electoral test as Prime Minister. Across England, there are 1,641 wards, 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities, six mayors and one parliamentary constituency up for grabs. Nine months after coming to power, Labour’s honeymoon period has worn off – and voters turning out

James Heale

What is Tony Blair up to?

15 min listen

Tony Blair is making waves in Westminster today after his institute published a report on net zero that appears to undermine Ed Miliband and Labour’s green agenda. In his foreword – while not directly critical of the UK government – he encouraged governments around the world to reconsider the cost of net zero. Many have

Was Nixon solely to blame for the fall of Saigon?

At 7.53 a.m. on Tuesday 30 April 1975, 50 years ago today, Sergeant Juan Valdez boarded a Sea Knight helicopter sent from aircraft carrier USS Midway that had landed a few minutes earlier on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. He was the last US soldier to be evacuated from Vietnam. As he

Mark Galeotti

Putin is terrified Ukraine will sabotage Russia’s Victory Day

Even by the elevated standards of Kremlin cynicism, Vladimir Putin’s invocation of a three-day ceasefire across the span of the Victory Day celebrations commemorating the end of the second world war in Europe takes some beating. Putin is well aware of Kyiv’s capacity to embarrass him on this of all days He has announced that

Have the markets stopped caring about Trump’s tariffs?

President Trump’s imposition of huge tariffs on everything America imports on ‘Liberation Day’ at the start of this month has been widely condemned as one of the worst economic policy blunders of all time. There were fears the stock market would collapse. Investors are abandoning the United States for Europe. And the country is about

Steerpike

How many crooks are in the Commons?

As politicians complain about a Britain in decline, perhaps they should look closer to home. Mr S can reveal that, over the last five years, a total of nine Commons staff have been probed for criminal activity allegations – and yet fewer than half were dismissed. Talk about falling standards, eh? A total of nine

Ross Clark

Tony Blair attacks Ed Miliband over net zero

Ouch! Tony Blair had only recently left office when Ed Miliband, a protégé of Gordon Brown, drove the Climate Change Act through the Commons, committing the UK government to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent, compared with 1990 levels, by 2050. That target was upgraded to a net zero target – with minimal debate

The closure of Grangemouth’s refinery sums up Labour’s Net Zero muddle

Another grim milestone in Britain’s elective deindustrialisation was reached today: Scotland’s only remaining petrochemical plant, Grangemouth in Fife, ceased refining crude oil after more than half a century of processing output from the Forties field in the North Sea. It was hardly a surprise. PetroIneos, the part-Chinese-owned company, announced last year that Grangemouth was to

Ross Clark

Could Torsten Bell be the next chancellor?

Rachel Reeves may have helped run up a £151 billion deficit in the past 12 months (with a little help from Jeremy Hunt), but for some people it is not nearly enough. A snapshot into Reeves’s world is provided by the Resolution Foundation today, which has claimed that Reeves’s plan for £100 billion of additional

Bridget Phillipson’s Ofsted reforms are a mess

In 1902, Holly Mount School in Bury was shut down following a scandal over alleged brutality against the children. The next year, the House of Commons noted that one reason why the abuse was allowed to continue for so long was because of infrequent and cursory inspections, which one MP said were nothing but ‘hard

James Heale

Revenge of the centrists: Carney wins in Canada

13 min listen

Mark Carney has won the Canadian election, leading the Liberal Party to a fourth term. Having only been Prime Minister for 6 weeks, succeeding Justin Trudeau, this is an impressive achievement when you consider that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were over 20 percentage points ahead in the polls earlier this year. Trump’s rhetoric against Canada –

How will Mark Carney govern?

Canada went to the polls on Monday. The election campaign only ran for 37 days, but it was a wild ride with shifts in political momentum that few could have predicted.   Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau on March 14, won last night. It’s the fourth consecutive Liberal win, but it

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP attacks Ed Miliband

Ding ding ding! The gloves are coming off, as Scottish Labour backbencher Brian Leishman today took aim at Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband in the Commons over Grangemouth. First bashing both the SNP and previous Tory governments, Leishman turned the guns on his own government minister. Today marks the day that all oil refining in

Stephen Daisley

The Maggie Chapman saga is a new low for the Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee has voted against removing Green MSP Maggie Chapman as deputy convenor following her attack on the Supreme Court. The fight might not be over At a rally in Aberdeen in the wake of the judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v. The Scottish Ministers, in which Lord Hodge found for a unanimous

Brendan O’Neill

Kneecap’s phoney punk act has been unmasked

If someone pulled on a Ku Klux Klan hood and went up on a stage and shouted ‘Up the KKK!’, what would you think of that person? Call me a literalist but I’d think that person supports the KKK. I would interpret his donning of the pointy hood and his singing of the KKK’s praises

Steerpike

Watch: Poilievre concedes defeat before Portillo moment

Dear oh dear. Canada’s election results came in early this morning, revealing that – despite only being leader of the Liberal party for two months – ex-Bank of England governor Mark Carney wiped the floor with Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre. And not only did Poilievre’s party lose the election, he even lost his parliamentary seat.

Why Merz’s free US-EU trade idea is a non-starter

Ever since President Trump started his tariff war earlier this month, the European Union’s response has been surprisingly clear. It should retaliate with tariffs of its own. It should focus on its own economic sovereignty. And it should make sure that targeted American industries feel the consequences. In other words, it should hit back, and