All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The one thing quieter than the quiet Commons at the moment is the Labour leadership. Even when Jeremy Corbyn speaks in the Chamber, he makes so little impact that trees falling in empty forests have excited more attention. Last Monday during his response to David Cameron’s European Council statement, Labour backbenchers nattered amongst themselves in
If the parliamentary diary for this week is anything to go by, the next few days are going to be very quiet in Westminster. There is hardly any legislation in the Commons, save for the exciting and largely pointless circus of Private Members’ Bills on Friday, and a series of votes on estimates – public
With the Sunday papers filled with stories suggesting David Cameron’s party is in turmoil over the EU, Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan decided to raise the issue with Anna Soubry during an appearance on his show. Alas he got more than he bargained for when the Minister for Small Business — who is known not to mince her words — proceeded to
I’m planning to propose to my boyfriend this leap year. I’m proposing that he earns another £10,000 and loses a stone. But marriage? Hell, no. I don’t know why, in the age of equality, society still endorses women going down on bended knee on one solitary day every four years. The internet blames it on
I’m one of those sad folk who rather likes airline food. On those rare occasions I get to turn left, of course, never when I get to turn right. Don’t be daft. And now that they are finally taking it seriously, I rather like airline wine. Food and drink might only be ninth or tenth
Q. What does méthode traditionelle mean on a wine label? It is the process (sometimes known as Méthode Champenoise) by which champagne and other top-quality sparkling wines are made, the bubbles being caused by a secondary fermentation in bottle. It distinguishes such wines from those sparklers such as Prosecco made by other cheaper methods. Q. It’s
The papers report today that many Conservatives are furious with the way David Cameron is conducting the referendum campaign. MPs threaten that if the Prime Minister continues with the personal attacks that he launched at various opponents on the ‘Leave’ side this week, it will impossible for him to continue at leader after the referendum,
This week Sarah Vine used her Daily Mail column to reveal the details of the roast lamb supper her husband Michael Gove used to plot a move to back Brexit with Boris Johnson. Now the Mayor of London’s sister Rachel Johnson has gone one better and lifted the lid on her brother’s subsequent Brexit deliberations. Writing in the Mail on
For years, now, the Sutton Trust has been releasing research showing how many doctors, judges, journalists etc were privately educated and conclude that it’s all a posh boys’ stitch-up. The British press loves banging this old drum, but in doing so they drown out a new tune. Today, there is more academic excellence in the state sector than
David Cameron’s slap down of Boris Johnson on Monday was one of the most brutal, and personal, that I’ve seen in six and a half years of reporting on parliament. But, as I report in my Sun column today, Number 10 are now keen to calm things down. Indeed, even some of Cameron’s closest allies
The week the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London have been at loggerheads over the EU. After Boris Johnson declared his support for Brexit, David Cameron launched a thinly veiled attack on him in the Commons. So, can expect to see a ‘posh bloke’ fight before the referendum takes place? Is it feasible that David Cameron and
One of the oddest features of the cabinet majority for staying in the EU is that almost no one in it admits to being a Europhile. How is it, then, that the very last-century ideas of Edward Heath, Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Chris Patten can still exercise so much power over those who have
The Spectator is run with Prussian efficiency by a dozen editorial staff at 22 Old Queen St. We don’t have very many technical gurus, and pretty much rely on our users to let us know when things go wrong. So I’d like to ask how you’re finding the website, our login system, our Apps and
Following Tom Shakespeare’s recent suggestion that now might be a good time to ditch ‘God Save the Queen’ — ‘terrible tune, with banal lyrics’ — and replace it with something that more accurately reflects contemporary Britain, competitors were invited to propose lyrics for a new British national anthem. In an entry whose tone varied wildly,
Jeremy Corbyn is this weekend campaigning against Labour Party policy. A year ago, it would have been quite unremarkable for the then obscure backbencher to turn up to the CND rally and give a speech against nuclear weapons. But now he’s the Labour leader, Corbyn will be speaking against the current official policy of the
Has David Cameron settled on a strategy for dealing with his opponents in the EU referendum? The Prime Minister was clearly caught on the hop by the decisions of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to back the ‘Out’ side at the weekend, and his angry digs at the Mayor in the Commons on Monday showed
Despite the In campaign’s best efforts to reach the youth vote with the help of Britain Stronger in Europe board member June Sarpong, some youngsters still find themselves leaning towards Brexit. Both Liz Truss and Diane Abbott learnt this the hard way on last night’s Question Time when a young audience member offered up her argument for leaving the
Dublin Ireland goes to the polls today. The Google Doodle is up, the shadow of history hovers with the 1916 centenary—and Ireland, caught between the two, stalls halfway through a political software update to becoming ‘Ireland Centenary Edition’. Elections are heady things in Ireland these days, on the heels of last year’s Marriage Referendum which
Michael Howard has said he believes Britain should leave the EU. The former Conservative leader said David Cameron’s attempts to renegotiate had ‘met with failure’. Here, in an extract from his article published in the Daily Telegraph, he says Britain is better off out of Europe: Europe’s leaders may spurn the possibility of a new
It is wearisome work, but I hope the ‘leave’ campaign is carefully monitoring the BBC’s coverage of the referendum. On Monday, the first full weekday since Mr Cameron’s ‘legally binding’ deal, I listened to the Today programme for more than two hours. I heard six speakers for ‘remain’ and two (John Mills and Nigel Lawson) for ‘leave’. In
This article, in Nature magazine, ought to have been front page news – and might have been, had it suggested that global warming was worse than we had thought. Instead, it underlines the sound science behind an inconvenient truth: that there has been a 15-year hiatus in global warming. To those of us who have been following the debate,
A study out today suggests that sending your kids to private schools puts them two years’ ahead of their state school counterparts by the time they reach the age of 16. The research, revealed in The Times, showed the ‘private school effect’ apparently boosted grades in almost every subject. But here, in an article first
In the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks, Kay Burley became the subject of much mockery online after she tweeted a photo of a dog in the French city, with the caption ‘sadness in his eyes’. Readers were quick to question whether it was an appropriate message in the wake of 129 deaths. Sadness in
Quite naturally, those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union have seized on today’s net migration figures as evidence that staying in won’t resolve voters’ concerns about immigration. Priti Patel has said that ‘the proposed deal will do nothing to reduce the level of immigration from the EU, and will leave unelected politicians in
David Owen said it was time for Britain to leave the EU. Speaking this morning, the SDP founder said Brexit was a way of restructuring Europe in the way it needed to be. Owen went on to say there was no need for Britain leaving behind the EU to be a damaging process: Dame Janet
Yesterday PMQs descended into ‘Punch and Judy’ style politics after David Cameron responded to a heckle about his mother by laying into Jeremy Corbyn’s fashion sense. David Cameron criticised Corbyn’s shabby appearance: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.’ However rather than take the criticism on board, it
David Cameron had a tough time trying to convince his European counterparts at the European Council; but hopefully he will be up for seconds when he goes head-to-head with the European Parliament. He paid its Members a long overdue visit last week, but only met with a select few. He will have to do more
Niall Ferguson got me thinking about this in his Sunday Times piece, in which he rejected the allure of Brexit and declared himself an ‘Anglosceptic’. He concluded: ‘In the days before empire, Henry VIII’s version of Brexit was to renounce Roman Catholicism and divorce Catherine of Aragon. A true sceptic in those days would have
The net migration statistics have, for quite a while, been an awkward quarterly occurrence that the Tories just have to sit through and pretend isn’t happening. Today’s release from the Office for National Statistics shows that David Cameron is still nowhere near hitting his pledge of driving net migration into the tens of thousands, with
The vision of a European Common Market was a good one when in 1962 membership was first envisaged for the UK. Nevertheless, we were rightly warned even then by the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, that a federal Europe lurked in the background. As far back as 1971 Edward Heath’s White Paper on
Oh dear. Today Time magazine released a list of the 100 most-read female writers in American colleges. On the list were Jane Austen, J K Rowling, Kate L. Turabian and… Evelyn Waugh. Yes, the Brideshead Revisted author made it onto the all-female list despite the fact that he was a man. In their defence, Waugh’s first name has
The Dame Janet Smith report into Jimmy Savile has already been labelled an ‘expensive whitewash’ by a lawyer representing 168 victims, just hours after it was published. The review found that BBC staff knew of complaints and allegations about the entertainer but that little was done to pursue them because of a culture of fear
So, FTSE 100 company bosses have come out in favour of staying in the EU – even if, as Ed West notes, the 198 signatories in a letter to the Times represent only 36 companies. I wonder if anyone dropped out at the last moment to reduce the tally below the figure of 200. Of
The head of Amnesty, Kate Allen, was busily talking the most terrible balls on the radio this morning. In an interview on the Today programme she reminded everyone of how bad the situation in Syria is and indulged in the usual Conservative-bashing by arguing that Britain wasn’t doing enough to alleviate the refugee situation. Despite