All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Somebody give Bill Whitaker a prize. In his 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which aired last night, the CBS correspondent did what no other journalist has successfully done since the Vice President was thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket: journalism. He asked Harris challenging questions about the matters voters care about most.
During the general election campaign, Labour played a cautious game on tax: the party was careful not to share its bigger plans for getting more revenue into the Treasury until after the election was over. A few major tax hikes were ruled out – income tax, National Insurance and VAT – but it was quickly
Germany was once the powerhouse of Europe; for decades, its economy has helped drive the continent’s growth. No longer. Berlin’s economy ministry plans to downgrade its growth forecast for this year. The German government now expects the economy to shrink by 0.2 per cent in 2024 – down from a previous estimate of 0.3 per
The appearance on our television screens of one Hamish Falconer, the newly-elected Labour MP for Lincoln, tells us much more about Keir Starmer’s government than meets the eye. Falconer is not exactly a household name, but has already been elevated to the role of junior minister in the Foreign Office. He is an ex-pupil of
On Friday morning, Azwan bin Bohari was marched to the gallows. The 47-year-old Singaporean, himself an addict, was convicted of trafficking 26.5 grams of heroin in 2019. Despite pleas for the Singaporean authorities to halt it, and the fact Azwan was waiting on the outcome of a legal appeal, the execution controversially went ahead. Azwan’s
Another day, another Sue Gray-related drama. Even though the ex-civil servant has resigned from the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff after becoming the story herself, she is still managing to generate headlines in her absentia. In an attempt to reboot his government, the Prime Minister swapped out Gray for Labour campaign guru
The latest move in Anne Hidalgo’s war on cars has left Paris motorists teetering on the edge of despair. Last week, the city’s left-wing mayor reduced the speed limit on the Périphérique, Paris’s critical eight-lane motorway, to a crawl-inducing 30 mph. For the thousands of suburban commuters who rely on it, it’s made the daily grind
Happy birthday, Mr President? With Vladimir Putin turning 72 on Monday, this has become an opportunity for the Kremlin’s spin doctors to present their ideal notion of the septuagenarian sovereign. Ambitious courtiers have been competitively performing their sycophancy, as if in an over-the-top production of King Lear. Posters were anonymously pasted up in Kyiv, vowing
Travelling through the Gaza border area on the morning of October 8, 2023, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. The scenes of destruction, the burnt buildings, and the smashed-up cars by the side of the road were, of course, profoundly shocking. But they were not, at least to me, unfathomable. Unlike most of
How long are the Tories going to campaign on the winter fuel payment? It was their main line of attack on Monday at Work and Pensions questions in the House of Commons, with a number of Conservative MPs asking ministers to say how many pensioners were going to die this winter because of the restrictions
Keir Starmer took a different tone on Israel today. That change of tone is to a certain extent to be expected, given the Prime Minister was marking the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks. He reflected in the Commons this afternoon that there were still nearly 100 hostages unaccounted for, and families across Israel
Should we trust a new study that claims that the level of irregular migration in the UK has essentially not changed in the past 16 years? That is the assertion being made in the reporting of a project called Measuring Irregular Migration, or MIrreM – a collaboration between Oxford University and 17 other universities across
Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was largely a love-in. But when you have been actively avoiding the media for the majority of your presidential campaign, even the most innocuous of questions can accidentally bite. ‘You don’t do too many long-form interviews,’ Cooper put to Vice President Harris at the start
It’s an iron law of politics that when the staffer becomes the story they have to go. Dominic Cummings had to leave Boris Johnson, and Theresa May’s joint chiefs Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy both took the blame for the disastrous 2017 election result. The reshuffle resolves a perplexing political question Lobby journalists leaving Liverpool
Who remembers Natalie Bennett, the Aussie-accented eco-warrior whose car crash interviews briefly enlivened the 2015 election campaign? The onetime Green leader has since been installed as one of our great unelected masters in the House of Lords. But it seems that all that the institutional knowledge there has not yet rubbed off on Bennett, who
Cheap Chinese imports will flood the market. Even more jobs will be lost, and the country’s industrial base will be even weaker than it already is. UK Steel, the lobby group for the industry, has today called for tariffs to stop the last remaining steel mills being wiped out by unfair competition from lower cost
New Zealand just lost one tenth of its naval defence fleet. The HMNZS Manawanui – the jewel in the nation’s small military crown – ran aground near Samoa this past weekend after hitting a reef and catching fire. The £75 million specialist survey vessel sank on Sunday morning off Samoa’s southern coast of Upolu. An order to abandon ship was made
It’s been a golden start in politics for Hamish Falconer. The son of former Lord Chancellor Charlie, the ex-Westminster boy triumphed at his first tilt for parliament in July before being appointed a fortnight later as the Minister for the Middle East. Highly regarded by many in the Foreign Office, it was to some excitement
Given the idolatry with which Americans worship the man widely seen as their greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, and the obsessive place that identity politics now occupies in the public spaces of the US, it was probably inevitable that the sexuality of American civil war winning ‘honest Abe’ would come under revisionist scrutiny sooner or later.
There’s been another development in the wearying saga of Gary Lineker, the over-salaried presenter of football on the BBC and banal takes on Twitter/ X. An email leak suggests that a draft BBC statement preparing to announce his departure from Match Of The Day is in the works, but he has laughed this off on screen and told
One year after the brutal attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel’s global reputation has undergone a remarkable transformation. Far from being undermined by the actions it has taken in Gaza and beyond, Israel’s standing has been fortified, its image strengthened with steel. While some voices –particularly in the West – have feigned concern about Israel
Who’s in charge in Downing Street? Until recently, the answer to that question would tend to reveal whether you were a Sue Gray or Morgan McSweeney supporter. Keir Starmer’s two most senior aides were viewed to be in a power struggle over the direction of the government. As Chief of Staff, Gray was ultimately in
Emmanuel Macron has chosen to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’ murderous attack on Israel on 7 October by criticising their response. In a radio interview, the president of France announced that ‘the priority today is to return to a political solution, to stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza’. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
Change is the flavour of the month and nobody knows that better than Sir Keir Starmer’s top team, which on Sunday saw the PM’s chief of staff Sue Gray swap out for Labour campaign guru Morgan McSweeney after weeks of negative briefings about the former civil servant. Gray is down but not quite out –
It might be best described as the war for Keir Starmer’s ear in Downing Street, a battle to the bitter end between two of the Prime Minister’s most senior advisers. There was, in reality, only going to be one winner, and so it has come to pass. Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief adviser and architect
Nørrebro, Copenhagen’s hip, multicultural inner-city area, was crowned the world’s coolest neighbourhood by Time Out in 2021. Former residents include Denmark’s greatest living film star Mads Mikkelsen. If you’ve viewed Nordic noir TV dramas depicting the nexus of hip urbanism and the tribulations of mass migration, you’ll have seen plenty of Nørrebro (sometimes called ‘Nørrebronx’ in tribute
It is one year since the Jews suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi era, and what is the British left doing? Raging against the Jewish state. Hitting the streets in their thousands to fume against the nation that was the victim of that carnival of racist killing. They’re protesting not against
Now that Sir Keir Starmer has unilaterally decided to give up British ownership of the Chagos Islands, the last vestige of our imperial inheritance in the Indian Ocean, it seems an appropriate moment to look back at the long-forgotten history of this remote possession. Mauritius will be the happy recipient of the Chagos Archipelago, which
A year has passed since the terrible events of 7 October 2023, but for Jews the pain of that day – when 1,200 were killed and 250 hostages snatched across Israel’s border into Gaza – remains vivid. Every call and every text on that dreadful Saturday morning brought awful news. Many of those murdered were
