All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
51 min listen
What went wrong for Liz Truss? In her first interview since leaving 10 Downing Street, she talks to Spectator TV about her leadership election, her 49-day premiership and her plans for the future. Truss admits to some mistakes, says her premiership was probably doomed after she fired her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, and says Whitehall orthodoxy
What a pity that memoirs don’t qualify for the Bad Sex in Literature prize. If they did, the description of how Prince Harry lost his virginity in Spare would surely qualify. That sordid tale has already passed into the annals of the least sexy writing about sex imaginable, with an older woman treating the young
Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That
Natural disaster always worst affects those who have already lost so much. And so it is in Turkey and Syria, where a double earthquake has killed more than 1,900 people. Across both countries, there are widespread scenes of destruction: apartment blocks reduced to rubble; gas supplies cut off in the middle of a freezing winter;
The biggest round of NHS strikes is taking place this week, and there isn’t much hope of a resolution. This is despite, as Kate Andrews explores, a widespread acceptance that the strikes are detrimental to patient safety. There is also widespread public sympathy for striking healthcare workers, which surely suggests that a deal should come
The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is
Patients in Devon are not supposed to call their local GPs to check on their appointments. Residents in Gloucestershire have been encouraged to avoid ringing 999 unless the situation is life-threatening. Once again, people are being asked to stay away from the health service – not because of a pandemic this time, but because today
Strikes. Inflation. Political instability. It’s been a pretty miserable few months in Britain – but some in government are hoping that the coronation in May changes all that. The bunting will be out and the flags on display, to celebrate our septuagenarian monarch (finally) getting his hands on the Imperial State Crown. But with the
There have been two major reactions to reports that Rishi Sunak is ready to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights if that’s what it takes to solve the small boats issue in the Channel. The first, common among denizens of the Westminster village, is surprise that an outwardly conventional product of
Law-making is a funny old business. My move from commentator to legislator has brought with it some poacher-turned-gamekeeper quandaries. While all laws emanate from political choices, unlike my usual stomping ground of activist speeches or polemical articles, there is a danger that legal mis-speaking might end up criminalising people. I feel the need to ask
The Tory grassroots are revolting – and they clearly aren’t happy either. This weekend has seen two selection battles engulf different Conservatives associations. Local Tories are currently picking their prospective parliamentary candidates, ahead of the expected general election next year. For incumbent MPs, reselection is normally a formality: the sitting member is proposed and re-adopted
It was self-indulgent, whinging. Dull in places while completely batty in others. All the usual insults will be hurled at former prime minister Liz Truss for her essay defending her short time in Downing Street, published today. Perhaps it would be better for her to retire gracefully from public life and let some ambitious young
Liz Truss – Thwarted by a ‘powerful economic establishment, and a lack of political support’ After Liz Truss claimed in a Telegraph essay that the ‘economic establishment’, and flaws in the Conservative Party’s preparations, had prevented her from enacting her policies, Laura Kuenssberg pressed Business Secretary Grant Shapps on whether he agreed with any of
Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice the enormous elephant in the room: the failure of the global media even to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, how wrong they were to warn the world that Italy was on the verge of a far-right, ergo fascist, take-over.
Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has led a charmed life. Even her sternest critics agree that she is immensely talented, one of the UK’s most successful politicians, a master of detail and an effective communicator. She has been at the pinnacle of public life for two decades. But all things must pass. Nearly ten years
Liz Truss has broken her three-month long silence since leaving No. 10 at the end of October. In a 4,000 word article for the Sunday Telegraph, she reflects for the first time on the mini-Budget, the challenges she faced within government and the mistakes she made in her 49-day premiership which made her the shortest-serving
The hopeful life and wretched death of Claudia Gavrilovna Popova during a previous age of extremes should speak to us now. Popova lived in Siberia in the years before the Russian revolution. She was a liberal who opposed the Tsarist empire – then, as now, was the world’s great fortress of reactionary power. Popova was a wealthy landowner in Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River, who thought any enemy of the regime couldn’t be wholly bad. She gave
Just a quick plea to those who know me; if you’re going to burst upon me with a revelation, make it a juicy one, please – preferably sex-related. No gender reveals, no late-onset allergies – and please, most of all, no adult ADHD diagnoses. Before you start up berating me as lacking in ‘compassion’ and
‘I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.’ This is the crux of Liz Truss’s defence of her 49 days in Downing Street: the shortest-ever stint for a Prime Minister. It is also the start of her attempt at a political comeback. Writing in today’s Sunday
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine almost a year ago, the questions of if, when and how to supply the Ukrainian Air Force (UkrAF) with western fighter aircraft have been a matter of fierce debate. President Zelenskyy has made repeated and impassioned calls for American-made F-16s in particular, as have UkrAF leaders and pilots. Russia
If you didn’t know any better, you might have thought China was preparing to unleash a large-scale invasion on the continental United States. News of a Chinese surveillance balloon loitering over the picturesque landscape of Montana generated a wave of sensationalist coverage and panicked responses from lawmakers. We don’t know much about the balloon other
At the height of the Cold War, it was Britain that appeared to be infested with Russian spies and moles. From the 1950s to the 1980s a series of security scandals, from the defections to Moscow of the Cambridge spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby, to the exposure of the Queen’s art advisor Anthony Blunt as
Those of us unlucky enough to have suffered through the six interminable hours of the Netflix Harry and Meghan series might now be regarding further updates from the less-than-dynamic duo with the same excitement that a dental patient looks forward to a round of root canal. But because the Sussexes have signed a multi-year deal
‘It’s unbelievable but true,’ Vladmir Putin said on the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the battle of Stalingrad. ‘We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks.’ The Russian president is once again turning to an old staple he has often used to rally support in the absence of a genuine, unifying ideology: the
Parents standing at the school gate have all kinds of hopes and expectations. They want their children to be happy, well looked-after and to learn something. Thankfully, most teachers agree. But for some classroom activists, education is less about the three Rs and more about LGBTQ+. Rather than geography and history, they teach gender identity
15 min listen
In his column for the Telegraph, Fraser Nelson says that Sweden has become a gangster’s paradise, with its liberal approach to criminal justice allowing a shocking subculture of violence. He is joined by Katy Balls and Fredrik Erixon, Swedish economist and writer, to discuss how the country should respond to gun violence.
Rugby is a gladiatorial game – as Wales’s Six Nations match today against Ireland will surely prove. But even the greatest commentators in the sport, such as the late Eddie Butler and Cliff Morgan, would wince reading the script of Welsh rugby’s spiralling decline. Wales has been more reliant on rugby to form the guardrails of
It’s interesting, the way that laws and policy can change seemingly out of the blue. In April last year, following a massive outcry from feminists and others concerned about trivial matters such as the safety and wellbeing of incarcerated women, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released a press statement about changes to the policy on transgender prisoners,
Were anyone still in doubt about the wholesale abuse of our asylum system by would-be economic migrants then the ever-changing make-up of the Channel boat arrivals should seal the argument. Last year Albanians were among the leading nationalities of those suddenly finding themselves in fear for their lives in war-torn France. Many of them also
There was a time when Ukraine’s accession to Nato was a fantasy. It wasn’t just that Ukraine was dismally poor, politically unstable, or highly corrupt – though all these factors played a role. Nor was it just that Ukraine’s rusting, unwieldy post-Soviet wreck of an armed force was not exactly Nato material. The bigger reason was
China’s ‘spy’ balloon, (or is it an errant weather balloon?), is currently being tracked across America. Picked up above the Aleutian Islands, it was buzzed by US planes above Montana and is now headed eastwards as it is pushed by the prevailing Jet Stream. The Pentagon has decided not to shoot it down; it does
10 min listen
In her Times column this week Katy Balls says that Rishi Sunak is about to roll his sleeves up on EU trade and small boats, potentially setting him against both the right and the left of his party. What should we expect? Also on the podcast, as allegations about Dominic Raab’s bullying continue to swirl, is this
The safety of women in prisons cannot be allowed to plummet back down the news agenda after the latest Sturgeon saga is over. Not least because today has seen the publication of a report into one women’s prison in Gloucestershire that makes for troubling reading. HMP Eastwood Park, which holds 348 women, was the subject of an