All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In 1944, Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl sent the US government a 30-page report detailing an extermination facility in Poland where Jews were being murdered en masse. The document included maps pin-pointing the exact locations of gas chambers and crematoria. Rabbi Weissmandl pleaded: ‘We ask that the crematoria of Auschwitz be bombed from the air… Such
Conservatives once knew that command and control didn’t work. Even if they didn’t know it intellectually, one former Conservative minister told me as he looked in disbelief at the chaos of Johnson’s dictatorial administration, ‘they felt it in their bones’. This nominally Conservative government has centralised control, Soviet style, into a triumvirate of Boris Johnson,
Why might a top medical adviser be dropped from the government’s daily coronavirus press briefing? This was the question that MPs were keen to answer after England’s chief nurse gave evidence to the public accounts committee on Monday. Ruth May, who was interrogated by the committee chair Meg Hillier, failed to appear at the daily Downing Street
How excited should we be about the latest news of the Oxford vaccine? At least this time – in contrast to previous updates, which have tended to come via Downing Street briefings – we have a paper in a scientific journal, the Lancet, to go by. The paper reports that 1,077 people took part in
It is often written that the Labour party has an enormous electoral mountain to climb in order to win a majority at the next general election – or possibly, even the general election after that. What isn’t evaluated enough is what this means in hard, psephological terms. Winning substantially in Scotland appears to be getting
Dominic Raab has this afternoon confirmed that the UK will suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong ‘immediately and indefinitely’. Speaking in the Commons chamber, the Foreign Secretary said the imposition of China’s controversial security law in Hong Kong amounted to a ‘serious violation’ of the country’s international obligations and as a result the UK
It has been yet another busy medical day in our ‘new-normal’ coronavirus world. Today, the Phase One results of the University of Oxford vaccine were published, confirming positive reports tantalisingly leaked last week. Also making the news is a press release from the pharmaceutical company Synairgen, touting very positive initial results from its inhaled protein,
The Times has revealed today that counter-terror police officers are considering dropping the term ‘Islamism’ to describe terror attacks motivated by Islam. If it feels like we’ve been here before, we have. Ever since Islamist terror hit the West in September 2001, the circular debates over the correct way to describe terrorists has been a
Test, test, test said the WHO. And globally, that’s what everyone did: tests have detected more than 14 million cases of Sars-CoV-2 so far. The thinking goes: turn up, have your test, and if positive, you must have the disease. But that’s far from the truth. When virus levels in the population are very low,
What are we thinking about Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner whose officers have lately ‘taken a knee’ at unlawful protests, failed to prevent the defacing of cherished national monuments, been injured in their scores and chased out of London housing estates? Weak, woke and woeful, right? That was certainly my view. Indeed, I
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Now that Huawei is banned, China hawks in the Conservative Party are turning their attention to social media platform TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company. It comes as the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in the UK today to meet with Conservative backbenchers and the government to discuss China further. Cindy
Two ‘c’s come easily to Boris: charm and cheerfulness. He has always believed that he can charm his way out of trouble and to be fair to him, he often has. He is also a naturally cheerful cove. He is never happier than when dispensing good news, even if it has been necessary to invent
Relations between the UK and China came under even greater strain over the weekend. In a fraught interview on the Andrew Marr Show, the Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming said his government was still ‘evaluating the consequences’ of the ‘very bad decision’ by the UK government to ban Huawei from 5G networks by the end of 2027. It
When they come to write the history of the Union’s demise, there will be three guilty men. Tony Blair was a transformative prime minister, but he nodded through devolution after allowing himself to be convinced that it was an administrative change, rather than an unravelling of the United Kingdom. Many believe Iraq to be the
On Saturday afternoon, Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds released a charming picture of their baby son, Wilfred – the first publicly released picture of the child since he was born in April. The PM and his partner were on a Zoom call in Number 10 to thank the midwives of University College Hospital for delivering
When Liu Xiaoming agreed to come on the Andrew Marr show, he ought to have expected that – as the Chinese ambassador – he’d be asked about Uighur Muslims. He doubtless came on to bemoan the Huawei decision. But as anyone with a social media account could have told him, video footage of people with
Liu Xiaoming – No Muslim concentration camps in Xinjiang Today’s Sunday interviews took a heavier focus on foreign affairs than usual, with Andrew Marr counting not one, but two ambassadors among his guests. He began by speaking to Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador, and confronted him with aerial footage appearing to show restrained Uighur Muslims
There has been an emotional response to the case of Shamima Begum, quite rightly. It is not clear to me that lawyers are better equipped than politicians to navigate such emotions, but sadly we live in an age which is increasingly demanding legal answers to political questions. What is perhaps surprising is that, with uncharacteristic
In 1739 a London attorney called John Theobald fell into a dispute with a man called John Drinkwater, widely regarded as ‘the most litigious Fellow in London’. Theobald met with Drinkwater’s enemies in a Holbourn tavern, and they decided ‘the Way to perplex Drinkwater and bring him to Terms, was to indict him for Barretry
The Black Lives Matter frenzy against statues may have passed its peak. The issue has been co-opted by the bureaucracies in government, Church, universities, etc. As their various committees study lists of allegedly offensive monuments, they should remember something which has hardly been mentioned: localism. Most statues are erected not because of a general national
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James Forsyth writes in this week’s Spectator that the Union is the biggest challenge facing this government, despite everything that is going on with the pandemic. Support for Scottish independence continues to grow north of the border. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and our Scotland Editor Alex Massie about what the
There’s talk of reparations in the air. Lobbyists from around the world are demanding sin-payments from former colonial powers. Let me add my voice to the clamour on behalf of this island’s indigenous Celtic people. My family are from Llanelli in Carmarthenshire and I believe that my compatriots have an excellent case to make against
Huawei’s 5G path is blocked. In a few months’ time, Huawei may no longer see the point of paying six-figure sums to Lord B and his attendant knights,’ I wrote in this space on 20 June. I underrated its ruthlessness. It took only a few weeks. Lord Browne, its UK chairman, is out. Sir Ken
The cost of Covid-19 in the UK, in 45,000 lives lost and considerably more if ‘excess’ deaths are included, in long term illness for tens of thousands, and in damage to our prosperity, is changing everything. But did the shock have to be so great? Could the government have done more to protect us? Among
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In a press conference from Downing Street today, Boris Johnson set out the road to ‘significant normality’ – but not until November. It’s a more cautious position than had been previously briefed, but is even this timeline too optimistic? John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.
Normally Fridays are spent thinking about how to unwind from work. Today though Boris Johnson announced changes to government guidance to get the public back to work, and more specifically, their place of work. From 1 August, the guidance will be changed to give employers more discretion to decide whether their employees should keep working
The numbers have seldom been better for Nicola Sturgeon. Ten months from the next Holyrood election, the SNP is polling 55 per cent on the constituency ballot and 50 per cent on the regional vote. Support for Scexit has swung into the majority. Almost three-quarters of Scots say she has handled the Covid-19 pandemic well,
‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’. It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention. But there are two things making it an effective headline, at least in the sense that it gets attention. One is the notion of someone looking at child porn in a hospital – that’s a shocking
People living in England have become increasingly concerned in recent weeks, as Public Health England’s (PHE) figures demonstrate a relentless daily toll of more than a hundred Covid-associated deaths, several days a week. This is in stark contrast to the more reassuring recovery in neighbouring regions (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), where there are days with
It is startling to see the Court of Appeal take over the Home Secretary’s responsibility in deciding who should be allowed to enter the UK – judging for itself the relative importance of national security considerations. But this is what the Court did in its judgment today, by opening the door for Shamima Begum to return
Days before the release of the becalmed Intelligence & Security Committee (ISC) report on Russian political interference, we suddenly started to hear news of Moscow’s meddling on Thursday. It’s almost as if the government, sensitive about appearing like it wants to bury the report, suddenly wants to steal the thunder and look serious. Surely not.