All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Parliament is back in action today and David Davis kicked the new session off with a bang. In a statement to the House, the Brexit Secretary appeared to perform a U-turn as he announced that the final Brexit deal will take the form of an act of Parliament. This means that as well as the current
I don’t hold much faith in forecasts by the IMF. They have been so wrong in the past as to be worthless. A week before referendum day in 2016, for example, the IMF predicted that a Leave vote would take 5.5 per cent off UK GDP by 2019, tipping us into recession in 2017. We’re
When the EU Withdrawal Bill returns to the House tomorrow, Theresa May is hoping Tory MPs – and some Labour rebels – will be persuaded to play ball. However, an appearance on the Daily Politics by Labour’s Frank Field and Nicky Morgan offered an insight into the difficulties ahead. "I certainly think he should be
Today’s Guardian has an odd splash headline, denouncing as ‘Orwellian’ a letter that Michael Gove and Boris Johnson sent to Theresa May warning her that some parts of her government are unprepared for ‘no deal’. I’m not quite sure what’s Orwellian about that, or even so controversial. Here’s the leaked extract of the letter. ‘Your
‘Take up our quarrel with the foe’, intones John McCrae’s famous In Flanders Fields. ‘To you from failing hands we throw, the torch’. For the millions of us marking Remembrance Sunday today, that quarrel is a solemn reminder of past sacrifice. It refers, somewhat euphemistically, to one of the bloodiest, most tragic conflicts in history. For
It’s remarkable how fast the unthinkable becomes the expected. It felt almost routine to pick up the New York Post last Sunday morning and see the front page mocked up as a wanted poster for Harvey Weinstein and the news that the NYPD is preparing to arrest him for alleged rape. Between the daily barrage of Trump’s
It is Remembrance Sunday, and the party leaders put their politics aside this morning as they gathered around the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and honour those who lost their lives in times of war. However, in the TV studios, the political debate still carries on with as much vigour as before: Sadiq Khan – Boris
The latest competition invited you to submit cringeworthy portmanteau words. The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass when Humpty Dumpty is explaining ‘Jabberwocky’ to Alice: ‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”… You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into
Jeremy Hunt has told Tory rebels that”if we don’t back Theresa May we will have no Brexit”. It echoes a point Paul Mason once made – a point that you hear quite often: there’s no chance of no deal on Brexit, because there is no parliamentary majority for no deal. It’s understandable, given recently chaos, to imagine
On rolls the Harvey Weinstein horror show with no finale in sight. The next episode looks likely to star Uma Thurman, who’s waiting for the right moment, she says, to tell her own Harvey story. Hollywood waits for Uma and I wait for Robert De Niro, who said of Donald Trump: ‘He’s a dog, he’s
The latest single of Bertrand Cantat, a French pop singer who murdered his girlfriend and who was present in the house where his ex-wife killed herself, is being heavily played on French pop music stations. This would be of little interest to anyone who isn’t following French pop music or observing the tolerance of the
Another week, another Cabinet resignation. Now, as I say in The Sun this morning, there are those saying that Theresa May is just being unlucky right now. As Downing Street aides point out, few would have predicted a few weeks ago that Westminster was going to be engulfed in a sex scandal or that Priti
I wonder if a factor additional to those widely mentioned lies behind differing attitudes to the ‘Pestminster’ scandal. It is well known in every generation that the young find it disgusting that old people (by which they mean anyone over 40) should have sex at all. In his own youth, the late Auberon Waugh wrote
Dealing with a hung parliament was never going to be easy, but no one quite foresaw the decay which now seems to have set in to Theresa May’s government. The best that can be said for the Prime Minister is that the past week’s events have weakened her rivals within the Conservative party. No one
Given all the rows in Westminster at the moment, it’s easy to forget that there are Brexit negotiations going on. But those involved in the talks from the EU’s side haven’t, and neither have they neglected to notice that Theresa May’s government is looking remarkably flimsy. Hence Michel Barnier’s warning today that there are only
It’s safe to say that Alex Salmond’s decision to host a talk show on Russia Today has not gone down well. The former first minister has been widely condemned for taking the controversial gig on the Russian-funded channel. Nicola Sturgeon has also now joined in, saying that she would have advised her predecessor ‘against RT
England play Germany this evening at Wembley and it sounds like the football will be incidental to the virtue signalling. Not only will the two teams be sporting poppy armbands but there will be poppies on sale, poppy T-shirts given away, poppy wreaths laid, poppy banners paraded and then, during the minute’s silence before kick-off,
When Republicans like myself mouth off against the Windsors, we always add the caveat ‘But the Queen’s different!’ What we mean is that among a menagerie of malingerers – her mother left behind £7million in debts when she died; her sister, a sottish snob who crippled herself during a miscalculation with boiling bath water; her
The Fawcett Society would have you believe, as part of its Equal Pay Day campaign, that today is the day “women effectively stop earning relative to men”, highlighting the gender pay gap, which they place at 14.1 per cent for full-time workers. If that number seems high to you, or not reflective of your working environment,
When Alex Salmond became first minister of Scotland in 2007 many people wished him well. You did not need to have voted for the SNP to appreciate that Salmond’s minority administration was a welcome breath of fresh air. It replaced a tired and muddled Labour-Lib Dem coalition with one that had a pleasing sense of
Whilst planning no career change of my own beyond my regular, if fleeting trips to secondary schools to talk about money, I’ve been enjoying reading Lucy Kellaway’s FT updates on her first half term as a maths teacher. Kellaway is well known for her short shrift for maths illiteracy: ‘It is not cute. It is
‘Wir sind das Volk’ – ‘We are the people’ – has become the slogan of Germany’s disaffected. The phrase is the rallying cry of Pegida, the country’s anti-Islam protest movement. At one of the group’s first rallies in Dresden, back in 2014, it was taken up as a popular protest chant. In the disenfranchised east, it is a phrase
Boris Johnson made a mistake when he said that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran. He and the Foreign Office should have moved to clear up the error far faster and far more comprehensively than they did. But some of Boris Johnson’s critics are risking turning themselves into Tehran’s unwitting helpers. Take, for
On this week’s episode, we turn our attention to the Middle East and the unlikely alliance of Saudi Arabia and Israel as they stare down a common enemy. We also consider whether the old adage ‘the night is always darkest just before the dawn’ holds for Theresa May, and wondering why there hasn’t been a
Buried in yesterday’s drama over Priti Patel was the news that train drivers represented by Aslef have voted to end their industrial action on Southern Rail by accepting a pay deal which will give them a 28.5 per cent rise over five years. It will take their basic pay – for a four day week
Penny Mordaunt is the new International Development Secretary. After last week’s very unexpected appointment of Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary, Theresa May has done what many observers expected her to do in appointing Mordaunt to replace Priti Patel. The choice of a female Brexiteer maintains the gender and Brexit balance of the Cabinet. Mordaunt has
Almost a third of young women think that winking is a form of sexual harassment. Let that sink in. For 28 per cent of women aged 18 – 24 the merest flick of an eyelid, an action so small as to be barely noticeable, is considered to be unwanted sexual behaviour that violates their dignity,
We ran a Steerpike blog entitled “the resignation letter blunder” about how Theresa May put Priti Patel’s name underneath her signature. In fact, the blunder was ours. No10 was following protocol, where it’s normal to put the recipient’s name under the Prime Minister’s signature in such letters. We – and I – ought to have
Another week, another Cabinet minister heads for the exit. Priti Patel’s departure means Theresa May now faces another difficult decision in choosing who should replace her. But was she right to get rid of Patel? The newspaper verdict is unanimous: ‘We like Priti Patel,’ says the Sun: ‘But she had to go’. After all, ‘fierce
The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy
I’ve been a customer of Lloyds Bank for over 30 years, and as in any long-term relationship there have been ups and downs. Nevertheless I have always stuck with the black horse; partly because I can’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of opening another account, but mostly because I’m usually in debt to
Priti Patel has resigned from the Cabinet. Patel said that she accepted her decision to hold meetings with Israeli officials during her summer holiday without the prior say so of the government meant that her ‘actions fell below the high standards that are expected of a secretary of state’. The secretary of state for international development went
Priti Patel is currently on her way to Downing Street, where she is expected to be fired by Theresa May. The early signs are that Number 10 is looking for a Leaver to replace her as International Development Secretary, to preserve the Cabinet’s Brexit balance. But this would be the wrong way to think about
One of the hazards of writing about a government so hapless you wonder if it’s doing it all for a dare is that it could fall any minute. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, Theresa May could be cramming that last pair of heels into the back of a Pickfords
