There were no civil servants present when ministers gathered for their weekly cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The reason? It was time to talk politics. On the eve of Labour’s first Budget for 14 years, Keir Starmer tried to rally his ministers around a common message: blame the Tories! He spoke of the so-called fiscal black
I have been trying to interest MPs of all parties in joining my call to persuade Barbados to say ‘thank you’ to Britain for the extra 17 years of life they enjoy as a consequence of their distant ancestors having been forcibly transported, hundreds of years ago, from Africa to the Caribbean. Nobody is quite
There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible
Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it
My young friend Dr Cajetan Skowkronski has helped me resolve a question that has been worrying me. Why do supporters of ‘assisted dying’ insist that the best method is a cocktail of pills (or intravenous injection)? Their prescription has an air of medical respectability, but this is not a medical process. The sole aim in
Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise
