Keir Starmer surprised his colleagues during his first week in power when he appointed his old friend Richard Hermer KC as Attorney General. Emily Thornberry, the holder of the role in opposition, was banished to the backbenches. Senior Labour figures had sensed something was afoot. ‘Sue [Gray] was keeping those transition talks under lock and
When I first saw the headline I was highly optimistic. Sir Keir Starmer had identified the threat to society posed by ‘young men in their bedrooms’. What would follow, surely, must be a polemic in the style of Robert Baden-Powell or John Harvey Kellogg on the dangers of masturbation. It’s about time this was politicised,
Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result
On the cusp of an almighty row over Trump’s planned mass deportations, let’s look to Europe for light relief. Last month, the pridefully left-wing management of the storied 19th-century Parisian theatre Gaité Lyrique, owned by the pridefully left-wing Paris council and traditionally the home of operettas, digital arts and musical performances, staged a free conference
I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and
London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take
