Munira mirza

Thursday

Taki

The perils of a sex party

Gstaad I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the best exercise in the world. Both upper and lower body get the maximum workout as one churns along a beautiful course in Lauenen, a tiny nearby village that looks like Gstaad did 60 years ago. I used to bring my children to the lake here during the summer, warning them time and again about a horrible monster that lived underwater and specialised in grabbing little kids. They screamed and screamed in terror until they got a bit older, told me to stop talking nonsense and swam to their heart’s content.

Friday

James Forsyth

Who would join Boris’s No. 10?

Munira Mirza’s resignation over Boris Johnson’s refusal to withdraw his Savile barb at Keir Starmer led to Downing Street bringing forward the departure of various senior staff. Johnson’s shadow whipping operation were keen to emphasise that these were the very changes to his operation that he had promised Tory MPs on Monday night. Leaving aside the fact that these departures looked rather chaotic, the real challenge will come with whether Johnson can persuade anyone to come into Downing Street. As I say in the Times today, the failure to get Lynton Crosby to take on a formal role shows how difficult it will be to get the kind of big hitters

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why Munira Mirza’s resignation matters

Boris Johnson’s great strength has always been his ability to spot, recruit and hire a great variety of brilliant people. He did so when he edited this magazine and as London Mayor with a superb crop of deputy mayors. As Foreign Secretary he couldn’t hire anyone, so he struggled. As Prime Minister, his gift seemed to have come back when he hired Munira Mirza as policy chief. She was one of his deputy mayors and having her in No. 10 was, to me, a promise of great things to come. Her resignation, today, suggests a prime ministerial team that’s falling apart rather than being rebuilt. She is an academic, a thinker, a fighter, writer (she once wrote a