The Brazilian presidential election yesterday was billed as one of the most consequential in decades – not just for the country but for the future of the planet. Anyone paying attention to either the climate crisis or the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, could hardly quibble with that description. The good news is that the
In his first interview since being reappointed, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly laid down some clear diplomatic water between his party and Labour – confirming that, unlike Keir Starmer, he would attend this winter’s Qatar World Cup. The Foreign Secretary won’t be alone. The Football Association expects that some 10,000 England fans will make the journey
Once upon a time, well within living memory, a free-born Britisher could drink as much as he or she liked and smoke with a carefree abandon – all within working hours, and even without leaving their desk. You may remember elevenses – immortalised in those moments when M briefs Bond in the 007 films and
From Fawlty Towers to Psycho, hotel horrors have long provided a rich seam of material for big screen and small. HBO’s The White Lotus, which returns to Sky Atlantic tonight for its second series, swept the board at last month’s Emmys, with ten wins in the limited series category for its sharp social satire set at an upmarket
If you go to Fifa’s website, you’ll find all sorts of things to make your heart sing and tears spring unbidden to your eyes. It’s not just about football, you see, and the making of obscene amounts of money from it. It’s about values. It’s about making football a beacon of good in this wicked
Michael Gove – Suella Braverman ‘is the right person’ to be Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s return to the government benches has become a lightning rod for criticism of Rishi Sunak’s new administration. She had been sacked only a few days prior to her reappointment, thanks to her sending an email containing sensitive information to the
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is widely considered less dangerous than Liz Truss because he is less ideological. For many journalists, Liz Truss was the personification of ideology – and therefore vile. The Guardian’s Rafael Behr summed up the mood when he said: ‘Liz Truss’s Tories are higher than ever on ideology – and they’re refusing
The revolving door in No/ 10 seems to turn even faster these days, given the news that Downing Street will shortly be greeting its fourth director of communications in eight months. Amber de Botton will be next to sip from what has become widely regarded as a poisoned chalice, following the departure of Adam Jones,
The First Minister could not have been clearer. Asked about the possibility of Scotland joining the euro, she said Scotland ‘would not qualify’. ‘I don’t think it is the right option for Scotland,’ she added. The question was put to her earlier this month at a press conference where she presented her new paper on
This week, on BBC radio, I made a confession: I am a denier. Not a climate-change denier – an apocalypse denier. I thought it was a clever point – to distinguish between my acceptance that climate change is happening and my scepticism that it will imminently bring about the fiery destruction of Earth. Apparently not.
British households could save £400 a year if we left the clocks alone this weekend instead of putting them back an hour, according to Professor Aoife Foley, an energy expert at Queen’s University Belfast. The logic is simple. We use a lot more electricity in the evening than in the morning. That is why daylight
Renata is a young paediatrician from St Petersburg who, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeps crying at work. Her colleagues are baffled: why is she sobbing over Ukrainian deaths when she doesn’t have relatives there? She’s surrounded, she says, by ‘complete incomprehension’ from her fellow-doctors, ‘and I’m quietly going insane.’ Her mother Vinera, a school
Ziplining and beekeeping may not be your typical city break activities – but then again, Ottawa is not your typical city. Sandwiched between the more sought-after Toronto and Montreal, it’s also not typically at the top of travellers’ wish-lists. When I started planning my visit, the question I kept being asked was ‘why go there?’.
There is a sweet spot for party leaders in which two key conditions are fulfilled. First, the leader’s party is ahead in the polls. Secondly, the leader is more popular than the party. At the end of his first week in office, Rishi Sunak can at least be content that the latter of these conditions
There isn’t much that unites the fractious, dysfunctional football family. But in the UK, at least, there is something most fans seem to agree on: VAR – Video Assistant Referee – is awful. The technology, introduced to limit errors and controversy, appears to be having the opposite effect. Critics speak of VAR as if it were
When Liz Truss’s premiership came to an abrupt end, it appeared to spell doom for a historic policy shift raised in her leadership campaign. In a break from a widely held but diplomatically fruitless consensus, Truss stood on a platform of reviewing the location of the British embassy in Israel. That legation is still based
It’s finally happened. After months of legal wrangling, Twitter has fallen. All hail King Elon; the ‘bird is freed’. The executives running the show have been defenestrated, including CEO Parag Agrawal and head of safety Vijaya Gadda. Around the virtual watering hole, skittish packs of activists watch nervously as the ground shakes; Donald Trump, the
He’s had his money worries in the past, but life seems to be pretty sweet for Nigel Farage right now. Less than eighteen months after announcing his retirement from frontline politics – claiming there was ‘no money’ in it – Farage’s fortunes seem to be on the up. Newly published accounts for his company, Thorn
Rishi Sunak deserves one of those ‘climate champion’ badges they hand out at primary schools. Why? Because he is not going to fly to the COP27 summit in Egypt – thereby saving 1.65 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to the World Land Trust’s carbon calculator. So what if Ed Miliband thinks it is a failure
When Rishi Sunak entered No. 10 on Tuesday, he paid lip service to the aims of his predecessor. Liz Truss ‘was not wrong to want to improve growth in this country’, he said outside Downing Street. But ‘mistakes were made’ which is why he was installed as Prime Minister: to fix the economic fiasco that