Jawad Iqbal is a broadcaster and ex-television news executive. Jawad is a former Visiting Senior Fellow in the Institute of Global Affairs at the LSE
The Labour leadership has only itself to blame for becoming embroiled in a bitter and divisive row over the future of Dianne Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. She was suspended from the party in April last year after writing a letter to the Observer that appeared to play down racism against
The provisional England squad for the Euros unveiled by manager Gareth Southgate contains one notable omission: Jordan Henderson. That’s a big surprise, not because the midfielder deserves to be on the plane to Germany this summer, but for what it says about the thinking of the normally ultra-loyal Southgate, who is often accused of picking
Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi and the country’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian have been killed in a helicopter crash in north-western Iran, according to the country’s state media. The news that Raisi – second only to the country’s supreme leader in the power structure – and Amir-Abdollahian – a critical and influential figure in the ruling
Manchester City have been crowned Premier League champions for an unprecedented fourth time in a row. They go into the record books after beating West Ham 3-1 at the Etihad stadium. It is a remarkable feat: never in 135 years of English league football has a club won four consecutive top-flight titles. City can arguably
Plaid Cymru’s sudden decision to end its co-operation deal with Labour in Wales piles even more pressure on the First Minister, Vaughan Gething. It caps a tumultuous week for Gething, who on Thursday sacked one of his ministers in a row over a leaked text message. The collapse of the deal with Plaid leaves Welsh
A suggested government ban on rainbow-coloured lanyards in the civil service has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved divisive at the highest reaches of government. The idea for the ban came from Esther McVey, officially a minister without portfolio but more widely known as ‘the minister for common sense’. In a speech on Monday, McVey suggested that permanent
Two questions dominated last night’s Eurovision Song Contest final in Malmo, Sweden. First, whether 20-year-old Eden Golan, Israel’s entrant, would defy the odds and actually win. And secondly, whether some kind of security breach involving pro-Palestinian protesters would result in the final being disrupted. In the end, proceedings passed off relatively peacefully. The eventual winner
The Indian chess prodigy Dommaraju Gukesh has made history by becoming the youngest challenger ever for the world chess title. His shot at the world championship comes after a sensational victory at the prestigious men’s Candidates chess tournament in Toronto last weekend. ‘I am so relieved and so happy’, he told reporters in his trademark
University campuses across the United States are facing a growing wave of student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Campus officials have responded by taking unprecedented measures, including calling in the police, to try to clamp down on the unrest and contain an increasingly chaotic situation. The end result? Some of America’s most prestigious
A stake in Selfridges – the most iconic department store in the vast retail emporium of Oxford Street – is again up for grabs. It is the latest chapter in an ongoing financial crisis engulfing its Austrian co-proprietor Signa Group, the property empire built by self-made billionaire, René Benko. The original deal for Selfridges dumped
Is that it? This is the immediate and understandable reaction in some quarters to the news that Israel has carried out a series of limited air strikes against Iran. Explosions were reported in the sky over the cities of Isfahan and Tabriz. Details are still sketchy but US officials were quick to brief that Israel
It is hard not to feel a teeny weeny bit sorry for Emma Raducanu, who was hailed as the next big thing in tennis after her fairytale win in the 2021 US Open. She was just 18 when she won at Flushing Meadows, a Grand Slam triumph achieved only three months after she finished her
The heart sinks at the latest thoughts espoused by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, on a future Labour government’s foreign policy. Lammy has penned a 4,000 word essay for Foreign Affairs on his vision of pursuing ‘progressive realism’ for Britain on the international stage. It is a less than catchy phrase that amounts to little
Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, has come up with the daft and damaging idea that athletes should be paid for winning gold at the Olympic Games. In doing so, the track and field governing sports body would become the first to offer prize money in the history of the Olympics. The idea of rewarding
The Foreign Office has been criticised as ‘elitist and rooted in the past’ in a scathing report by some of the UK’s most senior former senior diplomats and officials. The report, entitled ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s approach to International Affairs’, has been penned by the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill; a former
It is now exactly a year since Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, rose to the pinnacle of Scottish politics. Pretty much everything that has happened since entitles those who doubted his leadership skills, political judgment and basic competence to mutter ‘I told you so’. Even his most diehard supporters within the SNP must be starting
Football, so they say, is a results business – except when it comes to Gareth Southgate, the England manager. In his case it is apparently about so many more things than winning. It is about the harmony he brings to the dressing room, his grown-up relationship with the players, the way he conducts his press
It is time to wake up to the growing international threat posed by Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), the group believed to be behind Friday’s terror attack on a Moscow concert hall that left more than 130 people dead. For far too long this Afghanistan-based offshoot of Islamic State, formed in 2015, has been underestimated. Ignoring it
When England play Brazil in a friendly at Wembley tonight they will go into the game as firm favourites to win. It is hard to imagine writing that sentence at any other time in the last fifty years, which is a measure of how much the tables have turned. How so? Today’s Brazil side are
Vaughan Gething, the victor in the Welsh Labour leadership contest, will now become Wales’s first black First Minister. It is both a historic moment and a huge personal achievement. Gething, born in Zambia and raised in Dorset, was also the first black person to become a cabinet minister in one of the UK’s devolved governments, and
