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The political focus is, quite rightly, now on Sir Keir Starmer. You hardly need me to point out how tenuous his hold on office now is, or why. But there is one key aspect to that ‘why’ which has been relatively unremarked on. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch scored a direct hit on the Prime Minister when
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It’s the fag end of January, so that means it’s time for Davos – the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in the Swiss mountains, when the world’s smuggest men and the occasional woman come together to play dinner companion one-upmanship. Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now
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Robert Jenrick isn’t often compared to Groucho Marx, but there’s something apposite about the latter’s line, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’. Clearly Jenrick, who was sacked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday before being unveiled as Reform’s latest recruit, does want to be a member
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The most important thing about Robert Jenrick’s sacking isn’t Robert Jenrick. It’s that it is yet another demonstration of Kemi Badenoch’s increasing stature as Tory leader. The Tory leader was presented with a gift – a sacking that was both necessary, obvious and politically useful to her, further cementing her standing as leader For most of her
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What is it going to take for the British government – any British government, of any party – to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood? It was revealed today that the UAE is now limiting the number of students it will enrol at British universities because of the prevalence of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) influence on campuses. The
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Hugh, meet Claire. Claire, meet Hugh. Claire has some guidance that might prove useful for you, Hugh. Should, that is, you not want to come across as any more of an ignorant buffoon than you do already. The problem for Bonneville is that details do matter. And there is a big issue with the detail
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Call me an old cynic, but I knew from the moment that the Alaa Abd el-Fattah affair blew up what the next stage would be. The single most predictable thing in the entire farce – a Whitehall farce indeed, albeit very much not in the old Brian Rix mould – was that when el-Fattah made
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Everyone is familiar with the old insult that you can tell when a politician is not telling the truth because his lips move. Be that as it may, a variation of this has emerged, but this time when someone from West Midlands Police is giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. Did West Midlands Police
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I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people
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It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly
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The most apposite comment on Shabana Mahmood’s proposed reforms to the asylum system came from Kemi Badenoch during yesterday’s Commons statement on the plans: ‘The Home Secretary has done more in 70 days than her predecessor managed in a year.’ On one level that was damning with faint praise, given that Yvette Cooper’s tenure in
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I’m not going to rehash here the details of the memorandum by Michael Prescott, the former independent editorial standards adviser to the BBC, which has now led to the resignations of both Tim Davie, director-general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News. You’d have to have been in a cave for the past week –
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On the field, last night’s losers were Maccabi Tel Aviv, beaten 2-0 by Aston Villa in their Europa League match. Off the field, however, the story was rather different. For one thing, the Maccabi Tel Aviv team arrived in and departed from Birmingham with their heads held high. Despite the attempts of hate campaigners to
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Barely a month ago, the received wisdom was that the Javier Milei experiment in Argentina had effectively collapsed. The self-styled ‘anarcho-capitalist’ president was elected in December 2023 after a campaign in which he waved a chainsaw at rallies, symbolising his promise to slash public spending and destroy the ‘political caste’. But with the peso on
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Today is a perfect day. Not just any old great day, but the first truly perfect one for over six months. As I write this, I sit at my desk looking out over the green acres of a north London park. The leaves are that glorious autumnal reddish brown, the weather is crisp and bright, and
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Last night’s decision by Maccabi Tel Aviv to not take up its allocation of away tickets is deeply depressing. The statements of principle that have come from across the political spectrum, arguing that it is wrong to ban Jewish fans because of the sectarian bigotry of many in that area, are now irrelevant. Castigation of
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Two years ago I started wearing a Star of David necklace, for the first time in my life. The regular weekend hate marches had led to many Jews feeling so intimidated that they no longer felt able to be in central London on Saturdays. Added to that, the more general explosion in anti-Semitic incidents was
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Donald Trump is a bully. He is a braggart. He is venal. But, as this week’s ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas shows, he is also capable of acts of uniquely brilliant statecraft. The US president is a master at using the hard power of his office to force changes that make the world a
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It is doubtless apocryphal, but it’s said that when Ernest Bevin heard someone say that Aneurin Bevan was his own worst enemy, he replied, ‘Not while I’m alive ‘e ain’t.’ Sometimes Israel behaves as if it is its own, and the diaspora’s, worst enemy That came into my mind when it emerged that the Israeli
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As so often, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis hit the nail on the head over yesterday’s terror attack in Manchester. It was, he said, the result of ‘a tidal wave of Jew hated’. Jews have spent the past two years highlighting the danger posed by the authorities’ refusal to take more than perfunctory action against
