Politics

Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Candy Brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not. Papers get to call it a ‘third home’ because she has the use of a ministerial apartment – ‘grace and favour’, obviously, to make it sound extra posh – in Westminster, but she’s not exactly going to be flipping the place in Admiralty House

Seeing those photographs of Angela Rayner on Hove beach in broad daylight drinking a vast glass of rosé (‘day wine’ as my lot call it) I felt a rare flash of FOMO. I met a lot of politicians when I worked as a political columnist for the Mail on Sunday in my twenties, and I’ve rarely craved their company since. But seeing Rayner on my doorstep (doing one of the things I used to most love doing before I became an invalid – boozing on Hove beach in broad daylight) I felt a pang of loss. But then, we’d have only been half a glass down before we’d have started screeching

The appearance of vigilantes on the streets of Bournemouth certainly represents a worrying development. What is less widely-known is that civilian law enforcers have also started to appear on the streets in London. London is now exhibiting much the same problems that have been in incubation elsewhere for years I only became aware of this on Monday when walking up Tottenham Court Road. There in the afternoon I spotted two personnel clad in orange patrol vests emblazoned with the words ‘Street Warden’ (deployed, as it explained at the dorsal base, by the Fitzrovia Partnership, an organisation that works with local businesses) questioning three youths who, to judge by the expression

In September 2022, I came to the UK in the hope of leaving behind an overbearing and censorious state. In 2021, an op-ed I wrote for the Nikkei Asia Review provoked the ire of the Singaporean authorities because I exposed their feigned ignorance about cartels abusing lockdown loopholes during Covid-19. The UK state – while much less competent than Singapore’s – is no less heavy-handed when it comes to dealing with dissent In response, the government waged a character assassination campaign against me and blocked foreign news outlets that dared to cover my case. When I was offered a lifeline – a chance to study for a master’s in international security at