Politics

Oh dear. It seems that Tobias Ellwood has slipped up one too many times. On Monday night he posted a video declaring that Afghanistan under the Taliban has become a ‘country transformed’ with ‘security vastly improved, ‘corruption reduced’, the ‘opium trade ended’. An immediate outcry followed, with a furious Mark Francois raising the matter at PMQs on Wednesday. Ellwood apologised on Piers Morgan’s TalkTV show and subsequently deleted the video but the damage was done. Four members of the Defence Select Committee – Kevan Jones, Mark Francois, Derek Twigg and Richard Drax – have now tabled and published a confidence motion in him, meaning a vote will take place in

Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, has become the sage of the cost-of-living crisis. He is closing in on national treasure status, dispensing helpful advice on TV and online to help people avoid rip-off charges and ensure they are getting the benefits they are entitled to. This is all good work, but as the housing campaigner Anya Martin notes, Lewis, and resources like him, rarely focus on increasing earnings. Watching the similarly themed American show How to Get Rich on Netflix, the contrast is noticeable. The expert here, an American named Ramit Sethi, does all the Lewis-style tricks to save pennies here and there – but also encourages his subjects to leverage their

Sir Richard Moore, head of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – follows the tradition of only giving one public address a year, so it is inevitably scrutinised carefully for signs and portents. His speech at the UK embassy in Prague, inviting Russians to spy for Britain, required no particular reading between the lines. After a suitable preamble noting Britain’s strong relationship with the Czech Republic, he pivoted from Moscow’s brutal suppression of the liberal Prague Spring in 1968 to Soviets, the bravest of whom, seeing ‘the moral travesty of what was being done…acted on their convictions by throwing in their lot with us, as partners for freedom.’ This was