All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Hours after his first bilateral meeting with Donald Trump earlier this week, the South Korean President Lee Jae-myung admitted that he feared that his one-to-one would become a ‘Zelensky moment’. Although the reality was far from the case, it made for somewhat vomit-inducing listening. As Lee showered Trump with praise for his handling of North
Taylor Swift is engaged – and women the world over are rejoicing. Not merely because they care about Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce or the Ralph Lauren shorts he wore at the proposal, but because, in a profound way, her story has become theirs. Swift is not just the world’s biggest pop star;
When I learned that the Royal Opera House had booked Russian soprano Anna Netrebko to sing Tosca in the new production which opens its 2025/26 season next month (and, later in the season, Turandot), I felt a surge of anger. How could they be so callous, so blasé, about the boycott of Russian artists with
Like death and taxes, the second instalment of With Love, Meghan has come around again, sloughing into view to the usual chorus of disapproval and confusion. The news recently broke that Netflix has deigned to allow Harry ‘n’ Meghan another five years of deciding not to make their future projects. In light of that, this
There are dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming ‘race war’. The protests outside migrant hotels prove the ‘native English’ have had a gutful of these ‘invaders’, say nefarious actors on X. Others foresee a civil war: a showdown between a haughty left and a resurgent right over the very soul of the kingdom.
Nigel Farage’s latest immigration plan contains a proposal that deserves to be taken seriously. Reform UK’s ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ promises mass deportations, detention camps, and the withdrawal from international treaties. Those elements will raise both legal and moral challenges. But another part of the package is something that deserves attention and credit: a scheme to
Power, said Henry Kissinger, is the ultimate aphrodisiac – but it also seems to improve your property prospects too. Angela Rayner is back in the headlines, having just purchased a new £800,000 property in Hove. She is under fire amid questions about her two residences: a grace and favour flat in Admiralty House and her
The magic grandpa is back in town! Jeremy Corbyn’s new leftwing outfit – ‘Your Party’ – is seeking a rebrand, ahead of its long-awaited launch. The outlet has so far got off to a rocky start, after co-leader Zarah Sultana shocked some involved by launching it late one Thursday night. But now, in a bid
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Today James Heale has been on quite the magical mystery tour. Bundled into a bus at 7.45 a.m. along with a group of other hacks, he was sent off to an aircraft hangar in Oxfordshire where Nigel Farage finally unveiled his party’s long-awaited deportations strategy. The unveiling of ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ was accompanied by some
If Nigel Farage wanted headline treatment for his immigration speech at Oxford Airport this morning, he certainly got it. So far the reaction has been fairly predictable. But politically, there is a good deal more to this affair than meets the eye. The difficulty faced by Farage’s opponents is that, whatever the details, the man’s
Every August Bank Holiday my neighbours in Notting Hill Gate pull down the shutters and disappear. Cornwall, Tuscany, anywhere but here. ‘You’re mad to come back for it’, they tell me. It is, of course, the Notting Hill Carnival. Does two million people celebrating together lose its value because a few hundred are arrested? I
The Duke of Wellington, assessing newly arrived British soldiers during the Peninsular War, is supposed to have said, ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.’ Having watched Donald Trump greet Vladimir Putin with a red carpet in Alaska a week ago, then direct his
Geographically, eastern Australia is about as far from Israel and Gaza as anyone can get. But given the Australian government’s provocative decision to recognise a Palestinian state while Hamas still exists, you could be forgiven for thinking the conflict is being fought on our doorstep. And on Tuesday, it was revealed that, in a very
In an Oxfordshire aircraft hanger this morning, Nigel Farage finally unveiled his party’s long-awaited deportations strategy. For six weeks, asylum and small boats has dominated the airwaves. Now, after a successful summer offensive, Farage laid out his plan to deal with the problems he has exploited so successfully. To stop the small boats, he is
Anyone who has looked at modern football and muttered ‘the game’s gone’ has a point. Nothing confirms this belief more than the obscene amounts of money and the hypocrisy surrounding the drawn out transfer saga of Newcastle United’s Alexander Isak. Liverpool fans think Newcastle are behaving badly by not selling them their best player, yet
Its debts are out of control. There is very little space left to raise taxes any further. And the political establishment can’t agree on anything apart from postponing the whole issue for another year or two. It is a description that could apply to plenty of countries, and not least the UK. But right now,
Quietly, without even a press release let alone a fanfare, Britain over the past 12 months has just passed a grim milestone. The number of people on out of work benefits has surpassed the peak reached in the early 1990s. Indeed, it is higher now than it was at the peak of Covid-19 in 2020.
There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. The late Virginia Giuffre has gone a step further by serving up her final helping of vengeance against Prince Andrew by publishing her sure-to-be-revelatory memoir, Nobody’s Girl, from beyond the grave this October. Giuffre collaborated with the American writer Amy Wallace on a 400-page book
Prime Minister François Bayrou has recalled parliament for a confidence vote on 8 September, betting he can outmanoeuvre a surging protest movement before it paralyzes France. The grassroots ‘Bloquons tout’ campaign, echoing the gilets jaunes and fuelled by the hard left, plans to halt trains, buses, schools, taxis, refineries and ports. It is a general
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’ Britain’s free-speech wars are
If I had to summarise, in a word, the mood of the nation in 2025, I’d probably plump for fraught. There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from
For the second time in a week, Emmanuel Macron has been criticised for allowing antisemitism to run riot in France. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed last week that antisemitism had ‘surged’ in France after Macron announced his intention to recognise Palestinian statehood next month. It is not only France’s Jews who are living in
The flag-raisings in towns and cities across the country are an inevitable consequence of elites’ seeming preference for every flag but England’s. High-status flags: Ukraine, Palestine, Pride. Low-status flags: Union Jack, St George’s Cross. It is possible, of course, to favour multiple flags. Although a Scot, I am quite partial to St George’s Cross, a
Most people deplore bad behaviour in public and gratuitous breaches of etiquette and manners on trains and buses. Few would disagree with comments made yesterday by the shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden, that ‘inconsiderate and obnoxious behaviour blights the lives of the travelling public’. Yet many, contrariwise, would disagree with his proposal to remedy this
The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum
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
‘Are you ready?’ a kind but optimistic friend asked me a few weeks ago with a look of genuine concern. But I am not on the verge of moving house, getting married, starting a new job or having a baby, all of which might have merited her anxiety. Instead, my friend was cautioning me to
One viewer whispered on the livestream: ‘Yes, keep going… Keep going’. Moments later, Jean Pormanove was dead. Last Sunday night around 10,000 people watched as 46-year-old Raphaël Graven slumped forward on camera, unresponsive. As he died the chat spiralled into a frenzy, as the moment was streamed from a quiet village north of Nice in
Fertility rates in Britain are in freefall. The average number of children per woman is now 1.44, the lowest in recorded history. Among millennials, childlessness at 30 is no longer unusual but expected: half of UK women born in 1990 were still childless by that age, twice the rate of their mothers. Many couples will
19 min listen
Jamie Greene, an MSP for the West of Scotland region, defected earlier this year from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. Most defections in Scotland – indeed across the UK – seem to be from the Tories to Reform, so what is behind Jamie’s motivations to go in a different direction? What are his reflections
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
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has won what looks like a significant victory in her quest to eradicate squatting. About 250 carabinieri and police officers took possession this week of a former paper mill in Milan which had been occupied by numerous groups of squatters for 31 years. The 4,000 square metre building was a
Every now and again a new phenomenon emerges in human communication or social behaviour which everyone recognises but none can name, because there is no term for it. There’s a sense that a word or phrase needs inventing. ‘Virtue signalling’ was one such development, and it came in the pages of The Spectator in 2015 from James
Britain is not lacking in trade unions – if anything, they have become one of the country’s few reliable constants. The latest example: the London underground workers who are set to go on strike for seven days in September. In theory, trade unions exist to protect workers from the overreach of power – and in
