Graham Watts

Trade-offs and compromises are part of all government policy. One day’s priority can easily be eclipsed by the next day’s events. As a recent example, Ed Miliband has been stressing the government’s manifesto pledge to veto new fossil fuels extraction in the North Sea but the pressure on energy prices caused by the war in the Middle East has encouraged Rachel Reeves to suggest that the UK should control more of its own energy supply by opening up new offshore oil and gas fields; the implication being that the immediate economic interest is greater than the longer-term net zero targets.

The misjudgement over Stamp Duty which led to Angela Rayner’s resignation as Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, may be deeply embarrassing for her (and her party) but it will likely save her from the embarrassment of failing to achieve the government’s target of delivering 1.5 million new homes by 2029. In an interview on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, back in December 2024, the then DPM vehemently argued that this was her target, and she would be accountable for it. That interview might best be remembered for her inability to respond to Phillips’s assertion – backed up by quoting the government’s own data – that five out of every seven new homes would be needed just to keep pace with immigration. If the 1.

Angela Rayner’s lunchtime announcement to the House of Commons, giving details of the government’s response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report, was a week earlier than the Prime Minister’s commitment to respond to the Inquiry within six months of its publication on 4 September 2024. Frankly, it’s the only deadline that has been met in the sorry saga that has taken almost eight years to bring the Inquiry’s business to a conclusion. Sir Martin Moore-Bick made 58 recommendations, 37 of which were directed at government, with the remainder directed at other bodies and institutions.

The BBC's Strictly Come Dancing returned this weekend, but rather than being met with the usual fanfare there is a growing feeling that the glitter ball may have been irreparably tarnished. Some former contestants have alleged that they were subject to bullying by their professional partners and – having already used almost 300 contestants in its now 20 year history – many think that the producers have been scraping the bottom of the celebrity barrel in recent years. Such criticisms have led to speculation that it might be time to cancel the show. Cancel culture won’t yet claim Strictly as another victim. There are signs of life, however. This year there has clearly been an attempt to secure some genuine celebrities amongst the fifteen hopefuls.

Today’s long-awaited publication of the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry provides a forensic account of the ‘root causes’ of the tragedy that led to the loss of 72 lives. More than seven years since those awful early morning hours of 14 June 2017, Sir Martin Moore Bick’s 1,694 page report represents another traumatic reference point for the victims and their relatives. First and foremost, it is important to recognise their continued suffering and to extend heartfelt sympathy to all those impacted by the tragedy.  Six weeks after the fire, I assisted the choreographer Arlene Phillips in arranging the Gala for Grenfell at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End. In preparation for that event, we visited the ravaged tower and its surrounding environs.

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas. The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia's but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay for a decade.

The acting commander of the Azov brigade, Major Bohdan (pronounced Bogdan) Krotevych, is a hero in Ukraine. In last year’s Siege of Mariupol, he and 2,000 men – together with civilians and other units of the Ukrainian armed forces – held out for almost three months as defenders of the Azovstal Iron and Steel works. That huge network of tunnels and bunkers provided shelter to withstand daily bombardments from far more numerous Russian forces. Ironically, it was the Soviet Union that built this enormous infrastructure to withstand such aerial bombardment.  Major Krotevych – his call sign is 'Tavr', meaning a native of Crimea – spoke to me from the Azov Brigade HQ in Kyiv. He is surprisingly young – just 30 – and unsurprisingly tired.

Michael Gove’s building safety announcement today addresses the two contrasting problems of the cladding scandal, but fails to provide any convincing solutions. On the one hand, the Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (with the unmemorable acronym DLUHC – apparently pronounced 'de-Luck') has finally brought to an end the absurdity of people living in buildings of between three and six storeys (11 to 18 metres), which are clad in unsafe external wall systems, being required to take out loans to remediate homes that were never fit for the purpose of keeping them safe when purchased.

The government's Building Safety Bill has been a long time coming, but its publication today offers little certainty for residents caught up in Britain's cladding scandal. For leaseholders, the bad news is this: many will remain trapped in buildings cloaked in combustible external wall systems. Despite the housing secretary Robert Jenrick’s insistence that the new system would 'reassure the vast majority of residents’, there is little in the bill to alleviate their worries.