Jawad Iqbal is a broadcaster and ex-television news executive. Jawad is a former Visiting Senior Fellow in the Institute of Global Affairs at the LSE
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Whose fault is it that Labour-controlled Birmingham city council, the country’s biggest local authority, is now effectively bankrupt? The answer, according to the council’s leaders, is that it is anyone and everyone’s fault except their own. It is the fault of the government for imposing funding cuts over the last decade, the ballooning costs of rolling
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Jonathan Slater, a former top mandarin at the Department for Education (DfE), has laid the blame for the school building safety crisis fairly and squarely at the door of the Prime Minister. It is an extraordinary public intervention by a former senior civil servant in an ongoing political controversy: former mandarins of Slater’s rank are
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It is safe to say that there is very little chance of the Elgin Marbles turning up for sale on eBay anytime soon. Even those charged with running the British Museum, currently embroiled in a growing scandal over stolen and missing artefacts, would presumably spot them on the site. That is why it is simply
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India – or, to be more precise, its leader Narendra Modi – wants to conquer space. That is why the success of the country’s latest moon mission matters so much. Only three countries – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China – have completed a successful landing on the lunar surface. No country
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Downing Street has extended an invite to Mohammed bin Salman to visit the UK in Autumn. Five years after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is it time to let Saudi Arabia in from the cold? Fraser Nelson speaks to Simon Mayall, a former Middle East adviser in the Ministry of Defence, and to Jawad Iqbal,
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It is absurd to suggest that Prince William’s non-attendance at the Women’s World Cup final in Australia on Sunday is some great public scandal. He faces growing pressure to cut short his family holiday and jet over to Australia pronto. Some critics have even gone as far as to claim that, if William doesn’t do
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Why is the government so keen for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, to visit Britain? Or, as the television comedian and interviewer Mrs Merton might have put it to Rishi Sunak: ‘So, what first attracted you to the stupendously wealthy Saudi leader?’ Bin Salman’s visit is expected to take place
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Political vanity projects come in all shapes and forms but invariably turn out badly. One such is India’s ‘Project Cheetah’, a madcap scheme to reintroduce cheetahs to the country after an absence of just over 70 years. It has the personal backing of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has made it an issue of national
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Sudha Murty, the Indian billionaire and philanthropist, who also happens to be Rishi Sunak’s mother-in-law, has something of a fixation with the cleanliness of spoons. Speaking on a popular food show, Murty revealed herself to be quite the tyrant in the kitchen: ‘I am a pure vegetarian, I don’t even eat eggs or garlic. What
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Iran’s so-called morality police, loathed and feared in equal measure, are back patrolling the streets of the country. They temporarily disappeared from view in the wake of the widespread public protests over the death last September of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman. She was arrested and beaten, and subsequently died in police custody. Her
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Anurag Thakur, India’s information and broadcasting minister, is hopping mad about a sex scene in Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film Oppenheimer. The offending segment shows Cillian Murphy, who plays the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, reciting a famous line from the sacred Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita while making love. ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds,’
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Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the Saudi throne, certainly leads a charmed life. He spent several days in Paris last month meeting the French president Emmanuel Macron. This has now been followed up with a reported invitation from Rishi Sunak to visit Britain this autumn. It would be the first such high-level diplomatic trip
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The Foreign Office is making a big mistake in failing to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist group. The 100,000 strong organisation, the most powerful wing of Iran’s security apparatus, was established after the 1979 Islamic revolution. For decades it has been at the heart of Iranian support for global terrorism on
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The world of cricket suffers from an unjustified moral superiority complex. This explains the periodic howls of outrage when a player or team is caught acting in a manner summed up by the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ — a catch-all sentiment that purports to speak of some higher purpose than just winning. The self-appointed cricket
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The self-serving ethical blind spots of some of those in charge of running international sport never ceases to amaze. Step forward Andrea Gaudenzi, a former top 20 singles player who now leads the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the global governing body of the men’s circuit. Gaudenzi recently revealed that tennis officials have been in
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Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has conceded defeat in his bid to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of Nato. Wallace had been a strong contender for the job, owing to his role in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. But now it seems the role will go to a character in the mould of the incumbent,
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On taking office, Joe Biden promised a new approach to foreign policy based on prioritising democratic values and human rights. The US president spoke of ‘the battle between democracy and autocracy’ as the defining struggle of the time, effectively dividing the world into two clear and opposing camps. Now Biden is having to eat his
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What is it that India’s rulers find so objectionable about Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory that they’ve banned his work from some school classrooms? Firstly, Darwin is not a Hindu and in India’s ruling circles that appears sufficient to cast doubt on his merits as a scientist. Secondly, his cause is not helped by
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Some of football’s biggest names are revealing themselves to be shameless mercenaries on a scale that is staggering even by the sport’s abysmally low standards. Karim Benzema, the Real Madrid striker, is the latest superstar to answer the siren calls of one last big pay day plying his waning talents in Saudi Arabia. Benzema will
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The vicious racist abuse of Vinícius Jr – the Real Madrid and Brazil star – points to something rotten at the very core of Spanish football. La Liga, marketed worldwide as the glamorous pinnacle of club football, is riddled with racism and racist attitudes at every level of the game: from the pitch to the
