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
A stake in Selfridges – the most iconic department store in the vast retail emporium of Oxford Street – is again up for grabs. It is the latest chapter in an ongoing financial crisis engulfing its Austrian co-proprietor Signa Group, the property empire built by self-made billionaire, René Benko. The original deal for Selfridges dumped
Is that it? This is the immediate and understandable reaction in some quarters to the news that Israel has carried out a series of limited air strikes against Iran. Explosions were reported in the sky over the cities of Isfahan and Tabriz. Details are still sketchy but US officials were quick to brief that Israel
It is hard not to feel a teeny weeny bit sorry for Emma Raducanu, who was hailed as the next big thing in tennis after her fairytale win in the 2021 US Open. She was just 18 when she won at Flushing Meadows, a Grand Slam triumph achieved only three months after she finished her
The heart sinks at the latest thoughts espoused by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, on a future Labour government’s foreign policy. Lammy has penned a 4,000 word essay for Foreign Affairs on his vision of pursuing ‘progressive realism’ for Britain on the international stage. It is a less than catchy phrase that amounts to little
Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, has come up with the daft and damaging idea that athletes should be paid for winning gold at the Olympic Games. In doing so, the track and field governing sports body would become the first to offer prize money in the history of the Olympics. The idea of rewarding
The Foreign Office has been criticised as ‘elitist and rooted in the past’ in a scathing report by some of the UK’s most senior former senior diplomats and officials. The report, entitled ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s approach to International Affairs’, has been penned by the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill; a former
It is now exactly a year since Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, rose to the pinnacle of Scottish politics. Pretty much everything that has happened since entitles those who doubted his leadership skills, political judgment and basic competence to mutter ‘I told you so’. Even his most diehard supporters within the SNP must be starting
Football, so they say, is a results business – except when it comes to Gareth Southgate, the England manager. In his case it is apparently about so many more things than winning. It is about the harmony he brings to the dressing room, his grown-up relationship with the players, the way he conducts his press
It is time to wake up to the growing international threat posed by Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), the group believed to be behind Friday’s terror attack on a Moscow concert hall that left more than 130 people dead. For far too long this Afghanistan-based offshoot of Islamic State, formed in 2015, has been underestimated. Ignoring it
When England play Brazil in a friendly at Wembley tonight they will go into the game as firm favourites to win. It is hard to imagine writing that sentence at any other time in the last fifty years, which is a measure of how much the tables have turned. How so? Today’s Brazil side are
Vaughan Gething, the victor in the Welsh Labour leadership contest, will now become Wales’s first black First Minister. It is both a historic moment and a huge personal achievement. Gething, born in Zambia and raised in Dorset, was also the first black person to become a cabinet minister in one of the UK’s devolved governments, and
The contest to be the next leader of the Welsh Labour Party, and more importantly First Minister of Wales, has been something of a snooze fest. The race kicked off in December, when Mark Drakeford, first minister since 2018, announced that he was stepping down. There are two candidates – Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles
Ten years ago today, on 8 March 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, en-route to Beijing – only to veer wildly off course and vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. There were 239 people on board. How can an aircraft simply disappear without a trace? Even now, no
Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share
The record low turnout for parliamentary elections in Iran, which took place on Friday, is another blow to the regime’s attempts to pretend that all is well in the country. Early reports suggest a turnout of just under 41 per cent nationwide. Iranians in their millions have rejected the regime by choosing to stay at
Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is
Bayern Munich’s decision to part ways with their coach Thomas Tuchel is a rather bizarre form of managerial sacking. Tuchel is leaving the job but will be allowed to stay in charge until the end of the season. This can only make a team that is in free fall more unstable. In a statement on
A senior official in Pakistan has publicly confessed to vote-rigging in the country’s general election earlier this month. It is an unprecedented admission of malpractice that raises fresh questions about the legitimacy of the electoral process and whether the final results were manipulated by the country’s all-powerful military. Commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha claimed that authorities
The latest American drone strike in Iraq, which killed the commander of a powerful Iranian-backed militia group, is one more dangerous escalation in the increasingly unpredictable Middle East conflict. The US strike in the Iraqi capital Baghdad targeted Wisam ‘Abu Baqer’ al-Saadi – a senior leader of Kataib Hezbollah, which the Pentagon blames for the
The levels of cynicism and disillusionment surrounding the upcoming parliamentary elections in Pakistan – due to take place tomorrow – are remarkable, even for a country with a chequered democratic tradition. Few people believe the vote will be free or fair, with widespread speculation that the country’s all-powerful military has already decided the result and will
