Jawad Iqbal

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 the club’s website, Jan-Christian Dreesen, the Bayern chief executive, said: ‘In an open, good conversation we came to the decision to mutually end our collaboration in the summer.’ This is the same Dreesen who told reporters hours earlier that Tuchel would not be dismissed anytime soon. Tuchel was singing the same tune about an end to collaboration, but promising to do everything he can ‘to ensure maximum success’. It’s difficult to see how this can work.

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 in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the final voting numbers so that the candidates who were ‘losing’ the elections ‘were made to win’. Chattha says there was so much ‘pressure’ on him to manipulate the results that he contemplated suicide, before opting to make a public confession: ‘I take responsibility for the wrong in Rawalpindi.

The Labour party has a problem with Muslims. A new poll suggests that British Muslim voters, who have traditionally supported Labour in huge numbers, are deserting the party over its handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Backing for Labour from the Muslim community has fallen massively since the 2019 general election from 86 per cent to 60 per cent, according to a poll conducted by Survation. It was commissioned by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN), which promotes British Muslim engagement with the party.

Is it really some kind of underhand racist smear for Labour to claim that Rishi Sunak ‘doesn’t get Britain’? This is the charge being laid by No. 10 staffers at the door of the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who made the accusation during the first Prime Minister’s Questions of the year on Wednesday. Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, whose parents came from India in the 1970s, told a radio interviewer that she was prepared to give Starmer the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that the remark ‘wasn’t about race’. She then went on to add that ‘only he can know what he is implying’, while somehow  making it perfectly obvious that there was no real doubt in her mind about what Starmer meant in saying Sunak didn’t ‘get Britain’.

The chairman of Channel 4 has taken a swipe at the lack of diversity of the latest appointments to its board. The appointees, who join the board for a three-year term, were announced by Ofcom and approved by Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary. In a leaked memo to staff, Sir Ian Cheshire hit out at the appointments of four new white non-executive directors which he claimed lagged behind the broadcaster’s own diversity targets. ‘These appointments will improve representation on the board but do not yet meet the levels of representation throughout the organisation’, opined Cheshire.