Jawad Iqbal

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.

Politics in Bangladesh is very much a one-woman show, starring prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who has ruled the country for the last 15 years. When voters go to the polls in elections today, they face little choice but to re-elect her and the ruling Awami League party. The main opposition – the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) – is boycotting the vote, citing government interference. Many leading opposition figures are under house arrest, behind bars or in exile. An array of independent candidates and a few smaller opposition parties standing for election is meant to convey the impression of an electoral contest of sorts but this shouldn't fool anyone.

The third round of the FA Cup, underway this weekend, is one of the highlights of the football calendar – or so we are meant to think. Premier League and Championship clubs finally enter the fray, prompting breathless talk of part-time bricklayers and plumbers getting to test their skills against elite footballers paid millions. The tantalising prospect is held up of an elite manager – think  Pep Guardiola of Manchester City – patrolling the touchline at some tiny lower league ground. This is all part and parcel of the endless  hyperbole and romanticism surrounding this oldest of cup competitions, often accompanied by seemingly endless drooling over previous acts of ‘giant-killing’ in the competition.

Anyone who wants to strike at the heart of the Iranian regime would be hard-pressed for a more symbolic target than the memorial site for Qasem Soleimani, the senior commander who was assassinated by the United States four years ago. The memorial represents everything that the Tehran regime stands for. That’s why the bomb attacks today, reported to have killed more than 100 people and injuring scores more, will have dealt a significant blow to a regime that relies on projecting an image of total control. Tehran blamed ‘terrorist attacks’ for the two explosions in the southern city of Kerman. The blasts hit crowds gathering to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the killing of Soleimani. Initial eyewitness reports said there were two explosions ten minutes apart.

It seems there is a side to the former prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, that few knew existed. Until now. Newly released government documents have bizarrely revealed Blair's keen interest in football in Northern Ireland. So much so that during his time as prime minister, he was apparently prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths to get an English Premier League football team to relocate there in the late 1990s.  Blair wanted the struggling Premier League side Wimbledon FC, based in south London since 1912, to move to Belfast. A memo dated 16 July 1998 – just months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed – recorded Blair’s view that 'it would be excellent if Wimbledon were to move to Belfast and we should encourage this as much as possible'.

The Premier League’s television paymasters, who plough billions into football, invariably get what they want. That is surely why the decision has been taken to schedule the Wolves-Chelsea match at Molineux stadium in the Midlands tomorrow, on Christmas Eve: so that it can be shown live on Sky Sports. The Premier League has made 'special provisions' to play the game at 1 p.m. – rather than the typical later kick-off time on a Sunday. Ostensibly this has been done to ease travel for supporters, in particular, Chelsea fans trying to get back to London in time for Christmas. But the bigwigs behind these decisions really don’t get it, do they?

Three cheers for the British Museum, which has just announced a new £50 million sponsorship deal with the oil giant BP. The news is a surprise because oil and gas companies are increasingly treated as lepers by the culture sector. The Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Tate are just some of the elite organisations that have shamelessly abandoned longstanding funding relationships with BP following pressure from environmental campaigners. The British Museum deserves credit for standing its ground when few others have dared. The museum says the ten-year deal, believed to be the biggest in its history, will help to kickstart its £1 billion master plan to refurbish and redisplay its permanent collections.

It is hard to feel much in the way of sympathy for Boris Johnson, whose questionable leadership during the pandemic has come under renewed scrutiny during today’s much-anticipated appearance at the  Covid Inquiry. Even so, Johnson made a valid  point – too easily dismissed amidst all the guffawing and glee at the exposure of the derogatory comments in WhatsApp messages. He said that his government was no different from any other when it came to private feuding. Johnson suggested, under questioning from lead counsel Hugo Keith KC, that if WhatsApp messages were available from the Thatcher government showing what its members thought of each other, some of them would have been ‘pretty fruity’.

Is the Indian government guilty of conducting a covert policy of targeted assassinations of political opponents on foreign soil? The question is prompted by explosive revelations that the US authorities have foiled a conspiracy to kill a Sikh separatist on American soil and have issued a warning to India over its suspected involvement. The latest allegations, reported in the Financial Times, come just two months after Canada accused India of being behind the murder of a Sikh activist in Vancouver – a claim that prompted furious denials and denunciations from New Delhi.