Stephen Pollard

It’s the fag end of January, so that means it’s time for Davos – the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in the Swiss mountains, when the world’s smuggest men and the occasional woman come together to play dinner companion one-upmanship. Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now

Robert Jenrick isn’t often compared to Groucho Marx, but there’s something apposite about the latter’s line, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’. Clearly Jenrick, who was sacked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday before being unveiled as Reform’s latest recruit, does want to be a member

The most important thing about Robert Jenrick’s sacking isn’t Robert Jenrick. It’s that it is yet another demonstration of Kemi Badenoch’s increasing stature as Tory leader. The Tory leader was presented with a gift – a sacking that was both necessary, obvious and politically useful to her, further cementing her standing as leader For most of her

What is it going to take for the British government – any British government, of any party – to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood?  It was revealed today that the UAE is now limiting the number of students it will enrol at British universities because of the prevalence of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) influence on campuses. The

Hugh, meet Claire. Claire, meet Hugh. Claire has some guidance that might prove useful for you, Hugh. Should, that is, you not want to come across as any more of an ignorant buffoon than you do already. The problem for Bonneville is that details do matter. And there is a big issue with the detail

Call me an old cynic, but I knew from the moment that the Alaa Abd el-Fattah affair blew up what the next stage would be. The single most predictable thing in the entire farce – a Whitehall farce indeed, albeit very much not in the old Brian Rix mould – was that when el-Fattah made

Everyone is familiar with the old insult that you can tell when a politician is not telling the truth because his lips move. Be that as it may, a variation of this has emerged, but this time when someone from West Midlands Police is giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. Did West Midlands Police

I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people

It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly

The most apposite comment on Shabana Mahmood’s proposed reforms to the asylum system came from Kemi Badenoch during yesterday’s Commons statement on the plans: ‘The Home Secretary has done more in 70 days than her predecessor managed in a year.’ On one level that was damning with faint praise, given that Yvette Cooper’s tenure in

I’m not going to rehash here the details of the memorandum by Michael Prescott, the former independent editorial standards adviser to the BBC, which has now led to the resignations of both Tim Davie, director-general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News. You’d have to have been in a cave for the past week –

Donald Trump is a bully. He is a braggart. He is venal. But, as this week’s ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas shows, he is also capable of acts of uniquely brilliant statecraft. The US president is a master at using the hard power of his office to force changes that make the world a

It is doubtless apocryphal, but it’s said that when Ernest Bevin heard someone say that Aneurin Bevan was his own worst enemy, he replied, ‘Not while I’m alive ‘e ain’t.’ Sometimes Israel behaves as if it is its own, and the diaspora’s, worst enemy That came into my mind when it emerged that the Israeli

As so often, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis hit the nail on the head over yesterday’s terror attack in Manchester. It was, he said, the result of ‘a tidal wave of Jew hated’. Jews have spent the past two years highlighting the danger posed by the authorities’ refusal to take more than perfunctory action against

Back in the day – in 1992 – the think tank I worked for commissioned a series of focus groups of swing voters in marginal seats. They had all voted Conservative in that year’s election, having toyed with and then deciding not to vote Labour. I thought of those voters yesterday, when the Prime Minister