World
Nick Clegg gets unfriended by Facebook
Happy new year Nick Clegg. The onetime Deputy Prime Minister has spent much of the past decade collecting oodles of…
Speaker’s Office doubles under Hoyle
When John Bercow finally left the Speakership at the end of 2019, MPs breathed a sigh of relief. At last,…
Labour loses 20 councillors in Starmer protest
All is not well in Labourland. Now it transpires that 20 councillors have quit Sir Keir Starmer’s party in a…
Ed Miliband doesn’t understand how energy pricing works
Are we about to find out the full foolishness of Ed Miliband’s policy of blocking licences for new oil and…
Small boat crossings up by a quarter on previous year
Labour’s crackdown on people smugglers comes as New Year’s Day Home Office figures show the number of small boats crossing…
Starmer’s queue-cutting blunder shows he isn’t very good at politics
Who would want to be Prime Minister, when even an innocent holiday can lead to a PR disaster? Keir Starmer…
Treasury under fire over private school VAT ads
New year, same problems. Already Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the firing line again – this time facing…
Will terrorists target Donald Trump’s inauguration day?
Donald Trump is an unconventional politician and he responds to terror attacks unconventionally. When bad things happen, he often goes…
Labour rejects calls for Oldham grooming gang inquiry
State failure was a consistent theme of British politics in 2024. So as the new year begins, attention has turned…
Biden confirms New Orleans attacker ‘inspired by Isis’
US president Joe Biden has confirmed that a terrorist who killed 15 people during the New Year’s Day attack in…
Brace yourselves for Meghan Markle’s comeback
As many of us lurched blearily into 2025, desperately trying to remember how, exactly, we’d managed to cause offence to…
Elon Musk calls for Jess Phillips to be jailed
Once Jess Phillips was the queen of Twitter, harrying and hounding the Tories at every chance. But these days it’s…
Forgive Stephen Fry for supporting Stonewall
There has been much indignation at the roll-call of those ennobled in the New Year Honours. There’s been bewilderment that…
Where have Russia’s Zs gone?
A social media post on 30 December: photographs of admittedly-splendid new year decorations in Moscow, archly captioned ‘back to 2021.’…
The problem with ‘diversifying’ the curriculum
As an English teacher, one of my favourite poems to teach, to pupils of almost all ages, is Chinua Achebe’s…
Which political party leader had the best year?
It’s been an eventful year in British politics, with a snap general election and multiple leadership contests keeping political journalists…
Gareth Southgate’s knighthood is a reward for failure
Some of football’s greatest names have been knighted for their achievements in the game. Sir Alf Ramsey received his gong…
China’s hacking frenzy has reached the US Treasury
When Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves visits Beijing in January on a mission to improve ‘economic and financial cooperation’…
How some atheists fell for the new religion of gender identity
The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is probably not on the radar of most people in the UK. It’s a US-based non-profit…
Why has ‘decolonising’ Sadiq Khan accepted a knighthood?
If you are going to give gongs for public service, I guess a three-times elected London mayor ought to be…
Why is Israel being blamed for the battle of Kamal Adwan Hospital?
Every good reporter knows you never bury the lede. You never smother the key point of a story with fluff…
Are Christians allowed to judge the promiscuous?
I was planning to give my mother-in-law the new biography of Ronald Blythe this Christmas. Then I read a review…
The joy of Kemi and Farage’s Christmas feud
A feud can be very tedious and tiring if you’re one of the combatants. But let’s be honest: for onlookers,…
Why Germans love Dinner for One
On his first state visit to Germany as monarch last year, King Charles III cracked a joke only Germans would…
Vodka and the Beatles on a New Year’s Eve in Narva
Narva, the northern Estonian city right on the border with Russia, has been much in the news of late. Not…
