News and Opinion

The government has pledged £28 million to private companies to return asylum seekers who arrive in the UK without a visa. The Home Office will enlist transport, housing, medical and legal services firms to ensure illegal migrants are “reintegrated” in their home nation, POLITICO has revealed. According the media outlet, the move is part of a […]

Downing Street has refused to praise cafes, pubs and restaurants offering to provide free meals for vulnerable children over half term. The prime minister’s official spokesperson was given three opportunities to express satisfactions with businesses pitching in to feed the UK’s poorest kids. Instead, they said: “As we have set out before, we are in a different […]

James O’Brien has delivered a scathing assessment of the government’s coronavirus response and claimed the pandemic has exposed just how out of touch with reality leaders have become. The national radio host accused the government of underestimating the impact of Covid-19 is having in communities across the UK. “The contradiction of telling us for months that it was all […]

How was your first lockdown? Productive, learning Spanish and recreating Michelangelo’s David in Lego? Frustrating and made palatable by alcohol and chocolate? Or perhaps, like the politico-turned-comedian Matt Forde, you were one of the two million confined indoors for months. Forde, who has a severe form of asthma, did not set foot outside his north-west […]

An adviser to Rishi Sunak and Tory donor is in pole position to be the next chair of the BBC after frontrunners George Osborne and Nicky Morgan ruled themselves out. Richard Sharp, a multi-millionaire former Goldman Sachs investment banker is being tipped as Boris Johnson’s favourite to take over at the national broadcaster, The Times has claimed. […]

Wales, its former first minister Carwyn Jones was often heard to say, is an old nation but a young democracy. And it’s true. Unified in the 11th century, Wales only began to accumulate the trappings of modern statehood in 1999. But could it be on the path to something more – a seat at the […]

A report into allegations of bullying by home secretary Priti Patel may never be released to the public, a top official has suggested. Newly appointed cabinet secretary Simon Case refused to guarantee the findings would be made public, saying that the decision was now in Boris Johnson’s hands. Patel has been the centre of a probe into […]

Former Tory minister Nicky Morgan has been criticised after suggesting the government refused to extend free school meals because one of its MPs had been called a “scum”. Appearing on Question Time, the previous -culture secretary suggested the government voted down a motion to extend the scheme because of Labour’s handling of the debate. This lead […]

So, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in Guy’s Hospital recently, accompanying my brother-in-law who’s terminally ill with cancer to his consultations and treatments. It’s a hospital I know well – having already seen birth and death there, as well as being diagnosed with – and receiving ongoing treatment for – a myeloid […]

It was a cold evening in Paris on February 12, 1926, when the cream of city society made their way to the Salle des Agriculteurs on Rue d’Athènes, all cloche hats, fox furs, buttonhole carnations and clouded breath. When the doors had closed and everyone was seated, the lights dimmed and applause drowned out the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new book covering 2,000 years of English history at breakneck speed, right up to a gloomy ending in the present day…but with some cause for cautious optimism. English politicians have always displayed a particular interest in history. Maybe it’s a narcissistic thing, feeling that by stepping up to public office they […]

Reader Mary Philo, from Wandsworth, south London, has submitted the following obituary for her husband, a man she describes as a “scholar, Polymath and committed European”.  Simon Edwards, who has died aged 73, did much to enrich the opportunities to study abroad for students at the University of Roehampton where he taught English Literature for […]

The nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are located in Caucasia, the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, no more than 350 miles across at its narrowest point, which is mostly taken up topographically by the Caucasus mountain range. These three countries are widely, but by no means universally, considered to be […]

I miss the days when I’d think nothing of looking at my diary and seeing I had a lunch with someone like Eartha Kitt. The reputation of the West End stage meant that the greatest performers from all over the world were continually converging upon it. I realise now how I took that for granted, […]

An archipelago of 10 islands 350 miles off the coast of Senegal, Cape Verde is a place that was made by slavery. Its islands of jungle, mountains and volcanic landscapes were uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived in 1462, but it then became a key staging post in the transatlantic slave trade, developing a population of […]

A new biography of singer-songwriter John Martyn perfectly captures his flair, as well as his flaws, says GARTH CARTWRIGHT. Newly settled in London in 1992, one evening I ventured from my Forest Gate base to the Half Moon in Putney – an epic east to west hike for a gig – to see John Martyn. […]

A political commentator has delivered a blistering response to Tory MPs who called on Angela Rayner to apologise after labelling one of them a “scum” in the Commons. Tory backbenchers Chris Clarkson and Shaun Bailey were successful in getting an apology from Labour’s deputy leader after she was caught blurting out the insult during an MPs […]

We don’t worry enough about giant monster attacks. Granted, we have problems enough, what with pestilence and political tumult, to be fretting over things whose actual existence is, at best, disputed, but if this year has taught us anything, it’s that nothing can be dismissed as impossible. In lieu of more formal contingency planning, the […]

Think you’re on top of what’s been going on across Europe in the past seven days? Take The New European’s tricky quiz and find out just how much of a Europhile you are… 

I read that Dame Julie Walters, having recently turned 70 and survived a brush with cancer, has said that she’s considering retiring from acting, although she might be tempted back to do Mamma Mia 3 if it happens. What’s perhaps interesting about this announcement is the fact that it’s considered newsworthy at all… A woman […]

A party supported by Nigel Farage has just won millions of votes in a European election standing on a strongly Eurosceptic platform. However this party wasn’t UKIP or the Brexit Party but the Greens. And the year was 1989. The Green Party received 2.3 million votes in that election – including Farage’s – representing a […]

Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre was the biggest winner in the government’s cultural bail-out scheme in England, with a whopping £999,999 coming its way. This made it the envy of far more acclaimed, but less generously supported venues, such as the Bristol Old Vic, and, in London, the Almeida and the Kiln, where the great Indhu Rubasingham, […]

I work in a hut that stands on a floodplain on the edge of the Broads and I often see marsh harriers from my desk: wings in a shallow dihedral, balanced on the edge of a stall, a bird of prey and a virtuoso of slowness. They’ve been extinct once, almost twice as a British […]

LIZ GERARD on how the Daily Star became the voice of the people – while The Sun speaks for Boris Johnson alone. The Daily Star speaks for the nation. Who would have thought it? Fleet Street’s most downmarket tabloid is the country’s acknowledged expert on giant mutant rats, psycho seagulls and lager lout wasps. It […]

A Tory MP who defied her own party to vote in support of Labour’s free school meals motion has quit her government post. Caroline Ansell, the MP for Eastbourne and Willingdon, was one of five Tories who backed an amendment to provide children with free meals over the holidays. The MP quit her role as parliamentary aide […]

Given the low-level background dread that is life in 2020, picking out any individual source of anxiety can often be all-but impossible – but one obvious exception for many of us is looking towards the impending US presidential election, now less than two weeks away. In the pit of our stomachs, many of us have […]

As the election results came in from New Zealand I was lucky enough to be able to celebrate with a small (fewer than six!) group of Kiwis, close friends and former colleagues of victorious Jacinda Ardern. With so much bad news around, it was great to be able to enjoy a stunning Labour victory; a […]

A Tory minister has been labelled “shameful” after he defended a government memo attacking Marcus Rashford’s call for free school meals. A leaked memo has shown that Tory MPs are being ask to shift the blame for a failed vote to extend free school meals to children during the holidays onto Labour. The statement said MPs should […]