Mehdi Hasan

If you haven't read Jemima Khan's interviews with Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in this week's New Statesman, you really should. The Livingstone interview hasn't attracted the best of headlines for the Labour candidate - "Ken Livingstone in Tory 'riddled with homosexuals' row" - but it is ludicrous to accuse Ken of being homophobic or ... read more

For some in the west, and in particular here in the UK, the murder of 77 people in Norway by Anders Breivik seemed unbelievable and inexplicable. It didn't compute. The moment the news broke, for instance, Labour MP Tom Harris took to Twitter to blame - yep, you guessed it - Muslim extremists for the killings. To be fair to Harris, he was just articulating out loud what others - ... read more

Matthew D'Ancona, one of the most well-informed commentators on the coalition, makes two important points on the fallout from the Huhne resignation in his Sunday Telegraph column today:

1) He identifies Ed Davey as a future Lib Dem leader, on the basis of the latter's promotion to the Cabinet and closeness to Clegg (a point I made on Andrew Neil's Daily Politics show on Friday):

Meet Ed ... read more

In all the hype and hyperbole surrounding David Miliband's latest "attack" on Ed Miliband, it is important to remember that the former foreign secretary's headline-grabbing essay in this week's New Statesman was meant, formally at least, to be a response to a long article on social democracy written by Roy Hattersley and academic Kevin Hickson and published in Political Quarterly ... read more

So Chris Huhne has gone off to defend his innocence in court. Arise Ed Davey!

If the former Energy and Climate Change Secretary is found innocent, will he become a lightning rod for left-wing, anti-coalition dissent on the Lib Dem backbenches? Much is made, for example, of his SDP past.

I was on BBC2's Daily Politics earlier discussing the fallout from the resignation, and host Andrew Neil ... read more

Ed Miliband had a bad, bad January - but ended on a high. Having fallen behind in the polls, been attacked by his guru, got his message mixed up on cuts and gaffed on Twitter, the final few days of the month saw him help ... read more

Last night, on my way home after doing the late-night paper review on Sky News, I got involved in a minor Twitter spat with Iain Dale over the nature of Iran's nuclear programme. Iain is one of my favourite Tories - intelligent, open-minded, unpredictable, amusing. He's also my publisher - which means, of course, that ... read more

On last night's Question Time, well-known Middle East expert and respected nuclear analyst Melanie Phillips proclaimed:

The IAEA and virtually every western government believes that Iran is racing to develop a nuclear weapon. It is behaving entirely as if it is. It is boasting that it is.

Put aside the nonsensical and deluded claim that Iran has "boasted" it is building nukes (eh? Where? When? That would ... read more

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. So I took the opportunity to write a "Thunderer" column (£) for the Times, entitled: "I am shamed by Muslim attitudes to the Holocaust".

If you can't get behind the paywall, here are the crucial paras:

We British Muslims prefer to wallow in vicarious victimhood. Only "our" tragedies matter: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya roll off our tongues. But none of these ... read more

There's an interesting and provocative letter published in today's Guardian that claims the Leveson inquiry has

so far failed to adequately address unfair media coverage as it relates to less prominent cases, including those relating to Muslims and Islam, focusing as it does on the impact of phone hacking on celebrities and other high-profile individuals.

The letter calls for an "alternative inquiry" to investigate

widespread and systematic ... read more

In this week's New Statesman, I have a piece on how Labour is now fixated on a political and economic agenda set by the Tories, who are much more adept at controlling the narrative and "framing" issues. I refer to the work of US cognitive linguist and progressive thinker George Lakoff who argues that attacking your opponents' frame ends up reinforcing their message. Lakoff outlines ... read more

1) Let us be under no illusions: Frederick Anderson Goodwin is an awful, awful man who doesn't deserve anyone's sympathy - or pity. I say this not just because, as Alex Brummer points out in today's Mail, "he was he felt able to conduct an extramarital affair with a senior female colleague" and "then hid behind a court injunction until he was found out", but ... read more