If David Lammy becomes foreign secretary after this year’s election, he will face tricky diplomatic terrain. Britain’s foreign relationships have been tattered by a tortuous exit from the EU. The Global South is angry about the unfair Covid vaccine rollout and Britain’s support for Israel. A Donald Trump presidency would inject uncertainty into America’s security guarantee for Europe. Yet the biggest change, as Lammy all but admits in a 4,035-word essay for Foreign Affairs, is Britain’s relative decline. He writes: "When former prime minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street 27 years ago, the British economy was larger than India’s and China’s combined. The United Kingdom still administered a major Asian city, Hong Kong, as a colony… Today, the global order is messy ...

Brussels Nigel Farage has never looked more satisfied. Europe’s hard right was handed a gift today when the police tried to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Farage was speaking as the police arrived to deliver a public order notice which said they had 15 minutes to shut down the conference.  The order came from the local Socialist Party mayor Emir Kir who tweeted that the “far-right is not welcome” and explained that he banned the conference to ensure “public safety”. The police said one reason for the order were reports that counter-protesters were planning on attending the venue. There was no public disorder within the venue itself. Organisers have said that they are challenging the order in the courts.  Nonetheless, a small ...

Here’s a thought experiment: if you really believed the world as you knew it was in peril, and that it was your purpose in life to avert catastrophe before it was too late, what would you do? How would you go about convincing everyone else – normal, sensible people who aren’t too worried about the end of the world, thank you very much – to listen to you? How would you grab their attention? If you are Liz Truss, the answer is to write a book. Not just any book: a memoir-cum-manifesto, published a mere 18 months after she was forced from office in disgrace, with the grandiose title Ten Years to Save the West. Much-hyped despite the embarrassingly low advance fee ...

Liz Truss is fatally self-aware. She has spent her time out of office recording her flaws with painstaking accuracy. Extracts from her book Ten Years to Save the West, which is published today, establish why she succumbed sooner than a lettuce. To understand why Truss was so poorly equipped to reside in No 10, remember that the prime minister must command a majority in the House of Commons. When she became PM, the Tory party was fractious and bitter. Removing leaders had become a habit. Some Conservative MPs made it known that Truss was anathema to them. They viewed her as fringe and crazed. As John Rentoul reminds us, Rishi Sunak won the most support from MPs. But it was the ...

The Prime Minister is expected to address the House of Commons later to update parliament on the RAF’s role in the Middle East over the weekend. British Typhoons intercepted Iranian drones that were heading for Israel. The attack was Iran’s response to an Israeli strike on its consulate in Damascus on 1 April. The Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, confirmed on the media round this morning that the RAF’s main job was to backfill American jets that were on a mission against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The British government did so at the Americans’ request. Cameron echoed President Joe Biden’s message that Israel should, in the context of international relations, “take the win”. Both the British government and the US are ...

The stakes in the controversy surrounding Angela Rayner’s tax affairs have soared. The Labour deputy leader has said she will resign if the police find that she has committed a criminal offence. The move comes after Greater Manchester Police reopened an investigation into whether Rayner broke electoral law by giving the wrong address as her primary residence. This is a separate issue to the accusation that she did not pay the correct amount of capital gains tax on the sale of her house in Vicarage Road in 2015. The police have reopened the investigation after they said Tory MP James Daly complained about their handling of the case. In a statement Rayner said: “I’ve repeatedly said I would welcome the chance ...

Can Humza Yousaf survive a thrashing at the general election? Possibly, perhaps even probably. Should he? A different question with a different answer. Scotland’s First Minister has been in post for just over a year, a period that amounts to a sorry tale of missteps, crises self-inflicted and otherwise, and the initially slow and now not-so-slow dissipation of authority. For SNP politicians used to the whip-smart drive and popularity that came with the leadership of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, it is all a bit of a head-scratcher. They have grown entitled and comfortable on the back of prolonged success, of doing what they are told and watching opponents tumble at their feet. Yousaf won the race to succeed Sturgeon – if ...

Only 13 per cent of people would choose Rishi Sunak over Keir Starmer to put up a shelf, according to a poll from JL Partners. This is one of the most revealing surveys to come out this year. The question usually asked by this type of poll is who would you rather have a pint with. That was when people wanted their politicians relatable, chummy and amusing. But this is a sober age. The kids don’t drink any more. Putting up a shelf is a better symbol for the task facing our leaders than lobbing banter across the bar. The metric had to change because of Boris Johnson. He was the archetypal who-would-you-have-a-pint-with? prime minister. But he became a drunken bore ...