Imagine Gary Lineker in 2029. A foreign, but not distant, prospect. Silver hair still silver. Smile still winning. Banter appropriately pitched to a broad national audience. Anecdotes about Gazza, not Gaza, still doing the business. A podcast mogul today, by 2029 Gary Lineker could be Britain’s Joe Rogan.  The Guardian’s media editor, Michael Savage, suggested last week that Lineker’s next move might see him eschew a traditional broadcasting rival, and instead opt for the hyper-modern streaming model. Why wouldn’t, say, Keir Starmer appear on The Gary Lineker Experience in four years time? The beleaguered Prime Minister would be aware that a three-hour sit-down endorsement from the genial Lineker is crucial to shoring up his voter base among the urbane, normie, mid-bourgeois, podcast-addled voter ...

The news that net migration effectively halved last year, falling from 860,000 in 2023 to 431,000 in 2024, will have been received with relief in Downing Street. Is this anything to celebrate? Do we actually want fewer people in the country? For a Labour party that now claims Reform is its main opponent, the answer is yes. The figures present an opportunity to follow in a long political tradition of taking credit for someone else’s numbers. Rishi Sunak was able to claim that he had reduced inflation, which had in fact been achieved by the Bank of England. Keir Starmer can now claim that he has steered Britain away from a period of exceptionally high net migration, which was largely achieved ...

The front page of the Sun on 22 May was typically subdued. The headline read: “Justice Secretary’s vow: Paedos to be castrated”. Readers of the morning papers would be forgiven for thinking they’d woken up in an alternative universe mirroring the novels of Aldous Huxley or HG Wells. But this is a policy being considered by a Labour government. A report by the Independent Sentencing Review (chaired by New Statesman columnist and former Conservative Justice Secretary, David Gauke) published this morning calls on the government to build on the evidence base for drugs to “suppress libido” or lower “sexual thoughts”. The government has listened. The Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood used her statement in the House of Commons this afternoon to announce plans ...

Who wields power inside Labour? One government aide recently suggested to me that the answer is three people: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and Rachel Reeves. But this week was a reminder that there is a fourth force: Angela Rayner.  The Deputy Prime Minister’s leaked memo to Reeves, in which she proposed eight tax rises, has exposed the cabinet’s private divisions and intensified the debate over Labour’s future. Rayner’s allies deny that they were the source of the leak, maintaining that she does not engage in such tactics (the Telegraph, they suggest, is hardly the natural place to win a fair hearing for higher taxes).  But to others inside government this stretches credulity. “When you write a letter like that and you share ...

When does a commoner become a nobleman? Michael Gove entered the House of Lords, bedecked in ermin, just after 11 this morning as an ex-MP, two-time (failed) leadership candidate, and lately editor of the Spectator magazine. He emerged less than five minutes later as all of those things still, but as first and foremost Baron Gove of Torry, in the city of Aberdeen. The Lords does pageantry in a way the Commons can only dream of, a wonderous juxtaposition of mundanity and tradition. The gold mace reclining behind the Speaker as he listed on the red velvet Woolsack, iPad in hand, like a student on a beanbag in the college library; sword-wielding officials next to peers in trainers; candles blazing with energy-efficient lightbulbs ...

More than perhaps any other cabinet minister, Shabana Mahmood inherited an emergency. Prisons had been operating at 99 per cent capacity since the start of 2023 and the system was close to collapse (the Conservatives only added 482 extra places during their time in office). “Those responsible – Sunak and his gang in No 10 – should go down in history as the guilty men,” Mahmood declared last July, channelling the anti-appeasement polemic, as she was forced to release thousands of inmates early. But the Justice Secretary’s actions only deferred rather than ended the crisis. Without radical reform, the system would soon be overwhelmed again. “Even when you build new prisons at an unbelievably rapid rate – the largest expansion since the ...

Is it fitting, or tragic, that European football’s second-tier competition would come to rescue the dismal footballing seasons of Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur? After record-poor domestic campaigns in the Premier League era – United sit 16th and Tottenham 17th in the table – the two contested the Europa League final in Bilbao yesterday (May 21). Beleaguered fans of both had dubbed the encounter – which Spurs won, 1-0 – as “the Battle of Mid”, and even “El Crappico”. The turgid nature of the match – Spurs’ scrappy goal, United’s long-ball desperation, the endless handbags between Harry Maguire and Cristian Romero – reflected both teams’ seasonal angst. It’s been a long season. And there was a feeling that whoever won in ...

We have a prison population crisis that must be addressed urgently. Our prisons are close to being full (with 88,087 inmates) and the demand for places is growing faster than it is possible to build new cells. Unless action is taken to reduce demand in the next few months, we will either have to undertake a programme of emergency early releases or be unable to place new offenders in custody. That was the bleak context when I was approached last September by the government to chair an independent review on sentencing policy, assisted by a panel of experts from across the criminal justice system. At the time, the expectation was that prison capacity would be reached in spring 2026. Since then, ...