Gregg Wallace’s attempt to defend himself against allegations that he made sexually inappropriate comments to contestants on various TV programmes, which he denies, has not gone to plan. Over the weekend, the MasterChef presenter said to his 200,000 followers on Instagram: “I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age.” The Prime Minister has since waded in: “Clearly the comments [from Wallace] that we’ve seen from the individual over the weekend were completely inappropriate, misogynistic.” Wallace’s further attempts at self-defence appear rather flimsy. He had worked with more than 4,000 contestants, he said, but “apparently” there’d been “13 complaints in that time”. Although Wallace today apologised for “any offence” that he caused, his statement ...

Back in February, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar told the New Statesman: “I am really open with Keir and the UK shadow cabinet that I want to and need to be going into a 2026 election in the midterm of a popular Labour government, not an unpopular one.” That’s a warning worth recalling now because Starmer’s government is – by any measure – unpopular. Just 18 per cent of voters, according to polling by YouGov, approve of Labour’s record to date, while 59 per cent disapprove. It took Tony Blair more than three years to lose his poll lead – during the 2000 fuel protests – but Starmer’s party has already trailed the Conservatives. In Scotland, the picture is still more troubling. Labour, which ...

When Bashar al-Assad captured Aleppo, then Syria’s largest city, in the first phase of the country’s civil war, it followed a four-year siege and horrific urban warfare. Last week, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels retook the city in a matter of days. It’s impossible to say now whether Assad’s regime will collapse on the face of these rapid gains, or whether the war will turn once again into a protracted grind. Even if it does collapse, we have no way of knowing what’s coming next. Either way, however, there will be knock-on geopolitical effects, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the world. The rebels’ gains fall into the category of shocking, but not surprising. To wrest back control of most of ...

Emmanuel Macron was supposed to do two things. First, turn France into a dynamic, low-tax, high-tech nation with a lean state and sound finances. Second, keep “populism” – by which his supporters meant Jean Luc Mélenchon on one side and Marine Le Pen on the other – at bay. A year and a half into his second term, the president has failed at both objectives, and his government stands on the brink of collapse.   Having already lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, and after a poor performance in the European elections in June of this year, Macron dissolved parliament, calling snap legislative elections. But the only effect was to pit both left and far-right against him, and both made gains, whittling his ...

“Is this just expensive virtue-signalling?” a reporter asked Sadiq Khan at the event marking the official launch of the new names and colours of the six London Overground lines on Thursday. He was not alone: the capital’s mayor has faced variants of this question from all comers these last few months. The new names are, let’s say, “socially conscious”. Two of them, Weaver and Windrush, relate to this history of immigration to London; two, Suffragette and Lioness, to rather different forms of feminism, both problematic in their own way (the former because the Suffragettes were, whatever else they were, terrorists; the latter because naming a line after a football team feels faintly silly). Another line, Mildmay, commemorates a hospital important to ...

That Tahir Ali, a backbench Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, could stand up in the House of Commons and openly demand the reintroduction of blasphemy laws to “prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions” was disgraceful enough. What was even worse was Keir Starmer’s pedestrian response that “desecration is awful” and that his government was “committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division”, rather than bluntly answering the question with a simple and firm no. Blasphemy laws have no place in a liberal democracy – as we claim to be – and his party shouldn’t countenance them.  This wasn’t even the first time a MP has called for blasphemy laws ...

In the end, it wasn’t as close as many were expecting. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, brought forward as a Private Members Bill by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, passed its second reading in the House of Commons by 330 votes for 275.But that result does not tell the whole story. It does not capture the fierce tug between radically contrary moral perspectives, laid out in compelling detail in speeches – more than 40 of them in all, not to mention countless other interventions – over an emotionally gruelling five hours on a crisp Friday in Westminster.By the time the debate began, we were familiar with the arguments for and against. We have heard them all: the ...

The Republic of Ireland is voting today in an election that seems unlikely to alter very much. Ever since the state’s inception in 1922 only the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties have ever produced a taoiseach. The country is currently run by a coalition of the two, after they dropped historic enmity first forged in the civil war to work together (first in a confidence and supply agreement in 2010s and then a formal arrangement in 2020). There is every reason to suspect that the next government will be another coalition of the two. The parties now cohere around a liberal centrist policy platform. This holds especially for Fine Gael (who cleave more socially liberal and pro-enterprise than their counterpart). ...