As dawn broke on January 1, 2022 the nation could have been forgiven for looking to the year ahead with cautious optimism. The success of the vaccine booster scheme combined with the milder Omicron variant had turned Covid from a terrifying killer into little more than a sniffle for many. With the pandemic fading into […]
. . Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a seriously impressive woman. She’s worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs analysing global economic trends, and sat on the boards of numerous FTSE100 companies including Barclays and Chevron. She’s also the author of five books including best-sellers Dead Aid – a critique of development policy in Africa […]
Typical isn’t it – you wait ages for a new Prime Minister and then three come along in six months. Rishi Sunak has taken command of a party that’s been through a bruising ideological battle and taken a battering in the polls as a result. He inherits an economy that’s in even worse shape than […]
‘Bonk for Britain’ was an eye-catching headline in this week’s Sun on Sunday, and no it wasn’t about yet another Westminster sex scandal. An unnamed Cabinet minister has told the paper that women should get tax cuts for having children. I’m sceptical about this. When my husband and I were trying for a baby, thoughts […]
It’s results season, so as well as an opportunity to offer congratulations or commiserations to all our many teenage listeners getting their GCSEs and A Levels this week, it’s a chance to talk about education policy. This is the first year since the pandemic that anyone has sat public examinations, which means an inevitable readjustment […]
If his downfall played out like a Shakespearean tragedy, then Boris Johnson’s rhetoric didn’t exactly match up. In an ungracious resignation speech, he blamed the ‘herd mentality’ of his parliamentary colleagues, and made the shrugging claim that ‘them’s the breaks’. But the manner of his departure also helps to explain why it happened. Johnson has […]
Just last week Boris Johnson was bestriding the world stage, joking about showing his pecs to Putin at the G7 and Nato summit. Today he is Prime Minister in name only, having reluctantly agreed to leave office after more than 50 of his ministers resigned. It’s an ignominious ending to a dramatic premiership, In just […]
I’m sorry, I know it’s a betrayal of my sex, but there’s really only one word to describe aspects of the British response to the repeal of Roe v Wade: hysterical. Look, I get it. America is the shining city on a hill. Never mind its moral leadership in recent decades has been questionable, nor […]
Like the Voldemort of Government announcements, the windfall tax is the policy that must not be named. Standing at the despatch box, Rishi Sunak described a plan to tackle the cost of living as a ‘temporary targeted energy profits levy’. The Labour benches erupted with derision at his delicate language and delight that he’d copied […]
So it’s finally here, the long awaited Sue Gray report was published this week and it was great stuff for journalists – with lurid details of excessive drinking, wine splattered up walls and Downing Street staff partying until the early hours during lockdown. But the question Westminster insiders will be asking is what the public […]
Anything that’s had this much hype was bound to be disappointing. For months, ministers have been telling us that we must await the Sue Gray report like it was the opening of the seventh seal. In the end it was less Revelation than a bunch of stuff we already knew. Yes, there’s more detail about […]
Politics is never a walk in the park, least of all for Labour’s Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, who came under attack over the weekend simply for having legs. I don’t wish to dignify the pervy claims by anonymous Tory sources, reported in the Mail on Sunday, that Rayner ‘likes to put Mr Johnson ‘off his […]
Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are nonetheless devastating. The inquiry examined 1,592 incidents since 2000. It found that poor care led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers; 94 babies suffered avoidable brain […]
In these dark days we all need a distraction, and what could be better than a romance for the ages? Thankfully Matt Hancock, the Hugh Grant of the pandemic, has furnished us with just the thing – revealing to The Diary of a CEO podcast that ‘he did not have casual sex with anyone’ and that he […]
It’s a grim coincidence that the tanks are rolling into Ukraine in the same week as Britain declared victory in its domestic battle against coronavirus. But even before the deep shock of the unprovoked invasion of a European democracy, Brits weren’t exactly chucking masks on the bonfire and belting out The Winner Takes It All […]
It will come as a no surprise to students of Novak Djokovic’s career that he ‘has always supported the freedom to choose what you put in your body’. Here, after all, is a man who eschews gluten but is happy to eat the grass at Wimbledon. But it’s not the tennis player’s unusual diet that’s […]
Martin Vander Weyer has had a front row seat for some of the biggest economic developments of the last 50 years – both as a banker and as business correspondent for the Spectator. His new book The Good, the Bad and the Greedy argues that scandals like the mis-selling of PPI and the fixing of […]
BBC bashing is something of a national pastime (just ask Nadine Dorries), but it found new expression last week when a protester scaled Broadcasting House to knock chunks off a statue with a hammer. The perpetrator apparently objected to the depiction of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Ariel because the artist who created it, Eric Gill, was […]
For some, reading has been an escape from the loneliness of lockdown, for others this year has been more about getting by than improving the mind. So to round off 2021, we asked CapX writers and editors which books – new or old, fiction or non-fiction – helped them make it through. Robert Colvile Due […]
Politics went back to the playground this week, with Peppa Pig and babies in parliament dominating the headlines. But despite appearances, it’s actually the latter row that’s the silliest. To recap, Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, was reprimanded by Commons authorities for having her 13-week-old baby in a sling while she spoke in a […]
