Time was when political scandals rocked nations and altered history. Watergate wasn’t just a bad headline or a name-calling spat, it was burglary, taped conversations, perjury and congressional hearings. Profumo had a serious breach of national security and a romantic affair to boot. Now, though, we have 21st-century scandal-lite: confected outrage for clicks, trivial infractions inflated into “crises” by opportunistic politicians who still think they’re in the student union. At Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch traded blows that most people wouldn’t notice, much less care about. Two-Tier (or Still-Here as he’s reminding us) declared that Robert Jenrick should have been sacked for saying there were no white faces in parts of Birmingham. This was a statement of demographic fact, not some racial slur, as the perpetually incandescent This is no Watergate Daily Telegraph 11/02/26 Left claims. Anyone who has walked through certain districts of our majo...
The destructive fools of Westminster are needlessly pushing Britain towards a gilts and sterling crisis Daily Telegraph 10/02/26 Britain is acquiring a bad reputation for hounding its leaders out of power in rapid succession and in petulant fashion, lurching from one set of policies to another with no economic or political compass. What I notice in my job covering the world economy is a creeping change in tone. A narrative is taking hold that this country is degenerating into an intractable and feral condition, prone to going down every rabbit hole of the culture war and lacking the discipline to see anything through. This is a dangerous reputation to have for a country that is running a large structural trade deficit, needs constant inflows of foreign capital, and has still not expunged the stain of the Liz Truss episode. Bond markets have become acutely sensitive to any sign of fiscal slippage anywhere on the planet. They will punish states that stray – even America, with the ex...