You don’t need a degree in the humanities to recognise a faulty argument, but it does help if you want to make such an argument in a newspaper. “We should cheer decline of humanities degrees” ran a headline in the Times last week above Emma Duncan’s column on the economic woes of university graduates (I know, I know, someone else writes the headlines). Young people, Duncan writes, feel betrayed by older generations. Their housing costs are surging, they are burdened with student debt, and incomes for all but those in the highest-earning professions are too low for a comfortable life. The solution is to avoid studying English literature – which is “lovely stuff”, apparently, but “not a way to earn ...

I used to resist the comparison between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. They were too easy, too obvious, lacking subtlety. Though it seemed they were riding similar (political) waves, the individual surfers were quite different. Their motivations were different. But I’ve had to reassess. As the years have passed, it is clear that Johnson has morphed into someone else, moving further in Trump’s direction. Perhaps he always had it in him, perhaps he has fed off Trump’s energy, or been inspired by the latter's sense of impunity. This process reached a culmination in Johnson’s parting gift to parliament, a resignation letter torching the institution and its processes, of which he was once custodian. Read it aloud in Trump’s voice – his ...

Blame the nimbys for climate change. That’s the message from the Tony Blair Institute this morning. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is in Edinburgh capitalising on the woes of the SNP by restating his mission to make the UK’s energy system net zero by 2030. The Labour leader will recommit to overturning the effective ban on onshore wind in the first few months of a Labour government, quicken permission for infrastructure projects, and place a net zero obligation on local authorities and regulators. But will there be any mention of the increasingly caveated £28bn-a-year investment in green technology? It isn’t mentioned in the pre-briefed document. Back to that report from Blair. It calls on Labour to change the planning system so that local consent ...

When the Privileges Committee began its inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament with his statements on lockdown-breaking gatherings at Downing Street during the Covid pandemic, they focused on six events. The last of these, a leaving party for two officials, took place on 14 January 2021. Johnson himself attended this event, and a photo supplied with the Privileges Committee’s hotly anticipated report, released today (15 June), shows him giving a speech with bottles of sparkling wine and beer on the table. I mention this because at this time that the UK government was working on releasing one of the most disturbing public awareness campaigns I have ever seen. You may have blocked this dark time from your memories, but to ...

The Privileges Committee report – all 50,000 words of it – dropped at 9am this morning, 15 June. It has found that Boris Johnson intentionally misled parliament over whether Covid restrictions were followed in No 10 during lockdown. His resignation statement last week, which disclosed the contents of the report, has itself been found to be contemptuous. The committee has said that if Johnson was still an MP, it would recommend a suspension of 90 days, as well as the revocation of his right as a former MP to access the parliamentary estate. The findings are unanimous. This is as harsh as the committee could be. The report is a searing indictment of Johnson’s character. It accuses him, fundamentally, of being ...

There have been two notable responses to the rise in yields on UK gilts – government debt – in recent days. The first is to point out that the interest rates businesses and mortgage holders pay will rise even further. This will be painful. As Nicholas Macpherson, the former Treasury permanent secretary, has argued, it is likely that the Bank of England will raise rates to a level where a recession next year becomes inevitable. This, of course, has significant political implications. The Conservatives’ path to re-election is very dependent on reducing inflation as quickly as possible and ensuring living standards are rising by October 2024. As I argued in March, the fact the UK economy has outperformed the dismal predictions ...

On Friday afternoon, as the sun shone on Westminster and everyone settled in for a nice, chilled weekend, Nadine Dorries announced that she was resigning from the House of Commons with “immediate effect”. Five days later, she had yet to actually resign. On Wednesday lunchtime, with quite magnificent shade, the Downing Street press secretary said that the PM believed “the people of Mid Bedfordshire deserve proper representation”, which is the politest euphemism for “well go on then if you’re f***ing going” I’ve ever heard. I have a slightly guilty soft spot for Dorries – not because she was a surprisingly popular and effective minister, an assertion I’ve seen a number of lobby hacks make since Friday but can’t remember ever hearing ...

Keir Starmer opened today’s PMQs by asking Rishi Sunak why, during a cost-of-living crisis with mortgage rates spiking, the Conservatives were arguing over “which of them gets a peerage”. The Labour leader was referring to the row between Downing Street and the outgoing Tory MP Nadine Dorries. Boris Johnson’s close ally has accused the Prime Minister of blocking her elevation to the House of Lords, but Sunak insisted that he “followed the process to the letter”. Starmer asked Sunak why he was prepared to reward those who defended Johnson over partygate, saying: “If he’s so tough, why didn’t he block it?” The PM countered that No 10 had not previously stood in the way of peerages for Labour figures such as Shami ...