Citizens’ Advice research showing that up to a million people have cancelled their broadband in the past year is a further grim example of how much social damage the cost-of-living crisis is inflicting and how badly this country is failing. Internet access is essential for life in a modern society; we are failing as an economy if we don’t guarantee it. It’s not hard to see how the financial pressures on people have accumulated. Energy prices surged last year and even with expected reductions in the price cap will remain 60 per cent higher for households than 18 months ago. Food prices have risen by 19.2 per cent over the last year, their fastest pace for 45 years. Into the middle ...

And it was all going so well. The unity of the Conservative Party – central to Rishi Sunak’s next 18 months – is cracking.   Six days after Suella Braverman publicly criticised the government’s policy on immigration, the Sunday Times has reported that she asked civil servants to arrange a private speed awareness course to avoid a fine or getting points on her driving licence after being caught speeding last summer. She eventually paid the fine. The ministerial code states that ministers must not involve civil servants in their private matters. Sunak has said he will speak with his ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, later today, 22 May, to determine whether to launch an investigation. As Rachel pointed out last week, this is ...

I truly believe that men should all get vasectomies and have some sperm frozen if they want to have children. Radical? Perhaps. But the alternative – women pumping their bodies full of hormones – is not sustainable, and women are increasingly seeing that. My journey to being a champion of vasectomies came when my mother was diagnosed with hormonal breast cancer. As a result of her diagnosis at a young age, when I went to speak to my doctor about contraception, it was made clear to me that the pill was not a safe option for me (progestogen-only hormonal contraception is associated with at least 20 per cent higher risk of breast cancer) – so I was offered the coil. ...

Polls change. In 1991 Labour led the Tories by 15 points, as they do today. That lead then rapidly narrowed and the Tories won a majority in 1992. Today’s Labour lead may also collapse. Mention 1991 to a Tory loyalist and they will write you an excited column in the Telegraph – as Gordon Rayner did this week – about how the Tories can win the next election. But there are major reasons to doubt this optimism. For one, the Conservatives are out of options at the top. In 1991 the party recovered by getting rid of Thatcher. Today, after the self-immolations of 2022, it is stuck with Rishi Sunak. Even under the calmer leadership of the respected former chancellor, the party trails ...

The Tory Party is becoming increasingly miserable. This isn’t a judgement of its internal position as it flounders in the polls, but more its outlook and view for the voters. Rather than the politics of hope or the push to sunlit uplands, many in the party seem intent on selling the public nothing more than parsimony. It seems unlikely to do them any electoral favours. On the cost-of-living crisis, multiple commentators on the right have suggested the response to rising prices is simply more and more simple living. In a fiery exchange on the BBC's Politics Live, Ann Widdecombe, the former Tory minister turned Reform UK spokesperson, said that if families can’t afford even a cheese sandwich, they should have to ...

Politicians should never deliver speeches on Saturdays. The press miss them and they slip by. But Keir Starmer’s speech to Progressive Britain last Saturday is worth revisiting. It was an attempt to seize the conservative mantel from a party whose senior politicians were about to embark on a three-day conference of incoherence. As I wrote on Tuesday, the values that Suella Braverman championed in her speech at Nat Con are not foreign to Starmer. What he can do is fuse those values with some industrial strategy and an acknowledgement of the cost-of-living crisis. Starmer’s speech on Saturday was all about his values. He listed them: “dignity, understanding, and most of all, respect.” “The Conservative Party can no longer claim to be conservative,” Starmer ...

In April 2018 Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Senate to answer questions on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and whether Facebook now represented a threat to the free world. Traditionally, for any business to be described by its parliament as “a weapon against democracy” would be a bad thing. But for Facebook the opposite was true. As the world watched a pale and contrite Zuckerberg explain whether he had subverted democracy itself, Facebook’s stock rose by 4.5 per cent, its best day’s trading for more than two years. In a single day Zuckerberg’s personal wealth rose by $2.3bn, equivalent to 70,000 years of work on the median American salary. A similar thing happened on ...

The main thing most people outside the UK know about the former British prime minister Liz Truss is that her tenure failed to outlast a lettuce. After six chaotic weeks at the helm in the autumn of 2022, defined by a disastrous economic plan that tanked the pound, she departed office as a political punchline and as the answer to a trivia question: who is the shortest-serving prime minister in British history? Now Truss has brought her distinctive talents to Taiwan. That expectations ahead of the trip to the self-ruling democracy, which is claimed by Beijing, were low wasn't unreasonable given Truss's past form: posing in a tank in an apparent attempt to channel Margaret Thatcher, and striding around the deck of ...