Reality being as bad as it is, some SNP politicians have taken to daydreaming. “I keep imagining how things would have felt had they announced Kate as the winner that Monday morning,” one told me. “The party would have had a burst of energy. The government and maybe even the country would instantly have felt different. It would have been a moment of potential.” Perhaps. Such has been the scandal swirling around the SNP in recent weeks that it’s hard to imagine any new leader getting much of a hearing. But at least Kate Forbes would have offered something genuinely fresh – a change in direction, an upscaling of ambition, a genuine break with an increasingly tarnished past. For now at least, that will remain a daydream, something Forbes’ ...

Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, has accepted an invitation to attend the King's coronation. It is neither surprising nor out of character. Sinn Féin is not what it once was. While he was the party leader in Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, shook Queen Elizabeth’s hand in 2012, he toasted to her in 2014; O’Neill herself met Charles shortly after his mother’s death. She declared herself “personally grateful” for the Queen’s role in Northern Ireland. It is too easy to think that Sinn Féin is full of naked monarchophobes (republicanism and monarchy are definitionally at odds, after all). But it isn’t true. The political face of Irish nationalism is smarter than that, and in possession of ...

David Aaronovitch, the former Times columnist, is not holding back. In an interview to promote his new Substack on Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast, Aaronovitch laid into his former editor ("lacking in class") and his former rivals at the Telegraph ("wall to wall rubbish"). As the Chatterer has previously noted, Aaronovitch’s Times column was recently axed after 18 years. (In a rightward shift, Aaronovitch was replaced by Juliet Samuel, formerly of the Telegraph.) Aaronovitch was restrained when telling the story of his dismissal on his Substack last month. But by the time of his Press Gazette interview the gloves had come off. While he said the Times was "a great, great, great newspaper with fantastic people working for it", he added ...

The government has hit its target to hire 20,000 police officers in England and Wales. Credit where credit is due. Last year the National Audit Office said the programme was “on course to achieve value for money”. The government set itself a target and followed through on time. It would be misleading, however, to say there are now 20,000 more police officers. The recruitment drive was only necessary because the Conservative and coalition governments cut police numbers by about 20,000 between 2010 and 2019. They are replacements. And rather than retain experienced officers, the turnover means the police force is now populated by more junior, often younger officers. Almost 40 per cent of officers are forecast to have fewer than five years’ experience in 2023-24. Yet another example of ...

Let me be clear, I don’t know if there was a “secret pact” between the royal family and News Group Newspapers (NGN) with regards to phone hacking. Neither do you. That’s the thing about secret pacts, they’re hard to verify. Prince Harry certainly believes there was one, though. His witness statement submitted as part of a legal case he is bringing against the publisher of the Sun alleges not only that journalists at the company’s titles hacked his voicemails and targeted him with other illegal activity, but that “senior executives” came to an agreement with the royal family some time before 2012 that they would delay legal proceedings in exchange for an apology at a future date. The royal family, Harry claims, ...

The Bank of England’s PR nightmare continues: Huw Pill, its chief economist, commented on a Columbia University podcast yesterday that Britain’s persistent inflation is the result of a “reluctance to accept that we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share”, and that “someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power”. Pill’s mistake was to pretend not to know who that “someone” was. He incorrectly characterised inflation as a “pass-the-parcel game” in which economic actors demand to be fully recompensed for higher costs at each stage, and no one shoulders the cost. Birthday party aficionados, however, will know that in pass-the-parcel the item being passed on gets smaller. In ...

Spare a thought for Keir Starmer, who is not having the dream run-up to the 4 May local elections that he would have liked. First of all, he has had to contend with a fresh anti-Semitism row after Diane Abbott suggested Jewish people faced prejudice akin to "white people with points of difference" such as redheads. The former shadow home secretary has been suspended pending an investigation. This morning, the New Statesman carries an interview with the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, who accuses Starmer of "intimidatory bullying" of Jeremy Corbyn, and makes the extraordinary claim that Labour members are more like likely to be disciplined for anti-Semitism "if you are a Jew than a gentile". Now it would appear that Sue Gray, the renowned Whitehall official that Starmer would like to hire as Labour's chief of staff, ...

A big blue tent and scene-of-crime tape in the former first minister’s garden, boxes of evidence taken from her house and from SNP HQ, a luxury motorhome removed from her mother-in-law’s driveway, and now a hunt for burner phones – all this story seems to lack is a Cadillac of heavily armed, gold-toothed Colombians who want their money and want it now. Scotland has been agog for weeks as its ruling party has collapsed into scandal. High-profile public figures have been arrested and taken in for questioning. Each leaked detail of the latest police lead is more theatrical than the last. We wait with bated breath to find out whether Nicola Sturgeon will become the latest and the biggest of the bigwigs to be ...