When Tucker Carlson ended his nightly news show on Fox News last Friday, he did so with a mouthful of pizza, a promotion for his online documentary Let Them Eat Bugs and a promise to the viewers that he’d see them on Monday. It was not a moment any broadcaster would choose for their final one on a network – let alone the network’s leading host, a man with three million viewers an evening, making him Fox News’s single most important asset. And yet Tucker Carlson’s Fox News career is over. The decision is reported to have come from Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, himself, with almost no one at the network even in the loop. Carlson was being ...

Everyone seems to be giving up on the Confederation of British Industry after weeks of allegations of sexual misconduct at the business lobbying group. More than fifty businesses have cut or suspended ties with the CBI, and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has said that there is “no point” in continuing to deal with it. The situation is so bad that the CBI’s president has said he doesn’t know whether the organisation can recover. The collapse of the CBI would leave a vacuum. Hunt has said it is “incredibly important” to him “to have someone I can turn to that speaks for British business”. Will Dunn, our business editor, has found that BizUK, which has been launched just as the CBI is floundering, has strong links ...

Twitter is quickly spiralling out of control. Last week, Elon Musk, the platform’s mercurial owner, took verification labels from thousands of users before restoring them to three: the actor William Shatner, basketball player LeBron James and the sci-fi author Stephen King. After an outcry, Musk then reneged on his decision over the weekend, reintroducing verification to all users who previously had a checkmark and more than a million followers. The flip-flopping hasn’t helped ensure that those accounts who ought to be verified are. One major account that slipped the net was @DisneyJuniorUK, which was granted an exclusive gold checkmark – bona fide evidence that the account was official, according to Twitter. There was one problem: the person behind it had no connection to Disney. They ...

Seven years ago last week, George Osborne sparked a storm by warning that departing the EU would leave Britain “permanently poorer”. By 2030, he warned, citing a Treasury study, the economy would be 6 per cent smaller than if we stayed in. This went down with Leavers about as well as one might expect: no less a giant than John Redwood described it as “completely worthless”. And if it was simply a scare tactic then obviously it didn’t work. We’re now halfway to 2030, though, and real wages are falling while prices are very clearly not. Last week the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran a feature headed, “Britain in Crisis: The UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole”. Little wonder, then, that over 141,000 people signed an online petition demanding an inquiry into the ...

Some time ago, I wrote a book called Jews Don’t Count. It is about how, in my opinion, Jews and anti-Semitism are positioned low down in the mix of the identity politics conversation. The book has had some impact. I have written another one since about something else (The God Desire). After Jews Don’t Count I felt I should move on, partly because I would like to think that the dial has now shifted on anti-Semitism and race, and that continuing to bang the drum on the issue may not be necessary. I would like to think this – but that often feels, perhaps, optimistic. Over the weekend, the Observer published a letter by the Labour backbencher Diane Abbott. It ...

It is easy to swiftly object to a newspaper column – through a tweet, a private message, a Facebook comment. Something visceral is triggered in us, and we want to respond. But writing a letter in reply to one takes time and effort; it is not a thoughtless exercise. In response to my column for the Observer on 16 April – in which I argued that accounts of racism in the UK need to reflect racism against Jewish people, Traveller communities, and Irish people – the Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote a letter, published by the paper on 23 April, that criticised my argument. Abbott writes that the groups above “undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words ...

It is difficult to remember sometimes, but on its best days Twitter could truly be magical. The day half the internet exploded because of The Dress and two escaped llamas, or when much of the UK tracked Priti Patel on a flight back to the UK to get sacked. There was even a day when people across the UK got diverted by nothing more dramatic than looking at a really big puddle in Scotland that everyone was tweeting live footage from. It was a simpler, better time. Yesterday offered a rare glimpse of that beauty and wonder once again, even if it came at a huge psychological cost to some of the biggest egos online: yesterday was the day that “legacy” ...

WASHINGTON DC – The war began on schedule at 7pm on Wednesday (19 April). Incensed by intelligence reports suggesting that Taiwan’s president was preparing to declare independence, China’s leader Xi Jinping had ordered his military to seize the self-ruling democracy by force. Or at least this was the scenario presented to the members of the US house select committee on China this week in a tabletop wargame they took part in, during a private hearing on Capitol Hill. The exercise, designed by experts at the Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security, was set in 2027 and designed to simulate the first week of a Chinese assault on Taiwan. The committee members were tasked with acting as ...