In a Telegraph article headlined “The SNP’s implosion is a chance to put failing devolution into reverse” on Wednesday (19 April), the former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost wrote that “not only must no more powers be devolved to Scotland, it’s time to reverse the process”. He said “devolution was designed in a different world – a world in which many powers theoretically devolved to Scotland were actually held at EU level and could not be exercised in practice”. The last thing Scotland needs right now is advice on how we should be governed from a Tory peer who undermined democracy in Northern Ireland and threatened the Good Friday Agreement with his inept Brexit deals. Certainly, the Scottish Tories were quick to ...

BERLIN – On Monday 17 April the French president, in a televised address, gave himself 100 days to “appease” the country, which was still seething after he signed an unpopular retirement reform into law the previous week. The first days have not gone well. On 19 April, Emmanuel Macron began the first leg of a tour of France, presenting himself as a leader listening to ordinary voters’ concerns. Visiting the eastern region of Alsace, on the German border, the president sought to move the political debate on from the toxic retirement reform, which he considers constitutionally and democratically legitimate. (After Macron forced the reform through parliament without a vote, large numbers of French people disagree.) Yet Macron found that few people in Alsace were ready ...

If the coronation quiche took most of us by surprise when it made its debut on the royal family’s Twitter account on Monday lunchtime (17 April), the reaction from some quarters was depressingly predictable. Nigel Farage told Australian television that his heart sank at the news, describing it as the “dullest, most uninspiring and most politically correct dish that has ever been produced for a major occasion… truly ghastly”. Farage’s followers, meanwhile, labelled the “bloody woke coronation quiche” as the “dull and boring as the future [sic] king” on his “Eco Nett Zero band wagon [sic]”, with one objecting that “surely it should be vegetarian ‘flan’, now that we’re out of the EU. What was the point of vote leave if ...

A contronym is a word that can hold two opposite meanings. For instance, cleave can mean to cling or hang on, as in cleave to outmoded ideas of conduct, or to separate, as in meat from the bone, or politician from ministerial post. Oversight can mean to pay close attention, say to numerous allegations of aggressive behaviour, or to overlook them. Sanction can mean to punish wrongdoing, or to permit it. But these are mere binaries, where other words encompass a whole continuum of meaning. Consider, for example, “professional”, and the Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab’s consistent use of it as a dead-batted response to deny allegations against him of bullying and intimidating staff. “I behaved professionally at all times,” he ...

You could be forgiven for thinking that Richard Sharp had already quietly left the BBC. It is now four months since it emerged that Sharp, a former banker, played some kind of role in the facilitation of a loan to Boris Johnson around the same time that the then-prime minister recommended him for the BBC chairmanship.  The Commons' Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee has already ruled that Sharp made "significant errors of judgement" by failing to declare this as a conflict of interest during his appointment process. But yesterday the FT reported that the findings of another investigation into the BBC chairman's selection, prepared for the commissioner of public appointments by Adam Heppinstall KC, make for “grim” reading. One person briefed on the report told ...

At next month's local elections, voters in England will be required to show photo identification to get their ballot paper and vote. Those more likely to get turned away are the elderly, people on low incomes, who live in rented accommodation and black and minority ethnic voters. There are claims that the measures are aimed at replicating Republican-style voter suppression in America, and fears that polling stations could be overwhelmed on 4 May. The Local Government Association has called it the biggest change to in-person voting in 150 years. This change was in the last Tory manifesto, justified on the basis that it would prevent voter fraud. But according to the Electoral Commission, since 2018 only 1,386 alleged cases of electoral fraud ...

How not to relaunch a government, by Humza Yousaf, aged 38 and 11 days. This wasn’t the title of the First Minister’s speech to Holyrood today, but it might as well have been. One can’t of course blame Yousaf for the travails currently erupting underneath his party like a particularly enraged squad of Dune sandworms. New controversies and horrible headlines are bursting loose on a daily basis, the latest being the arrest of Colin Beattie today (18 April), an MSP who was also the SNP’s long-standing treasurer during the reign of Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell. The party is in the deepest of holes. But Yousaf seems to lack anything resembling a ladder, and does himself no favours. In a ...

After more than two years in the pipeline, the government’s semiconductor strategy was due to be published on Thursday. It will not be published on Thursday. Politico informs us the delay is due to confusion over who will provide maternity cover for Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. Many Westminster watchers, particularly those interested in China, have been calling for this strategy for a while. Beneath the bombast about standing up to the Communist totalitarians is a recognition that the UK needs to secure the supply of key components such as semiconductors, which are essential to making computer chips. Taiwan produces more than 60 per cent of the world's semiconductors and over 90 per cent of ...