Hacks dragging themselves to hospital picket lines after the long bank holiday on Tuesday morning may have been hoping for an easy reporting trip. They weren’t so lucky. The Chatterer hears junior doctors – who are on the first of a four-day strike in England – have been turning down interviews, telling journalists that only representatives from their union, the British Medical Association (BMA), have permission to talk to the press. Two doctors on the picket line at a major London hospital told reporters that they would like to speak but couldn’t – offering to ask a BMA rep to come along instead. Another, in the north-west, declined an interview saying they’d been told only BMA reps can speak to the press ...

There is a chilling scene in the BBC’s brilliant podcast A Very British Cult in which the show’s host finally comes face to face with Paul Waugh, leader of the eponymous cult. During the course of a walking interview across Holborn, Waugh shouts her down, yelling “you supported Jimmy Savile”. Child abuse, and the failure to punish its perpetrators, leaves deep marks on our society – and fuels the political fringes. The BBC is often scorned because of its past failings over Savile, and Boris Johnson more than once deployed the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to prosecute him as a rhetorical stick with which to beat Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions. Labour has in turn provoked days of furore ...

Over the last few days Labour’s controversial and aggressive attack advert tying Rishi Sunak to the government’s failures on crime have split the shadow cabinet. Some have refused to share the ad – which says, “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t” – while others have welcomed a more strident approach to taking on the Tories. Last night Keir Starmer told frontbenchers to get behind the campaign in a piece in the Daily Mail. He said: “I stand by every word Labour has said on the subject, no matter how squeamish it might make some feel.” More personal attack ads in the same vein are planned for today, focusing on tax and the ...

As the general election edges closer, it is inevitable that disagreements about the parties’ strategies will spill into the open. There has been no more dramatic example of this than the spat over Labour’s advertisement apparently suggesting Rishi Sunak endorses shockingly generous sentences for child abusers. Anger over the advertisement united most of the political spectrum, from Ash Sarkar to Nick Timothy. But there were a few voices who attempted to justify it. One of the arguments cited by a Labour source was that it mirrored the approach taken by the Australian Labor Party in its victorious election campaign in 2022. Australian Labor strategists “told us to ignore the wailings of the people who expect you to be kind losers and ...

I wasn’t raised a Christian, and knew little about the religion outside of school assemblies with traditional hymns, and obligatory films about Jesus over Christmas when I’d rather be watching The Great Escape. So Easter, the day on which Christ was resurrected, did not hold any meaning for me. And then during Easter 1973, as a 14-year-old, I had my first encounter with death. Teenagers are immortal, and rightly so. Which meant than when a dear schoolfriend was hit by a car and killed I had no idea how to react and what to feel. The funeral seemed so foreign, like a sickening interruption in my emotional diary. Sorrow, fear, or just profound confusion? As I was leaving the cemetery, I found ...

Some years ago in Penge, south-east London we had a neighbour called Eileen who was in her late eighties. Eileen’s flat was the bottom floor of a house with a long, thin back garden, which the housing association had left untended until the weeds were at head height. For a year, we watched (our flat was the top half of the house next door) as Eileen gradually cleared the whole lot. Naively I assumed that Eileen had been inducted into the horticultural mysteries and would begin cultivating roses and delphiniums. She did not. Eileen, as I came to understand, hated nature. She covered as much of it as she could with a carpet of bright green astroturf, on which she arranged ...

The SNP’s latest troubles have come not as single spies but as a battalion of beefy coppers carting off boxes of papers and hard drives. The scene at Nicola Sturgeon’s house in Uddingston, south-east Glasgow, with its large blue tent, spades and police tape, more closely resembles a scene from Line of Duty than the quiet suburban home of Scotland’s pre-eminent stateswoman. Sturgeon’s husband, the former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, was arrested and taken in for questioning at 7.45am yesterday morning (5 April) in relation to an investigation into SNP finances and funding. After hours of questioning, he was released from custody without charge at 6.57pm. Police Scotland say a report will be sent to the Crown Office and the ...

Kemi Badenoch won the cabinet reshuffle in February when she was appointed the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, following the merger of the Department for International Trade with elements of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Badenoch, long touted as a "rising star" in the Conservative Party and possibly even a future leader, has wasted no time in streamlining her department. DBT – as the department is known – has announced a shiny new HR "Leaving DBT service" to smooth out the process of "managing the ebb and flow of joiners, movers and leavers", making it easier for managers to kick out surplus staff in the departmental merger. The service's launch states "no one comes to work to ...