Scott Benton, the MP for Blackpool South, has lost the Conservative Party whip after an investigation by the Times revealed he offered to lobby ministers on behalf of fake gambling industry investors. Undercover Times reporters posed as investors in the betting and gaming industry who were looking for a paid adviser. They filmed Benton explaining that he could table parliamentary questions, leak confidential policy documents and attempt to influence ministers to help weaken proposed reforms to the sector. Benton did not pursue the role and no rules appear to have been broken. It has been reported that the MP has referred himself to parliament's standards watchdog. Blackpool residents have been significantly impacted by the gambling industry in recent years. In 2016, the ...

At the BBC we used to do our public order training alongside the Metropolitan Police. As they practised dispersing “rioters” on a mocked-up council estate in Gravesend, we practised hurling interview questions at harassed unit commanders. Nearby, every so often, a volley of automatic gunfire would go off, as the elite specialist firearms unit MO19 were put through their paces. The unspoken question was, of course, why does the Met spend so much time and energy practising being at war with London’s population? Thanks to the Casey Report we have a definitive answer. Mentally, the force is in conflict with the values of the very society it is supposed to be policing. That’s what it means to say the force is institutionally ...

The year is 2053. Popular culture has finally run out of ideas. This is it. We’re homing in on a quantum point of no return in which all of the original thoughts have been thunk. All twelve notes have been played in every combination. The infinite monkeys have now typed all the words in all the different orders. Culture is a whirl of the same wizards, warriors, spaceships and superheroes, dribbled slowly into ChatGPT and regurgitated endlessly onto Disney+, which now owns Netflix, HBO, the BBC, four fifths of the Hollywood sign and exclusive rights to the complete works of Roger Hargreaves. AmazonTikTok owns everything else. Everyone is exhausted and everyone is bored. That’s the future. And on that day we ...

Like anybody else, the Chatterer enjoys a good theory about how real-world events might have inspired scenes in Succession, the HBO business drama whose lead character is Logan Roy, an ageing billionaire who is definitely not based on Rupert Murdoch. Hat tip, therefore, to Damian McBride, a former special adviser to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, who identified a corker of a reference to mid-Noughties British politics this week. No spoilers, but suffice to say this week’s episode (the second of series four) contained a scene in which Roy’s daughter, Shiv, tells him: “There’s nothing you could say to me now that I would ever believe.” McBride wondered whether this quote might have been inspired by a near-identical comment ...

Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband and until last month the SNP's chief executive, has been arrested this morning (5 April) in connection with an investigation into his party’s funding and finances. He was reportedly taken into custody while police carried out searches at Sturgeon’s home outside Glasgow and SNP headquarters in Edinburgh. In a statement, Police Scotland said: “A 58-year-old man has today, Wednesday 5 April 2023, been arrested as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party. “The man is in custody and is being questioned by Police Scotland detectives. Officers are also carrying out searches at a number of addresses as part of the investigation. “A report will be sent to ...

Another day, another damning statistic from the Scottish NHS. This time about cancer patients: a third were not treated within the two-month target in the final quarter of last year. The figure – only 71.7 per cent were seen in time – marks a decline on the previous three months and is 12 percentage points lower than in the final quarter of 2019, before the Covid pandemic began. It is just one more grim data point on an NHS dashboard that has been covered in flashing red lights for some time. SNP ministers like to point out that the health service in England is also struggling, but what of it? A Scottish government’s job is to fix things north of the border. The ...

Immigration to the UK is at the highest level in recorded history. Large numbers of refugees have come from Ukraine and Hong Kong, and there are workers and students from countries like India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. However, there is little sign of a backlash: the British public, which now sees migration in a broadly positive light, appears intensely relaxed. The Channel crossings of asylum-seekers on small boats are a different matter. Their numbers are much smaller but public and political opinion both agree that this is unacceptable. How to stop it is another matter. This poses a dilemma for the government. The sharp rise in worker and student migration splits the Conservative Party and the Brexit coalition. The economically liberal ...

In January 1998 the American news cycle blew up with news of a scandal between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Clinton looked straight into a camera and denied having an 18-month long affair with Lewinsky, beginning in 1995 when he was 49 and she was 22, using words that have now gone down in infamy: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” By October that year Kenneth Starr, appointed special counsel, had assembled enough evidence to present to the House of Representatives, alleging grounds for impeaching Clinton, including lying under oath and abuse of power. Presidents cheating on their wives was nothing new. Historians need look no further back than Jack Kennedy or Franklin ...