David Aaronovitch, the long-standing Times columnist, has opened up about his recent departure from the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper.  Launching his new Substack on Friday morning, Aaronovitch sought to “address the elephant in the sack in my room”. Or as best he could.  “Just before Christmas a sudden Zoom call with two deputy managing editors was used to inform me that I was no longer needed at the Times where I had been a columnist for the best part of 18 years,” he wrote in the maiden post on his page, "Notes from the Underground". “The reason given was a desire for ‘new ideas’. That was the full extent of any explanation.”  Aaronovitch wrote that he had “smiled wryly” recently when, in an opinion piece ...

Editor's note: This piece was originally published on 21 March but has been updated as Manhattan prosecutors indicted Donald Trump on Thursday 30 March. The charges against the former president centre on the $130,000 he allegedly paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels. Are we about to witness a watershed moment for American democracy? As early as this evening (21 March), the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is expected to place Donald Trump under arrest for allegedly paying hush money to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has testified that he paid $130,000 to the actress known as Stormy Daniels through a shell company and was later reimbursed with Trump’s knowledge by his organisation. The former ...

There were two big snubs at the TV Bafta nominations this year. The first was Ambika Mod – while her more famous This Is Going to Hurt co-star, Ben Whishaw, received a Best Actor nomination, Mod, who expertly played a character with a storyline that left viewers thinking for days, did not. Bafta juries, what were you thinking? The second – noticed by the television host, hugely successful author and active tweeter Richard Osman – was for a whole genre. Only three shows were nominated in the “Daytime” category – and of those, only two were actually shown in daytime (The Chase and Scam Interceptors). The third, The Repair Shop, has roots and is regularly shown during the day. But the ...

“Net zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western civilisation,” blares Allister Heath’s latest column in the Telegraph; the first news stories on the Telegraph website were all doom around the government's environmental announcements today (30 March). Not satisfied to fiddle while Rome burns, culture warriors are throwing fossil fuels into the fire. This delirium is a response to the government’s "green day”, during which it has announced updates to the UK’s energy and net-zero policies. In reality the news is underwhelming: there will be support for carbon capture projects and offshore wind farms, for example, largely based on existing government commitments. Meanwhile, the government is piling billions into dubious technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen – favourites of ...

Jeremy Hunt has criticised President Joe Biden's plan for green growth – the $400bn Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and he has accused the US of leading a "distortive" global subsidy race.  The Chancellor said the UK's own climate change strategy will be "different and better", but the UK will not go "toe-to-toe" with the US in regards to mass subsidies and tax breaks. Britain's response to the US's green subsidy plans will not be announced until the autumn, which has left the government open to criticism that it will lose out on creating employment opportunities in new green industries. Grant Shapps, the energy security secretary, has announced a multi-billion pound energy security plan, which signals the government's shift towards clean power. ...

My mother called me last week, saying she had urgent news: “There’s an Italian man in the Financial Times claiming carbonara is American, that panettone is new – and that no one in Italy had heard of pizza before the 1950s," she said. The FT article, which was provocatively headlined Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong, includes an interview with Alberto Grandi, a professor of food history at the University of Parma. He says: “Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian.” Grandi claims that carbonara was first made for American soldiers, and describes parmesan made in Wisconsin, United States, as “an exact modern-day match” for the original parmesan, unlike that of cheesemakers in ...

Royal Mail is holding a board meeting today (29 March) that may seal its fate. Yesterday the company told the Communication Workers Union, which represents 115,000 postal workers, that it has 48 hours to accept a below-inflation pay offer and job cuts equivalent to 10,000 full-time roles by August. If a deal is not reached, executives may follow through on their reported threat (which they have not publicly denied) to place Royal Mail into special administration. The service that has delivered letters everywhere in the UK for a fixed price since 1839 could be coming to an end. In its most recent trading update Royal Mail’s owner, the snappily titled International Distributions Services, is clear about who is to blame: the posties, whom ...

Last night (28 March) Keir Starmer was spotted enjoying a drink on the Commons terrace with members of the shadow cabinet. It had been a long day and he probably felt there was cause for celebration. Hours earlier the party’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee (NEC), passed a motion to prevent Jeremy Corbyn standing as a Labour candidate at the next general election. This was no surprise, and Starmer himself had confirmed this month that the motion would be proposed, but it has nonetheless provoked drama, both publicly and behind the scenes. Corbyn, who is still a party member, lost the Labour whip because of his refusal to apologise for saying anti-Semitism in the party was “dramatically overstated for political reasons” ...