Boris Johnson will today reveal how he plans to defend claims he lied to parliament over rule-breaking parties in Downing Street during lockdown. (Curious as to who’s paying his estimated £220,000 legal bill? It’s you.) The former prime minister is due to appear before the Commons Privileges Committee, chaired by Labour’s Harriet Harman but with a majority of Conservative MPs, on Wednesday 22 March. It is investigating whether Johnson knowingly or recklessly misled MPs and whether he was therefore in contempt of parliament. The committee can recommend a punishment (which MPs vote on), and if that includes a lengthy suspension, a recall petition and by-election could be triggered. These seven MPs, then, hold Johnson’s political future in their hands. [See also: Why ...

With the resignation today of the SNP's chief executive, Peter Murrell, the party’s executive suite is starting to resemble the final scene of Reservoir Dogs. There are precious few left standing now – Nicola Sturgeon, her husband Murrell (who held his role for 24 years), Sturgeon’s closest adviser Liz Lloyd, deputy first minister John Swinney, and media chief Murray Foote have all quit over the past few days and weeks. More are likely to follow. Scotland’s governing party is in a terrible, terrible mess, all of its own making. There’s a best-selling thriller in how the Sturgeon era has suddenly imploded. It has the lot: power, secrecy, unhealthily incestuous relationships, lies, double dealing and a police investigation. Somehow, out of all this, whoever ...

Props to Rachel Johnson, the journalist and sister of the former prime minister, Boris. She provided great value for money for attendees of the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Conference in London on Wednesday, 15 March.  Chairing a panel discussion on the press, politics and police, Johnson provided her audience of journalists with something of a scoop on Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who has come under pressure over leaked WhatsApp messages that have come to light in the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. (One message showed Case saying it was "hilarious" that holidaymakers were being "locked up" in quarantine hotels.) “I had to be in contact with Simon Case about something a month or so ago," said Johnson. "And when I was WhatsApping him, my ...

It appears Gwyneth Paltrow, Goop and her jade eggs will soon face increased competition in the realm of "wellness". This week Meghan Markle announced that she will be relaunching her “passion project” lifestyle blog, The Tig.  The blog is named after the duchess’s favourite wine, Tignanello, and will include articles on food, recipes, travel, interior design, and health and wellness. On the surface this blog sounds well-intentioned. The world has been through a stressful couple of years with a global pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis that has left many people struggling to afford basic necessities. Given all the stress, who wouldn’t want to come home to a little self-pampering? Meghan has previously spoken of her appreciation for yoga, green smoothies and ...

Over pizza a few months ago, an old friend told me that he was expecting not just one baby but up to forty of them. He had signed up to be a sperm donor. Not many people know that there is a shortage of sperm donors in the UK (perhaps surprisingly, given that sperm are extremely abundant). Being a family-oriented man from a large brood of siblings, when my friend learned of this shortage he thought, well, wouldn’t that be a nice way to help somebody? As I listened, and read the rather touching optional letter he had written for his future offspring to read, I found myself agreeing. Really, wouldn’t this be a nice way to help somebody? Should I ...

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt used this week’s Budget to announce major childcare reform which shows scant care for the children themselves. His government is pledging to offer 30 hours a week of free childcare to babies from nine months old (provided both their parents are working), the purpose being to reduce the number of “economically inactive” citizens who don't work due to caring responsibilities. His focus is on getting parents (particularly mothers) back to work after parental leave ends in order to close the gender pay gap and boost the economy. But he fails to ask: what's best for babies and small children? Then again, Hunt is only responding to the current mood music. In a recent parliamentary discussion, the Labour MP ...

Writing from the Nato summit in Madrid last June, in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade, I warned that Europe needed to draw the wider lessons about the risks of relying so heavily on American power. Europeans “must do [more] to prepare for a world of fracturing or distracted American power, a world that drew a step closer with the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe vs Wade,” I wrote. This view became rather unfashionable over the subsequent months as Joe Biden’s presidency flourished and a whiff of the 1990s returned to the transatlantic relationship.   Yet nine months on, the basic facts remain no less stark – and in some respects more so. Europe remains obviously, inescapably, ...

Yesterday’s was a quiet Budget, and a quietly ineffective one, as Freddie Hayward and Will Dunn have detailed. There were no Kwasi Kwarteng-style shocks, and not even any rabbits pulled from hats. But the Budget still told a story – the same stark story that every Budget has told for many years now. The story has four parts. First, Conservative chancellors are happy to sacrifice stunning amounts of revenue to “protect” motorists (and satisfy the Sun). Fuel duty – the tax on petrol and diesel – has now been frozen for 13 years, and was even cut last year. The costs of that policy are staggering. As the Office for Budget Responsibility put it: “The cumulative cost of freezing fuel duty ...