When Westminster – and online – discourse gets sufficiently detached from reality, all that is left to do is to repeat things that are true, almost like a mantra. The fallout from the appointment of the civil servant Sue Gray, most recently second permanent secretary in the Department for Levelling Up, as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is very much one of those moments. Gray is perhaps most famous for leading the internal inquiry into partygate, and for this reason Boris Johnson and the most deranged of his supporters are crying blue murder – her inquiry, they argue, cannot have been impartial. They were stitched up. Let us begin our mantra here, then. Boris Johnson did not want to authorise an actual independent ...

Initially it seemed like a great coup – the appointment of the most famed civil servant in the country to the top advisory role in Keir Starmer’s team. The surprise recruitment of Sue Gray, who worked under several prime ministers as ethics adviser and then second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office, seemed to declare not only that Labour is seriously on its way back to government, but that it will restore integrity to Whitehall. In practice, it’s declared the very opposite. I don’t believe the absurd claim peddled by Boris Johnson supporters in the Daily Mail that Gray was part of a Labour plot to bring Johnson down. I’m sure she behaved with total propriety in her long inquiry into partygate. ...

Emily Eavis knows she needs to do better. That is the resounding sentiment from her announcement of the line-up for this year’s Glastonbury Festival, detailed in an interview with the Guardian today. The headliners, joining the already announced Elton John, whose Sunday night slot will, he says, be his last UK show, are Guns n' Roses and Arctic Monkeys. That’s three acts comprised almost entirely of white men. (Slash, the Guns n' Roses guitarist, is of mixed heritage and the band's touring line-up includes the keyboardist Melissa Reese and drummer Frank Ferrer, who is Cuban.) It’s an infuriating announcement for those who see Glastonbury as a bastion of progress in the music industry. It is a “pipeline” problem, said Eavis, who co-organises Glastonbury ...

There’s nothing like live television. The energy, the unpredictability. The fact that you can tweet about the fleeting moment on screen, and everyone knows what you’re on about. The feeling that a live broadcast might go belly-up at any moment. Where else but live TV would you have found Bounce, a Labrador invited onto the BBC News Channel, with the caption “SPOKESDOG”? Until now, with the exception of some sports coverage, streaming services have ignored live television, but that might be about to change. Netflix announced this week that it will show a Chris Rock comedy special live. And not only that, there’s anticipation that he’ll finally talk about being slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars in his routine, which ...

In recent days we learnt a little more from Keir Starmer about what the next Labour government could look like. His five new missions for the country are hardly controversial: higher prosperity, clean energy, good health, personal safety and childhood opportunity. But in the details of the plan Starmer showed how he backs the timeless Labour values of equality, collective action and universalism. The egalitarianism was there in his goals of reduced health inequalities, opportunity for every child, keeping women safe from violence and ensuring no part of the country is left behind. The means to achieve the missions are intervention, partnership and the power of government. Philosophically, it could not be more different from the stand-back instincts of Rishi Sunak ...

It doesn’t take a GCSE in English to decipher what Gavin Williamson meant when he accused teaching unions of “really really” hating work in leaked WhatsApp messages to the former health secretary Matt Hancock, published by the Telegraph. Williamson's defence of these comments, that they refer to unions and not individual teachers, gets little more than a D-minus for empathy from this teacher. It’s little surprise that a Tory politician would have such resentment and disregard for unionisation. It is politically expedient, and downright characteristic, for a Conservative government that has presided over a decade of austerity and debilitating cuts to the education sector to find a scapegoat for its difficulties in work-shy teachers. We saw it throughout the pandemic. While ...

The meeting between the two diplomats lasted less than ten minutes. Factor in time for translation on both sides and the substance amounted to perhaps half of that. But then the encounter between Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, on the side-lines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi today (2 March) was not intended to yield a meaningful exchange of views. Blinken said afterwards that he had delivered three messages to the Russian foreign minister: reverse Russia’s “irresponsible decision” to suspend participation in the New Start strategic arms control treaty; free Paul Whelan, a US citizen who has been detained in Russia for more than four years; and “end this war ...

“I cannot accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France,” Emmanuel Macron said on a 2017 official visit to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Speaking at the University of Ouagadougou, he acknowledged that there is “no valid, lasting and unconditional justification” for artwork taken from the continent during the colonial period to be held in Europe permanently. He added that he wanted “the conditions to be in place within five years for the… return of African heritage to Africa”. Yet in the six years since, despite demands by multiple African countries for art taken from the continent to be returned, progress to repatriate looted artwork has been glacial. Tens of thousands of pieces are estimated ...