Lee Anderson, the Labour councillor turned Tory MP for Ashfield, is still rattled about food-bank users. Having made a name for himself saying people use food banks because they can’t cook, they could live on 30p meals, and his parliamentary assistant doesn't use food banks despite her low salary, his campaign continues. Food banks are being “abused” by people treating them like “the weekly shop” and then going to McDonald’s "two or three times a week”, Anderson, who is deputy chairman of the Tory party, said in a recent debate in parliament. And this isn't just his opinion, he claims: his constituents are the ones saying this, telling him "every single day about people making it up, telling lies or whatever". [See ...

When Terry Pratchett died in 2015, he left behind precious few new works. Three completed novels: the final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown, and the concluding two parts of The Long Earth series, the sci-fi project he’d been working on with Stephen Baxter. And that was basically it. Pratchett had always been adamant that any incomplete work must be destroyed after he died. He didn’t want people plundering his notes, as with Tolkien, or publishing incomplete drafts and stray ideas he had no control over, as with Douglas Adams. In 2017, as per the author’s explicit wishes, Pratchett’s friend, business manager and literary executor Rob Wilkins drove an antique steamroller over a hard drive containing all unpublished Pratchett material. It ...

The saga over the Finland's and Sweden’s accession to Nato continues. Turkey and Hungary are the only two member states yet to approve the Nordic countries' bid to join the alliance. Turkey imposed its conditions and signed off on an agreement with Sweden and Finland that made them change their laws on counterterrorism and arms embargoes. Is it now Hungary’s turn to make demands? The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has so far supported their bid, but last week he expressed concern for the first time. Among other criticisms, he has accused both countries of spreading lies about the health of democracy and the rule of law in Hungary. Some of Orbán's MPs bemoan that the two Scandinavian countries have insulted Hungary. ...

For a leader who likes to present himself as something of a strongman, Alexander Lukashenko has looked decidedly weak of late. Since he crushed the mass protests that erupted over his rigging of the election in 2020, the Belarusian president has become increasingly dependent on Russia for his political, and personal, survival. Where previously he had tried to play Moscow and the West off against each other, he has been reduced to the role of grateful supplicant at the court of Vladimir Putin.  Those dynamics were on display during Lukashenko’s most recent visit to Moscow, on 17 February, when the Russian president thanked him for agreeing to come. “As if I could not agree,” Lukashenko muttered in response. There is more ...

I’m not in the business of denying that the sky is blue, so before I say anything else, let me be clear: I think Happy Valley is a supremely well-acted, well-paced and compelling show. Like 7.5 million other Brits, I tuned into the crime drama’s season finale in early February from the edge of my seat. In the days after the credits rolled, I missed the authentic characters and the true-to-life, mug-clutching chats they had in their cluttered kitchen. I crammed all three series of the show into my eyeballs in little more than a week – I get it. It’s good telly. But I’m not in the business of denying the sky is blue! I also think that Happy Valley ...

Rishi Sunak, it’s been said many times, has something of the children’s television presenter about him. It’s not just the non-threatening physicality that allows him to bounce and wave his arms, and for it to come across as enthusiastic rather than merely unhinged. It’s also a matter of tone: the gentle, ever-smiling delivery that would be perfect for explaining tadpoles to a very small child. This morning delivered an excellent example. Against the expectations of the naysayers (such as, in the name of transparency, myself), the Prime Minister seems to have booked a big win, by successfully breaking the deadlock over the Northern Ireland protocol. And the way he’s done it is by ignoring the squawking from offstage right, and treating ...

The West is not only struggling to maintain the supplies it is sending to Ukraine, it is failing to replace the ammunition it has sent. Years of budget cuts have left western ammunition capabilities and stockpiles low, with little to no public backlash. Ukraine currently expends as many shells in a month as America produces in a year. Recently Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, told reporters that "the current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production, [which] puts our defence industries under strain". America and Europe produce around 480,000 155mm shells each year. At the moment that yearly production capacity amounts to about two and a half months’ worth of consumption for Ukraine. Nico ...

In 1991 the proportion of women in the UK aged 30-34 who had never been married was 18.3 per cent. By the time of the 2021 Census (which took a more inclusive view of commitment and factored in civil partnerships and same-sex marriages), that had trebled, to 54.2 per cent. A woman my age today (I’m 32, thanks for asking) is essentially three times less likely to be married than one 30 years ago. The figures, published in the same week as the SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes was opining on her personal views about the immorality of having children out of wedlock, have caused a certain amount of panic. Alex Phillips, a former GB News presenter and MEP for the ...