Occasionally a senior politician utters the unspoken truth out loud – it is useful, for example, when anti-immigration ministers use words like “swamped” or “riddled”, so we know what prejudice is really driving their actions. In the latest edition of Holyrood magazine Alex Salmond has done something similarly helpful. Writing about his time as first minister, he says he governed in “the knowledge that everything we proposed should be designed, de minimis, to do no damage to the independence cause, which was then, and still should be, the SNP’s raison d’être”. It’s no secret what gets nationalist politicians out of bed in the morning but, to the best of my knowledge, they have previously avoided acknowledging that the nature and efficacy of government policy ...

Boris Johnson wants us to understand how brave he is. As the former British prime minister recently recounted a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin in early February last year – around three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine – he made sure to mention how the Russian president had (allegedly) casually threatened to kill him. “He threatened me at one point,” Johnson recalls in an interview for a new BBC documentary Putin vs the West. “He said, ‘You know, Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile it would only take a minute,’ or something like that.” He pauses, half-smiling, apparently impressed with his own anecdote. “You know… jolly.” Presumably the point of this story is to let us know ...

What are the benefits of Brexit? For many years an assortment of politicians and pundits have offered their own suggestions, but it is now three years since the United Kingdom formally withdrew from the European Union, and despite so much debate, discussion and argument, a recent survey from Deltapoll, which I co-founded, shows that relatively few in the general public are able to answer this question. In public opinion terms, the benefits of Brexit, as with so many political policies, depends more on perception than reality. A government policy can still be perceived to deliver benefits or other impacts, irrespective of what is actually happening, and this can then have a significant impact on that government’s position in the polls, particularly ...

A Cancer Research UK-commissioned study published last week suggests that ovarian cancer in women could be diagnosed quicker by tracking loyalty-card points for over-the-counter prescriptions and the purchase of pain medication. Its questionnaire also found that the participants with ovarian cancer began to recognise their symptoms about four and half months before diagnosis, but not everyone visited a GP. Those who did, recognised their symptoms three and half months before diagnosis. In the meantime, they took painkillers and antacids and tried to live with their pain. They preferred a pharmacy to visiting a GP. What stands out for me in this study is how it is considered normal that women would keep bearing discomfort on their own. One of the reasons women ...

If asked as a child who the most beautiful woman in the world was, I’d answer with complete sincerity: Pamela Anderson. She had global popular culture in a chokehold throughout the 1990s, thanks to her role as the hippie romantic on the lifeguard soap Baywatch, which had a weekly audience of more than a billion in its heyday. Her rise, from being scouted at a Canadian football game to Playboy cover girl and TV star, was meteoric. Her look – the bouncy blonde hair, thin eyebrows and breast implants – made her into the designated sex symbol of a generation. Right at the cusp of her popularity the private sex tape she had made with her then-husband Tommy Lee was stolen from their ...

With the Nadhim Zahawi affair, Rishi Sunak has acted swiftly, decisively, but with fairness and decency over the last week – or so No 10 would have us believe. The version of events it wants in the minds of the public is that Rishi Sunak only found out in the last few days that there were questions around Zahawi’s tax affairs, which he had failed to disclose in line with the ministerial code. When the Prime Minister learned of this, he immediately appointed an independent investigator – on an expedited timeline – and once that investigator reported, Sunak acted rapidly to sack Zahawi. The reality is dramatically different: successive prime ministers could have quickly got to the truth about Zahawi six years ...

The last week has been a lesson in the difference between theory and practice. For several years now some feminists have tried to point out the risks posed by unquestioningly accepting claims about gender identity. When we pointed out that self-identification is unverifiable, and open to exploitation by sexual predators, we were shouted down and accused of transphobia. When we argued that vulnerable women prisoners should not have to share intimate spaces with men convicted of sex offences, we were told to think of the feelings of trans prisoners. No predator would ever dishonestly claim to be transgender, ministers insisted in the Scottish Parliament just before Christmas. They refused to accept an amendment to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill that would ...

Dutch diplomacy is one of the great oxymorons (though as we saw this week with the Leopard 2 debate, German diplomacy is often not far behind). A leaked proposal of the EU’s plan for a new debt instrument in response to the US's Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to subsidise green investment in America, hasn’t gone down well in northern Europe. Politico quotes the Dutch ambassador to the EU, Robert de Groot, response to the proposal for a recovery fund as “Marx on steroids”. I also have big issues with the leaked proposal by Charles Michel, president of the European Council, not because it is left wing, but because it makes no sense. The German finance ministry also rejected the idea ...