The choice by congressional Democrats on the 6 January House committee on the US Capitol riots to put the two Republican members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, front and centre has paid off. The GOP duo have grabbed the spotlight and performed well. However, there is a danger in letting the pair overdo the pretence that there is a split in the conservative movement away from Donald Trump. Having Cheney and Kinzinger take such prominent roles in the hearings serves a clear purpose: it allows House Democrats to make a plausible argument that there’s at least a whiff of bipartisanship to the committee. That’s been made necessary by the refusal of Republicans to even entertain the possibility of participating in the ...

Joe Manchin, a third-term senator and former governor from the deeply conservative US state of West Virginia, is a Democrat where no Democrat should exist. His own views skew far closer to the party he runs against than the one he represents. And yet for a few more months, he is perhaps the most powerful person in America – and the most dangerous.  With the Democratic majority in the Senate requiring every possible vote in order to pass a law (it is dead split, with the vice-president retaining the deciding vote), Manchin holds a spoiler vote for any legislation that the Joe Biden administration tries to pass. This is far from an ideal situation. It’s also far from unique – plenty ...

The global cost of oil and gas is shooting ever upwards in the wake of the war in Ukraine; energy corporations are getting record profits while hitting the poorest hardest, both at home and at the fuel pump. The protests planned for Friday across England and Wales – the latest in a series of recent demonstrations – show the anger over growing fuel prices. During the fuel crisis, different protest groups in the UK have been racing to define the solution: one prominent group wants to perpetuate our current fossil fuel addiction, while another wants to break from the mistakes of the past. First is the climate campaign group Just Stop Oil, from which a number of activists invaded the track ...

For years now, social media has been the villain du jour for spiking rates of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem among Gen Z girls. Apps such as Instagram and TikTok, we’re told, make us miserable and self-loathing. But do they also draw out a darker side with regards to how we treat other people? Earlier this month, the Times reported a rise in bullying between teen girls. It referred to a government study of 10,000 students that found boys aged 15 and 16 are less likely to be bullied than a decade ago, then a survey from Notting Hill and Ealing High School that reported girl-on-girl bullying is getting worse. Female cruelty is, of course, age-old. There is research that shows girls ...

Daria Kasatkina. If you’re not a tennis fan you might not have heard the name before. The no 1 Russian women’s tennis player, who made it to the semi-final of the French Open in June and is ranked 12th in the world, has come out as gay. In an Instagram post she said that she was in a relationship with Natalia Zabiiako, a Russian figure skater. I have not been able to stop thinking about her bravery. It still takes considerable courage to be open about your sexuality in elite sports, no matter where in the world you live. Last month the Olympian Dame Kelly Holmes created national news for coming out at the age of 52, having been forced into silence as a teenager in the army, which banned gay ...

“Some people will say as I leave office that this is the end of Brexit,” Boris Johnson told the House of Commons on 18 July, as he defended his government against the confidence vote that it had, confusingly, decided to call in itself. “Oh yes, and the leader of the opposition and the deep state will prevail in their plot to haul us back into alignment with the EU as a prelude to our eventual return. And we on this side of the House will prove them wrong.” It’s hardly “we will fight them on the beaches” (a setting, one must assume, that a demob-happy Prime Minister who isn’t even pretending to care about the nation any more would much rather ...

Kemi Badenoch is out of the race to become Conservative leader. It was never likely that she would secure one of the two places in the final round, despite the endorsements of senior Conservatives including Michael Gove. Nevertheless, I rather hoped that she might defy the odds. I wasn’t alone in that. If Badenoch, 42, the MP for Saffron Walden in Essex, had made it through to face the party members’ vote, she could well have become our next prime minister. Polling of Conservative Party members has revealed strong support for her: before her elimination, unscientific but closely watched surveys by ConservativeHome found Badenoch to be the clear favourite. This was interesting, to say the least. Conservative Party members are disproportionately male, middle aged ...

According to the contemptuous right-wing press, generally in the form of white men, we should deal with climate change and the heatwave by just chilling out and eating ice cream while forests burn and people die. “The heatwave green hysteria is out of control,” wrote Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator yesterday, urging everyone to “calm down”.  There is something “creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour”, he commented. “What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?” What a joker. Sardinia is experiencing its worst locust invasion in over 30 years, in large part because of the dry, hot weather. The heatwave is ...