It’s rare these days for a politician to announce an appointment that provokes no hostility. But then it is hard to imagine anyone – anyone who reads, at least – being anything other than bucked up at the announcement by Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, that Scotland’s fourth national poet or Makar, will be Kathleen Jamie. Jamie’s three-year appointment means that she
The 457 British servicemen and women who lost their lives in the dust of Afghanistan died for nothing. That is the view of 59 per cent of Britons, according to a JL Partners poll taken pn 18 August. Almost two thirds (65 per cent) say the West has let Afghan women and children down. Furthermore, while the British public is less sure about whether the country should have sent
Dominic Raab wakes up to day two of a storm over his failure to phone his Afghan counterpart to seek help for locally hired UK staff in Afghanistan as Taliban militants surrounded Kabul. Yesterday (19 August), the Foreign Secretary faced demands to resign from Labour, the other opposition parties and some anonymous Conservative MPs, after it was reported that the phone call
Parliament has been recalled to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, as the government has announced it will take 20,000 Afghan refugees – though when you look at the small print, the actual figure this year is 5,000. Although parliament is discussing a so-called “neutral motion”, which cannot be amended and also means that Boris Johnson can, if he chooses, rock up, say his
Will Joe Biden pay an electoral price for the withdrawal from Afghanistan? The president struck a defiant note in his speech yesterday, defending the American decision to withdraw and reiterating his opposition to continuing the United States’ 20-year involvement with the country. The first polls of the American electorate since the withdrawal show that most voters still