On Tuesday the resident doctors start a six day long strike. It’s the 16th strike since this pay and conditions dispute started. At the beginning, there was a lot of public sympathy for the doctors, but I think that sympathy is waning. They saw Wes Streeting award a 29.4 per c...
Buy tickets HERE! This year’s lineup of guests for my ALL TALK Fringe show is the most high profile so far. I have four current or past political party leaders including Kemi Badenoch and Zack Polanski. I want the Edinburgh public to discover the people behind the pol...
Last night, John and I sat down to watch the Huw Edwards drama which Channel 5 showed last week. It was that or Virgin River or the Hotel Inspector. Watching a drama about someone you vaguely know was bound to be a strange experience. What I wasn’t expecting, but should hav...
Dear all, So there I was, catching snippets of the West Ham v Manchester City match on my phone, while also watching Kemi Badenoch and Theresa May strutting their funky stuff to a live performance by Nicole Scherzinger, followed by Rory Bremner playing Bruce Forsyth in...
I have a treat for you. Clyde Best is a true West Ham legend. He can legitimately be described as Britain’s first star black footballer, and a real role model for the black players that followed him into the professional game in the 1970s and 1980s. He came to this co...
It’s astonishing how many experts on international law there seem to be. They all seem to know it, chapter and verse assume that any action taken by the USA or Israel must, by definition, breach international law. And that tells you all you need to know about their motivations...
Some by-elections are remembered for decades – think Oxford 1938 - Orpington 1962, Glasgow Hillhead 1981 – and others fade into obscurity almost as soon as the result is declared. Watching Labour representatives on the media this morning try to dismiss this as a normal resu...
BITEBACK TO PUBLISH IAIN DALE’S UNFILTERED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Biteback Publishing has acquired Iain Dale’s searingly honest autobiography, offering a rare, honest look at failure, imposter syndrome and the art of broadcasting. Award-winning broadcaster Iain Dale has led a...
On Tuesday morning I was at Crawley Magistrates Court, where I pleaded (or is it ‘pled’?) guilty to a speeding offence from last September. I was already on nine points when it happened, although three of those had already come off my licence in November. That doesn’t count th...
There is one thing above all that Keir Starmer is brilliant at, and that’s throwing colleagues under a bus, and failing to take responsibility himself for things that go wrong. It’s something that means he has very few people around him who are totally loyal to him. They know ...
My generation has experienced a rarity in British history. We’ve never really faced the prospect of a European or World War. You could argue the nuclear arms race in the 1980s was the closest we came to it, but it was never really a serious prospect. And when the cold war ende...
I understand why so many people are disillusioned with politics and politicians, but that being said, politics never fails to amaze, even if it doesn’t inspire. We live in an age of political fluidity, where party allegiances no longer mean an awful lot. Political parties have...
Back in the 2000s many bloggers used the art of ‘Fisking’ as a way of explaining why a MSM newspaper columnist was wrong. The term emerged in the early 2000s blogosphere and is named after Robert Fisk, a well-known Middle East correspondent for The Independent. Bloggers began ...
Eighteen months really is a long time in politics. Yesterday I was clearing out some papers and came across a copy of the New Statesman from 12 July 2024. It was their post-election issue. I flicked through it and was astonished by the...
Yesterday, Donald Trump did what he does best. He surprised us all by saying he would impose tariffs on various European countries, including the UK, unless they all acceded to his desire to buy or take over Greenland. He’s behaving like the child bully who makes threats if he...
If you want to kill a snake in the grass, the best thing to do is cut its head off. That’s what Kemi Badenoch has done to Robert Jenrick, and it’s not before time. I make it my business to have good relationships with politicians across the political spectrum, and it’s rare...
The established media comes in for a lot of criticism nowadays from the both hard right and hard left, and indeed some in between. “You’re biased,” they scream. “You’re legacy media,” they accuse. And much more besides. I reject most of the criticisms made, but this week I’...
Interview by Ronan McCreevey How did you get to edit a book about Irish taoisigh? I started my original podcast with British prime ministers in 2021 because it was the 300th anniversary of Robert Walpole being our first prime minister. I commissioned 55 people to write e...
New year is a good time to start afresh, so we've got two new innovations for my LBC eveninf radio show. We're extending Cross Question, our political panel show to four days a week, starting this week. Our first Thursday CQ will feature four LBC presenters - Tom S...
For those of us on the centre-right, who have always regarded our alliance with the United States as central to our defence and security policy, today is a difficult day. While no one would bemoan the departure of the brutal and illegitimate Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro,...