As diplomatic statements go, it lacks a certain Palmerstonian gravitas. “I did not smile, because it wasn’t a meeting about delivering a message that involved a smile.” Angus Robertson, the Scottish government’s External affairs Secretary, is attempting to dig himself out of a hole after meeting with Daniela Grudsky, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK. The Scottish independence movement is not overly keen on Israel at the best of times, and given the distressing situation in Gaza it is, currently, positively apoplectic. Robertson’s statement is therefore intended to prove the meeting was conducted in the spirit of necessity, not friendship, and he has also now apologised to party members for holding it. He insists he will not resign. There are those of ...

While most Democrats celebrate their recent polling surge in Chicago this week, Joe Biden is in self-imposed exile. After delivering his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, the US President flew to Santa Barbara for a “vacation” with his family. In reality, he is still smarting from being forced to sacrifice a potential second term by Democratic grandees who for months claimed to be his loyal backers. A more charitable interpretation of Biden’s early convention departure would be that he wanted to make way for his vice president and successor Kamala Harris, who now only has two weeks before mail voting begins on 6 September.  Whatever the reason for his early departure, Biden’s task at the convention was ...

Growing up in southwest London in the 2000s and 2010s, I heard a lot about Gail’s. The area was an early bastion of the posh café-slash-bakery chain: my mum would oftengo to the branch in Barnes, an idyllic village that clings to a bend in the Thames below Hammersmith, and bump into the parents of other kids at my and my sisters’ schools. It was a place to see and be seen as you bought expensive lattes – the flat white hadn’t arrived yet – and loaves of a new type of bread they called “sourdough”. Since then, Gail’s domain has expanded, the tally of its branches puffing up like bread in an oven. The first Gail’s opened in Hampstead in 2005; now there are ...

The last thing the SNP needed, given its profound electoral travails, was a spending crisis. But a spending crisis is what it’s got. In recent years the management of the public finances has been radical, messy and often incoherent. Income tax rates have risen above those paid elsewhere in the UK. Expensive new benefits have been introduced. Councils have been bullied into austerity. Westminster has been blamed for all difficulties. This has coincided with voters shedding their illusions about the SNP. Polls show that they no longer regard the Nats as progressive angels saving Scotland from a stingy, right-wing London. If taxes have gone up, where have been the commensurate improvements in public services? Why is the NHS on the verge of ...

Who gets to be English? On BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media questioned Matthew Goodwin as to why he would accept her as English despite her being a child of immigrants but keeps labelling the Southport stabber the child of Rwandan immigrants (the killer was born in Wales and raised in this country). And his stumbling response revealed a slippage between a civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood, which has lurked beneath much of the violence seen recently. On the one hand, there’s a jus soli conception of nationhood: if you’re born and raised on English soil, you’re English irrespective of where your parents’ origins. But on the other, there’s a darker and deeper ancestral understanding, ...

I was just about learning to walk the last time the Conservatives were evicted from office. And while I don’t have any political memory of that time, I can only imagine the then opposition, smarting from a historic defeat, was approaching its newfound position in a more dignified and collegiate way than its equivalent today. The Conservatives’ response to the riots has been bizarre. Shadow cabinet members and Conservative police and crime commissioners seeking to make political capital from the events – which the overwhelming majority of Brits are united in condemning – is a prepubescent approach to opposition politics. It speaks to a very core, very partisan, very logged-on base, who see little but the rosette on the jacket. Is ...

There could be no better accompaniment to a long holiday drive – particularly through France – than the brilliant recent Rest Is History series on the beginning of the French revolution. It not only tells the tale of the extraordinary transformation of France in a few short years, but also reminds us how – for the British conservative in particular – the events remain strong in our imagination. From Edmund Burke to Margaret Thatcher, conservatives view the French revolution as an example of the disorder, chaos and violence that occurs when institutions are swept away. It is a salutary lesson in what happens when the mob takes charge. For those of us who are children of the 1980s – when riots were ...

More data on the performance of Scotland’s schools, more depressing news. It’s becoming increasingly hard to remember a time when Scottish education was a source of national pride. The latest indication of the decline came with this week’s exam results. The number of pupils achieving an A, B or C grade at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher dropped. The attainment gap – the measure of educational performance between children living in the most and least deprived areas, so favoured by Nicola Sturgeon - rose on last year and on pre-pandemic levels. Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has said the results are “not good enough”, and she is of course right. Generations of children have been let down by a Holyrood parliament that ...