That Tahir Ali, a backbench Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, could stand up in the House of Commons and openly demand the reintroduction of blasphemy laws to “prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions” was disgraceful enough. What was even worse was Keir Starmer’s pedestrian response that “desecration is awful” and that his government was “committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division”, rather than bluntly answering the question with a simple and firm no. Blasphemy laws have no place in a liberal democracy – as we claim to be – and his party shouldn’t countenance them.  This wasn’t even the first time a MP has called for blasphemy laws ...

In the end, it wasn’t as close as many were expecting. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, brought forward as a Private Members Bill by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, passed its second reading in the House of Commons by 330 votes for 275.But that result does not tell the whole story. It does not capture the fierce tug between radically contrary moral perspectives, laid out in compelling detail in speeches – more than 40 of them in all, not to mention countless other interventions – over an emotionally gruelling five hours on a crisp Friday in Westminster.By the time the debate began, we were familiar with the arguments for and against. We have heard them all: the ...

The Republic of Ireland is voting today in an election that seems unlikely to alter very much. Ever since the state’s inception in 1922 only the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties have ever produced a taoiseach. The country is currently run by a coalition of the two, after they dropped historic enmity first forged in the civil war to work together (first in a confidence and supply agreement in 2010s and then a formal arrangement in 2020). There is every reason to suspect that the next government will be another coalition of the two. The parties now cohere around a liberal centrist policy platform. This holds especially for Fine Gael (who cleave more socially liberal and pro-enterprise than their counterpart). ...

There were some in Labour who never expected Louise Haigh to enter Keir Starmer’s cabinet. Both allies and sceptics questioned whether the soft-left 37-year-old – who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership – would make it to the top table. That she did – becoming the youngest-ever female cabinet minister – was a reflection of the esteem in which Starmer held her. Haigh was deemed to have mastered her transport brief in opposition and so made the transition to government.  But this morning she became the first cabinet minister to resign from Starmer’s six-month-old administration. The trigger was a Sky News story which revealed that Haigh was convicted of fraud by misrepresentation in 2015 after wrongly reporting that her work ...

The Royal George Hotel in Perth has existed since 1773. Queen Victoria stayed there in 1848, and there are two lamps in the hotel fashioned from the bed she slept in. Since March this year, the Stone of Destiny, used in the coronation of ancient Scottish kings, has been on display 300 yards away. It is, therefore, a place of some historic note. This weekend, a different kind of history will occur, when the Royal George hosts Reform UK’s first-ever Scottish conference. The event, which only lasts four hours, is billed as featuring “Richard Tice MP and guests”. A few short years ago this might have created general amusement in the mainstream political class. No longer. The party is expecting between 200-300 ...

It’s been ten years since my brother took his own life. He waited for his wife to go away for a night and then threw himself down a flight of stone steps. When she returned the next morning she found him dead at the foot of the stairs. He was 60 years old and had recently become paralysed from the waist down as a result of kidney cancer. The coroner was unable to ascertain the cause of death or how long it had taken him to die. It was entirely possible that he had lain there for hours in the dark before he died. The family will never know and are haunted by his lonely death. His palliative care team phoned me ...

For reasons best known to myself, I decided to watch the first episode of Meet The Rees-Moggs not in the privacy of my own home, but with the crowd attending the official launch of the reality series at Warner Bros HQ in London (Warner is the owner of Discovery+, which is streaming the show). In a way, this was a mistake. At home, I would have been able to step away for minutes at a time, the better to despair and self-medicate. But on the plus side, maybe I’m just a little better prepared now for life in 21st-century Britain, a place in which some men will always be good chaps whatever they’ve done, and no one will ever have to go ...

Oxford in the 1980s was well-photographed, and as a consequence we have several contemporaneous images of a young William Hague. He went up to Magdalen College in 1979, to read (inevitably) Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Let it not be said he didn’t know how to have fun though: an image of him bopping in evening dress is now preserved forever. But the best is more sedate. Hague is at the Oxford Union, the university’s neo-gothic debating society, and looks it. Winged lapels; loose, thickly knotted bowtie; three shiny buttons on each flank of his tailcoat.   The two young men to either side of him look like standard Union apparatchiks, or “hacks” as they’re known. One, wide grin and swept hair; the ...