Labour leader’s appearance on chatshow reflects politicians’ more general move away from hard news outlets to cosier, more niche settings
When Keir Starmer appeared on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch to cook his favourite tandoori salmon recipe, host Tim Lovejoy had a question: “What on earth are you doing here? You should be on the BBC with Laura Kuenssberg.”
“This is so much nicer!” replied the Labour leader.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch says Clementine De Montjoye’s case raises fresh questions about UK’s asylum seeker scheme
The Rwandan government has barred a senior human rights researcher from entering the country, prompting accusations that officials are seeking to dodge independent scrutiny just weeks before the UK government is due to send asylum seekers there for the first time.
Rwandan immigration authorities denied entry to Clementine de Montjoye, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, when she arrived at Kigali International Airport on 13 May.
Continue reading...The subversive work of Eliza Haywood, the feminist forerunner of the TV show’s gossip columnist, is about to be republished
She is the real-life Lady Whistledown, an eyebrow-raising female writer who penned a salacious anonymous gossip sheet that skewered 18th-century London society.
Like the fictional pamphlet from Netflix hit Bridgerton, which returned for a third series last week, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746, has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.
Continue reading...Stephen Watson says process will be carried out ‘fairly and impartially’ in his most extensive public comments on the claims
The chief constable of the police force examining claims against Angela Rayner has defended the decision to investigate the Labour party deputy leader, vowing it would be done “fairly and impartially” and would establish whether “culpability is proven or otherwise”.
Stephen Watson, who leads Greater Manchester police (GMP), gave his most extensive public comments so far on the investigation, which was triggered by a complaint from a senior Conservative.
Continue reading...New furnaces will be powered by electricity from 2027 but up to 2,800 workers will be made redundant
Tata Steel has reached a deal with the UK’s electricity grid to start supplying the energy for new furnaces in south Wales from 2027, as the company moves ahead with its plan despite union opposition.
The agreement with the National Grid’s electricity supply operator (ESO), the company that controls how energy is moved around Great Britain, will provide hundreds of millions of megawatts of power to a new electric arc furnace at the steelworks in Port Talbot.
Continue reading...Coventry MP, whose antipathy for David Cameron sparked her interest in politics, has largest TikTok following in parliament
When the UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, sat in the BBC TV studio last Sunday morning, he clearly had no idea of the identity of the woman sitting on the panel opposite him, simply referring to her as “the Labour MP”.
By contrast, Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, knows everything about Lord Cameron, telling the Guardian that it was her hatred of him as prime minister that first brought her into politics as a young, leftwing, Muslim woman. Her whole political outlook has been shaped by Cameron: the trebling of tuition fees and austerity.
Continue reading...Shadow minister says it is Justin Welby’s job to speak out but Labour could not commit to scrapping policy
The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has praised the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, for calling on Labour to scrap the two-child benefit cap, saying it was “literally his job” to speak out on such matters.
Streeting said he did not like the cap, which campaigners say has pushed hundreds of thousands of families into poverty, but that the party could not commit to ending it until it knew how this would be financed.
Continue reading...Website blames human error for the advert, now removed, for about 100 seats when practice is illegal in UK
The ticket trading website Viagogo has apologised for “mistakenly” advertising tickets to an upcoming England football match, despite the fact that the resale of football tickets is illegal in the UK.
Cris Miller, the managing director of Viagogo,has previously said the company does not resell football tickets. But Viagogo was advertising about 100 seats at Wembley for England’s 7 June friendly against Iceland, a warm-up for this summer’s Euro 2024 tournament in Germany.
Continue reading...Anthony Olubunmi George, 61, has been refused leave to remain despite living most of his adult life in Britain
A disabled man who has lived in the UK for 38 years has been threatened with removal from the UK by the Home Office.
Anthony Olubunmi George, 61, came to the UK at the age of 24 in 1986 from Nigeria. He has not left the UK since and has no criminal convictions. In 2019, he had two strokes, which left him with problems with speech and mobility.
Continue reading...Cast member of Palme d’Or contender shot in Kent says the high number of chaperones and intimacy coordinators on set was over the top
Is Britain leading the way in protecting young people and children from the potential traumas of working on a film set, or has it all gone far too far? Two of the most prominent European stars attending the Cannes film festival, both with high-profile premieres, have very different views.
Franz Rogowski, the acclaimed German actor who plays a key role in Bird, British director Andrea Arnold’s contender for the top Palme d’Or prize, said this weekend that the proliferation of chaperones and intimacy coordinators that had been required on the shoot on location in Kent qualified as well-intended “madness”.
Continue reading...Passengers were left abandoned and humiliated after operator banned staff from providing assistance
Eurostar has reversed a new accessibility policy that left a wheelchair user stranded and has retrained its London staff following pressure from the Observer.
Travellers with disabilities claimed that they would be barred from Eurostar services after the company banned its London staff from pushing passenger wheelchairs. Those who require assistance were told they must travel with a companion or cancel their ticket if they were unable to access services unaided, according to passengers who contacted the Observer.
Continue reading...Party says pooling resources across regions would deliver 40,000 extra appointments a week for patients
Hospitals would have to share waiting lists and pool resources under Labour’s plans to reduce waiting times by delivering up to 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week.
The party has announced that patients would be offered appointments at nearby hospitals, rather than necessarily at their local one, which would enable people to receive faster treatment. Hospital staff and resources would be pooled across a region and would run evening and weekend surgeries.
Continue reading...O’Reilly, who was also an international rugby player for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, died in Dublin on Saturday
Tony O’Reilly, one of Ireland’s leading business figures, has died at the age of 88.
O’Reilly, who had a career in the media as well as being an international rugby player for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, died in St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin on Saturday.
Continue reading...Former chancellor, who was one of those who urged Johnson to go, says Tories should have realised ‘Twitter was not the country’
Former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has said he and his Conservative colleagues were wrong to force out Boris Johnson as prime minister in 2022.
Johnson resigned after less than three years in No 10 after more than 50 resignations from government of MPs and staff and waves of backbenchers urging him to quit over the handling of the Chris Pincher affair and numerous other scandals. He resigned as an MP a year later.
Continue reading...In latest Opinium poll, only 16% say accepting rightwing Tory MP’s defection was the right move – against 33% who see it as a mistake
More voters believe Keir Starmer was wrong to allow a rightwing Tory MP into Labour than think it was the right move, after anger from within the party’s ranks over the defection.
Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP, said the Tories had become “a byword for incompetence and division” when she made her shock departure to Labour earlier in May. The party leadership regarded it as a major coup to win the support of the MP on the frontline of the Channel crossings issue that Rishi Sunak has attempted to prioritise. The move came despite concerns among MPs that her views conflict with Labour in a variety of areas.
Continue reading...As the inquiry publishes its final report, the chancellor is under pressure to find £10bn to put right a longstanding injustice
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.
The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.
Continue reading...The cultural sector falls short on other measures of diversity too, with 9o% of workers white, says new report
Six in 10 of all arts and culture workers in the UK now come from middle-class backgrounds, compared with just over 42% of the wider workforce, according to new research.
And while 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%.
Continue reading...Gender stereotypes at home may hamper female students’ ability to progress in the classroom, research suggests
Parents are more likely to overestimate maths ability in sons than daughters, according to research that suggests that gender stereotypes at home may hinder the progress of female students.
The findings, presented in a lecture at University College London this week, found that parents tend to be overconfident about their children’s academic performance in reading and maths regardless of gender. But, in maths, parents overestimated boys’ skills to a significantly greater extent.
Continue reading...The ‘blood friends’ swap stories and medical advice to help one another feel unburdened by their experiences
Victims of the infected blood inquiry are joining forces to share stories and support.
Sue Wathen, Joan Edgington and Nicola Leahey were diagnosed with hepatitis C after struggling through years of unexplained symptoms that were dismissed by doctors.
Continue reading...Eight-year-olds’ video, which racked up 14m views, hits a sore point for mobilers who have struggled with the cost of living
Like the totemic £8 pint or £5 coffee, the cost of a Mr Whippy ice-cream has become a barometer of a world gone mad. But really, nine quid for two ice-creams? Bloody hell.
That was the damning verdict of an eight-year-old whose TikTok rant over the cost of two screwballs from an ice cream van in the park has racked up 14m views at the time of writing.
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