Opinion

On February 25 2015, Andy Burnham rang me up out of the blue. In those days, I was the political editor at the Manchester Evening News, covering Greater Manchester’s escalating attempts to wrestle power away from London.

George Shipley doesn’t mince his words. The 34-year-old acting skipper stands on the quayside at Brixham harbour, the smell of salt and diesel thick in the early morning air, white plastic boxes stacked behind him and the Devon hills rising beyond the trawlers, and says what every fisherman here is thinking.

For the third time in a row Reform sought to stoke division and violence on Britain’s streets and have been roundly rejected by voters as a result, reports Adam Bienkov.

Victory for Labour. A heavy and wounding defeat for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Triumph for Andy Burnham. Complete and utter ruin for Keir Starmer.

Having been on Reform UK’s target list as a winnable seat, Andy Burnham’s new constituency is a microcosm of Brexit Britain and the failed legacies of Thatcher and Blair.

Having exercised unchallenged power in Belarus since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko has earned himself not only the title of “Europe’s last dictator,” but also a well-deserved reputation as a shrewd international player.

Age verification means that the sector’s biggest players will now have access to information that will only make them richer and more powerful

On 12 June, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, announced that she was releasing several pages of documents pertaining to US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine.

In January 2026, things looked exceedingly grim for the Iranian Government. After a decade of US sanctions, its economy was in a perpetual state of collapse. It had high inflation, high unemployment, and no way to get back on top of the problem.

Since he was a child studying at Gordonstoun, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was accused of arrogance and entitlement - sadly it appears he still has not learnt his lesson.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in order to restore Russia’s imperial greatness. Instead, he may go down in history as the man who transformed Russia into China’s junior partner, thereby demoting it to the ranks of middle powers — or, worse, transforming it into a Third World country with nuclear weapons.

The message circulating on WhatsApp listed 26 locations in and around Belfast with an unambiguous instruction: “Forward to all men of the age 18 and over.

UK and European law has started from the premise that trans people exist since at least 1999.

A bomb has gone off under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

On Tuesday hundreds of masked men spread across Belfast, pulling migrants and non-white people onto the street and setting their homes on fire.

The unemployment rate has climbed every month since the chancellor’s maiden Budget in October 2024. It’s jumped from 4.1% to 5% on Reeves’s watch, with forecasters warning of 200,000 job losses this year.

Eugenie and Beatrice look steady in public but one quiet decision behind palace doors could erase their place in the family faster than anyone expects.

Today, we learned that Britain’s national debt is growing at a faster pace than any country in the world, except Botswana. Yet instead of taking control, Reeves wants to borrow and spend even more.

The demands of high office, the weight of responsibility of keeping the country safe, combined with a good chunk of your MPs trying to depose you from office, would understandably make it difficult to sleep at night on the best of days.

On the outskirts of the sprawling city of Paris stands Villa Windsor - a glamorous house surrounded by a large garden and trees.

As Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie face the humiliation of another slew of headlines about their father Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it could not have come at a worse time.

I don’t understand why the Labour Party is getting so excited about Andy Burnham. Because until now, it’s never been that bothered.

Leaders of some of the UK’s largest companies have expressed alarm at the chaos engulfing Westminster.

Alyona Shevtsova, a Ukrainian fintech executive sanctioned at home over alleged fraud, recently appeared as a speaker at a major UK compliance event.

Jimmy Kimmel has defended a joke in which he referred to First Lady Melania Trump as an “expectant widow” just days before a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.