News Round-Up

• “Rishi Sunak begs angry Tories to return after by-election carnage” – Rishi Sunak blames the Tories two by-election losses in Wellingborough and Kingswood on low turnout and warns that voting Reform would “put Keir Starmer in power”, reports the Mail.
• “Reform is not just a flash in the pan, these results show it holds the key to Tory re-election” – The right-of-centre party came third in both Wellingborough and Kingswood achieving double digit percentages of the vote, reports the Telegraph.
• “Reform secure best by-election result – are they a threat to Tories?” – Election experts say the by-election results “backed up” Reform’s national opinion polling, which has seen the party hover around 10% for weeks, says the Mail.
• “The Tories should be worried about Reform” – The Tories failed on all the traditional vote-winning concerns: the economy and taxation, the state of the NHS, the criminal justice system, according to Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator.
• “Reform is obliterating the Tories. It’s too late to avoid electoral catastrophe” – Big tax cuts might have prevented these by-election disasters, but Mr Sunak chose otherwise, says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
• “The Tories laughed as we launched Reform U.K. – they’re not laughing now” – Conservative MPs deserve to face electoral oblivion for their woeful performance, says Richard Tice in the Telegraph.
• “‘Zero tolerance’ policing and tackling ‘woke madness’: Reform U.K.’s pledges at a glance” – The right-of-centre party wants to make ‘tough decisions’ and have ‘difficult conversations’ about the future of the country, according to the Telegraph.
• “Nigel Farage considers comeback as Reform Party leader” – Reform took home 10.8% of the vote in the Kingswood by-election and 13% in Wellingborough, prompting Farage to show fresh interest in becoming leader of the party, says the Times.
• “Nigel Farage vows to make life ‘very difficult’ for new NatWest boss” – NatWest Group has appointed Paul Thwaite as its permanent Chief Exec, succeeding Dame Alison Rose who stepped down in the wake of the Nigel Farage debanking row last year, reports the Mail.
• “Navalny’s Hell on Earth” – The FKU IK-3 penal colony, where Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was murdered, is a Soviet-era prison camp located deep in the Arctic Circle, says the Mail.
• “The Navalny I knew was moral, witty and charming – unlike his nemesis Putin” – the opposition leader’s defiance and optimism were dangerous weapons that the Russian leader had no idea how to counter, reports the Telegraph.
• “‘Putin, you will answer for what you did to my husband’” – “If it’s true, I want Putin, his whole crew and all of his friends to know that they will answer for what they have done to our country, my family and my husband,” says Navalny’s widow, according to the Mail. “That day will come very soon.”
• “Putin must pay for ‘murder’ of Navalny, say world leaders” – Joe Biden among world leaders to speak out against Russian regime after concluding Putin was responsible for the death of Navalny, reports the Telegraph.
• “Labour’s plan to slap VAT on school fees is a tax on aspiration” – The idea that private schools are solely the preserve of the rich is a colossal misconception, says Inaya Folarin Iman in the Mail.
• “Where is the ECHR when Brits are having properties seized for asylum-seekers?” – Human rights activists don’t seem that bothered when the right to property is breached, says Ross Clark in the Telegraph.
• “How Sadiq Khan came up with names of the six London Overground lines” – The Labour Mayor gave branding firm DNCO five months and £115,275 of taxpayers’ money to come up with the names Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty, reports the Mail.
• “Maybe we shouldn’t be ‘annoying all the right people’” – On his Substack, Ed West reflects that politicising commonly shared amenities to ‘annoy all the right people’ may not be the best way to run a city.
• “MS Society defends axing volunteer, 90, who was confused over pronouns” – Fran Itkoff was fired after 60 years of voluntary service with the National Multiple Scelorsis Society because she was unable to master modern-day pronoun use, according the Mail.
• “The Maoist cruelty behind the trans crusade” – The ousting of a 90 year-old charity worker for querying preferred pronouns is a new low for the woke movement, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
• “Le Tissier says he has ‘zero regrets’ about his conspiracy theories” – Matt Le Tissier has insisted he has no regrets over his sceptical views about the Covid vaccines, reprots the Mail.
• “Why did behavioural scientists crave mask mandates?” – It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the U.K.’s COVID-19 Inquiry will be the most expensive pantomime of all time, says Gary Sidley in the Critic.
• “Skin cancer diagnosis delays caused by lockdowns led to 12,000 years of life lost” – Scientific analysis of records from more than 50,000 patients calculated how their disease would have progressed if their treatment hadn’t been delayed by the lockdown, says the Telegraph.
• “Royal College of GPs forced into U-turn after cancelling gender-critical doctors’ conference” – A Labour peer is “shocked and disappointed that medical body tried to close down debate on important clinical issue”, reports the Telegraph.
• “What’s with all the fuss over Simon Fanshawe?” – In the Critic, Freddie Attenborough writes about the latest trans row to engulf Edinburgh University.
• “Exeter Under Ideology” – Left-wing race and gender theory have devoured a once-prestigious American private school, says Christopher Rufo in City Journal.
• “John Lewis branded ‘irresponsible’ by GPs over breast binder advice for transgender children” – The recommendation in the department store’s magazine for 70,000 staff members that trans adolescent girls should try breast binders has been condemned by doctors, reports the Telegraph.
• “Donald Trump in court: attempt to delay Stormy Daniels case rejected” – Donald Trump will face a criminal trial next month over the allegation he paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, says the Times.
• “Trump must pay more than $350 million for fraudulently inflating income, judge rules” – In another blow to the presidential hopeful, Judge Arthur Engoron finds that Trump and his co-defendants submitted “blatantly false financial data” and must pay a huge fine, according to the Telegraph.
• “Meta, Amazon, Google and others shed 3,071 staff in do-goody ‘ESG’ roles” – More people left ESG jobs than started them for much of 2023, marking the reversal of a previously-growing sector, reports the Mail.
• “JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock drop out of massive UN climate alliance in stunning move” – JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and State Street confirmed they are exiting the world’s largest climate alliance which seeks to push investors away from funding the fossil fuel sector, says Fox Business.
• “Satellite photos show Egypt building a wall near Gaza Strip as Israeli offensive on Rafah looms” – Egypt is building a wall and is levelling land near its border with the Gaza Strip, according to AP News.
• “‘Run by the Mob’: How Anti-Semites Took Over Stanford’s Campus” – On January 24th, Stanford University held a forum on combating antisemitism which quickly descended into an antisemitic hate fest, reports the Free Beacon.
• “As the air goes out of Just Stop Oil, new tyre deflaters hit the streets” – Climate campaigners targeted a middle class street in Fulham earlier this week, deflating the tyres of a car that belonged to a handicapped women who couldn’t then take her child to hospital, says the Times.
• “Cambridge is biased against rich white boys, says ‘anti-woke’ vice-chancellor” – James Tooley, Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University, warns that diversity targets are discriminating against straight white males, reports the Times.
• “Met Office’s stormy January was just average” – January was in fact no more stormy than usual, reports Paul Homewood in TCW – Defending Freedom.
• “Neoracism, Finally on Defense” – Coleman Hughes has written a great book defending colour-blindness in American public life, says Andrew Sullivan on his Substack.
• “We didn’t find any racial bias in police shootings” – Ex-Harvard economist Roland Fryer explains to the Free Press’s Bari Weiss how his copper-bottomed finding that black Americans were no more likely to be killed by the police than whites caused an absolute meltdown among his academic colleagues, who strongly advised him not to publish.

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