News Round-Up

• “Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested over Epstein scandal” – Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after police raided his Sandringham and Windsor homes on his 66th birthday, plunging the monarchy into its gravest crisis in living memory, reports the Telegraph.
• “Andrew’s arrest is the worst constitutional crisis in a century” – The King has been forced to confront a far bigger threat than any of his recent forebears, with his brother remaining eighth in line to the throne and the Palace struggling to contain the fallout, says the Times.
• “Why was Andrew arrested? Misconduct in public office explained” – The charge of misconduct in public office, which carries a potential life sentence, is notoriously difficult to prosecute, with numerous legal hurdles standing in the way, according to the Times.
• “Mandelson’s consultancy collapses after Epstein revelations” – Lord Mandelson’s lobbying firm has gone into administration after revelations about the Labour grandee’s close ties to Jeffrey Epstein triggered an exodus of clients, according to the Telegraph.
• “Starmer ‘will defy Trump over Chagos deal’” – The Prime Minister has resolved to press ahead with the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius despite Donald Trump calling the decision a “big mistake”, reports the Telegraph.
• “UK blocking Trump from using RAF bases for strikes on Iran” – Britain’s refusal to allow the US to use RAF bases for potential strikes on Iran is the real reason behind Donald Trump’s withdrawal of support for the Chagos Islands deal, notes the Times.
• “Starmer has turned Britain into a laughing stock over Chagos” – The Prime Minister has been condemned as out of his depth and lacking the backbone to stand by his own policies in the face of American pressure, says the Telegraph.
• “Starmer appoints Antonia Romeo as Cabinet Secretary” – Antonia Romeo has been appointed as the first female head of the Civil Service, taking up the role of Cabinet Secretary following the resignation of Sir Chris Wormald, reports the Telegraph.
• “David Lammy U-turns on deleting grooming gang courts archive” – David Lammy has abandoned his plans to delete a major archive of court records that provides crucial insight into grooming gang prosecutions, following a fierce public backlash, says the Telegraph.
• “Nigel Farage and I will defuse the benefits bomb that could bankrupt Britain” – Reform UK has pledged that a future Farage government will overhaul the benefits system to prevent it from bankrupting Britain, with the party vowing always to protect the vulnerable while cutting waste, writes Robert Jenrick in the Telegraph.
• “Bridget Phillipson is failing to enforce judgment on female spaces” – For ten months many employers and service providers have ignored the Supreme Court ruling and continued to allow males to use women’s facilities – and the Education Secretary has done nothing about it, according to Akua Reindorf the Times.
• “Why the Equality Act has to go” – Reform UK has announced plans to scrap the Equality Act 2010 on “day one”, with Suella Braverman arguing that the legislation has become a vehicle for systematic discrimination against white males across both public and private sectors, writes Laurie Wastell in the Spectator.
• “The dodgy data behind child poverty” – Half a million children who the government previously claimed were living in poverty have been found to be not in poverty at all, after the DWP’s income figures were revealed as wildly inaccurate, reveals Michael Simmons in the Spectator.
• “Angela Rayner has suddenly discovered the cost of… Angela Rayner” – The Deputy Prime Minister has apparently contracted the Westminster disease of fiscal rectitude, suddenly discovering a desire to be taken seriously on matters of public finance, notes the Telegraph.
• “Don’t underestimate the ‘stop Farage’ alliance” – Evidence from the Caerphilly by-election shows that Left-wing voters are sufficiently nimble to coalesce tactically without a formal pact, posing a grave danger to Reform UK’s prospects at the next general election, says Rod Liddle in the Spectator.
• “Britain’s Right is falling into the same trap as the left” – The launch of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party has opened a fresh ideological schism on the Right that threatens to replicate the very purity spirals that have long crippled the Left, says Douglas Murray in the Spectator.
• “The splintered right: how Rupert Lowe’s folly could gift the Left a decade” – Restore Britain has been assessed as a textbook “surge-and-collapse” trap under First-Past-The-Post, with even a 3–5% share threatening to hand marginal seats to Labour and the Greens and delay any patriotic realignment until 2034, claims the Rational Forum.
• “Donald Trump to help Britons bypass online safety laws” – The US State Department has launched a freedom.gov online portal to allow Europeans to access to content banned by their governments, in a direct challenge to Labour’s online safety regime, reports the Telegraph.
• “Trump issues new 10-day ultimatum to Iran on peace deal or he’ll unleash bombing hell” – Donald Trump has warned world leaders that the US could strike Iran if a nuclear deal is not reached within ten days, dramatically raising the stakes at what he called the first Board of Peace meeting, reports the Mail.
• “Just how bad are Nato’s armies?” – Despite facing Russia, whose economy is a fraction the size of Europe’s combined Nato members, the alliance’s fighting forces have been shown to be shockingly undermanned and under-deployed against a battle-hardened adversary, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
• “More than £15 billion of benefits given to migrant households in just 18 months, shock data reveals” – Research shared exclusively with the Mail has revealed that 70% of the £15 billion spent on migrant benefits was paid to households containing at least one unemployed foreign national.
• “Labour has learnt nothing from Denmark’s immigration success” – Denmark’s so-called ‘paradigm shift’ in immigration policy has delivered dramatic results that both Labour and Reform have conspicuously failed to study or emulate, reports the Telegraph.
• “Taliban ‘legalises’ domestic violence with new laws allowing husbands to beat women – as Afghanistan descends into the dark ages” – A new 90-page Taliban penal code has introduced different levels of punishment depending on a person’s standing in society, enshrining the right of husbands to beat their wives, notes the Mail.
• “Iran jails British tourists accused of spying” – A British couple have been jailed for ten years after being accused of spying on Iran while posing as tourists, reports the Telegraph. Tl;dr: they were tourists.
• “The Nazi sympathiser crisis tearing the architects of Trump 2.0 apart” – Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes has sparked a bitter internal feud among staff at Heritage, threatening the coherence of the conservative movement, claims the Telegraph.
• “The pro-Gaza luvvies are engaged in their nastiest purity spiral yet” – Pro-Gaza activists in the arts world have been shown to be mirroring the ideological purges of China’s Cultural Revolution, turning on allies for the slightest deviation from approved orthodoxy, reports the Telegraph.
• “The rise of trans ‘gunpersons’ should surprise no one” – When ideological zealots have been allowed to foster an atmosphere of hysteria, disturbed individuals have inevitably turned to violence, as a string of recent cases dramatically illustrates, writes Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
• “The cat is out of the bag over covid vaccine blood clots” – A mainstream medical journal has finally acknowledged that the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson covid vaccines caused life-threatening blood clots through “rogue” antibodies, prompting scientists who once dismissed such concerns to congratulate each other on the elegance of the discovery, says Roger Watson in the Conservative Woman.
• “Church lefties play the race card in £100 million slavery reparation battle” – As the row over the Church of England’s £100 million slavery reparations scheme flares at General Synod, leftist members have attempted to suppress dissent by branding opponents a risk to the wellbeing of black Synod members, says Julian Mann in the Conservative Woman.
• “Even auto giants know it: the electric car boom is out of charge” – The world’s biggest carmakers have written off more than $60 billion from their balance sheets in the past year as they beat a retreat from an EV revolution that has conspicuously failed to materialise, reports the Telegraph.
• “How Ed Miliband’s Net Zero folly stoked a house price crisis” – More than two thirds of homes in Aberdeen fell in value last year, with the average property now selling for just £136,000, as Net Zero policies have devastated the local energy industry and property market, notes the Telegraph.
• “Special needs school transport bill to rocket 70pc to £3.4 billion, Bridget Phillipson warned” – English councils have been warned of a 70% jump in special needs transport costs, rocketing to £3.4 billion a year, in stark new figures presented to the Education Secretary, reports the Telegraph.
• “Lisa Nandy paves the way for Telegraph sale” – The Culture Secretary has cleared the way for the Daily Mail owner to pay the agreed price for an option to acquire the newspaper, ending a prolonged period of uncertainty over the Telegraph‘s future, says the Telegraph.
• “Starmer simply doesn’t care enough to defend Britain” – Increased spending on the Armed Forces involves choices too unpalatable for this Government, and the country should expect nothing but more dithering from a Prime Minister who lacks the will to act, says David Frost in the Telegraph.
• “Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as he is driven away from the local nick and realises the driver’s name is Clinton” – Interesting interpretation of the iconic final scene in The Long Good Friday.

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