Once jihadi bride Shamima Begum sets foot on British soil again, what do you think the chances are of her ever being deported? Less than zero. Even if she fails in her legal bid to have her UK citizenship reinstated, she is certain to be granted ‘exceptional leave’ to remain. For a start, no country … Read more
Better late than never, Sir Humphrey is on his bike. Why has it taken Boris so long to get rid of him? Mark Sedwill should have been given his P45 the day Johnson moved into Downing Street. I said as much in this column more than a year ago, when it became apparent that Mother … Read more
When the Monty Python team couldn’t think of a proper ending to one of their more fantastic sketches, they came up with a brilliant device for calling a halt. The late, great Graham Chapman would march on set, dressed as a British Army Colonel, complete with swagger stick, and announce: ‘Stop this, it’s getting silly.’ … Read more
Boris Johnson is splashing out £900,000 of taxpayers’ money giving his official jet a funky makeover, including a spiffing red, white and blue paint job. Still, with £300billion already flushed down the gurgler, what’s another million quid on a few cans of Dulux? The RAF A330 Voyager is being repainted from its original battleship grey to … Read more
The first thought that occurred to me as I saw the crowds queuing to get into shops yesterday morning was: Why aren’t they at work? Some of the bargain hunters jostling outside Nike Town, on London’s Oxford Street, looked as if they’d come straight from a Black Lives Matter demo. Queue jumpers tried to force … Read more
A policeman grapples with a black suspect on an East London pavement. Instead of rushing to the copper’s aid, passers-by attack him. When a female officer intervenes, she is kicked and punched. After putting the boot in, another man poses theatrically for a selfie, grinning as the policeman struggles on the floor. The incident was … Read more
This is how it ends. This is how it always ends. Badly. What did they think was going to happen? By the time the ‘largely peaceful’ Black Lives Matter protest had called it a day, 49 coppers had been injured and one female officer was lying in hospital with cracked ribs, a broken collarbone and … Read more
Back when I was an industrial correspondent in the Seventies and Eighties, we had a word for employees who refused to go to work. It was called a ‘strike’. The unions withdrew their labour and their members didn’t get paid. Most of the time, these strikes were over money, even though Britain was an economic … Read more
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: With depressing predictability, it’s politics as usual again. The temporary ‘we’re all in this together’ truce didn’t last long.