Telegraph Blogs

From the @TelePolitics Evening Briefing. ***One-click sign-up*** HS2 ON TRACK FOR NOW HS2 cleared its first parliamentary hurdle. Despite the rebellion of 18 Conservative MPs, the Commons voted to allow ministers to start spending money on the project. That doesn’t mean the story of Tory revolts is over here: today’s vote was a minor one,… Read more

listen to ‘BBC bias and the death of Lou Reed’ on Audioboo In this week’s Telegram, James Delingpole locks horns with former BBC arts correspondent Rosie Millard over the issue of BBC bias. They don’t find common ground. At all. Then James talks to legendary rock journalist Mick Brown about what happens when – like… Read more

Is nature trying to tell Tony Abbott something? No sooner had the new Australian Prime Minister started to dismantle the last government’s policies for reducing carbon emissions, than wildfires swept across New South Wales, reigniting – as it were – the debate over climate change. The fires – the worst in the state for two… Read more

The longer I have been in Parliament, the more I realise that those on either front bench actually have rather a lot in common. I don’t just mean that they did similar degrees at similar Oxbridge colleges. Or that they then went on to work as “special advisers”, before being selected in equally safe seats.… Read more

One of the golden rules of Twitter is: beware anyone who starts sending messages after midnight. They’re likely to be either mad, drunk or Australian. Maybe all three. But now, based on the evidence of the early hours of this morning, there may be an alternative explanation. They could also be leader of Her Majesty’s… Read more

I strongly advise you to sit down before clicking on play. Funniest thing I’ve seen all day. Genuinely hilarious. Courtesy of Guido Fawkes.  

Over the last few days an unprecedented number of angry comedians have appeared in the national media. Last week Russell Brand did battle with Paxman on Newsnight, on Sunday David Mitchell and Steve Coogan clashed over press regulation in the Observer, and yesterday Robert Webb took on Russell Brand in the New Statesman. In battle,… Read more

Ed Miliband likes baseball. In particular, he supports the Boston Red Sox. He got into the game during a year at Harvard. Mr Miliband is so keen on the Sox that he appears to have stayed up until the early hours following their last World Series game, offering a Twitter commentary on the match from… Read more

Vast swathes of the British political establishment now seem to have their heads buried so deep in the sand I’m surprised they know whether it’s day or night. We stand as a country buried in hundreds of billions of pounds of debt, with a government still spending vast amounts more than it raises, and yet the inevitable pressures are set to continue. Pressures which will be of our own government’s making.

Dave has a problem with the countryside. There’s nothing new in that, but a new Countryside Alliance poll exposes how bad it is. Few people should be “natural Tories” more than Countryside Alliance folk, but now only 66 per cent say they would vote for Dave – a drop of almost 25 per cent from 2010. Yes, Dave should be very, very concerned.

Facebook is losing young teenagers. That’s the revelation made by the company’s finance chief which wiped £11.2 bn off its share price yesterday. In a recent survey, the social network was preferred by just 23 per cent of youngsters, down from 44 per cent. The gap is being filled by more lightweight, temporary, photo-focused networks… Read more

Oh dear. I haven’t much liked Tristram Hunt ever since he dismissed free schools as “vanity projects for West London yummy mummies” back in 2010, but even I felt a pang of sympathy after watching him being taken apart by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. Paxo asked the Shadow Education Secretary at least five times whether… Read more

The recent prominence of the Roma people in the news reminds me that there was a time when I was a small boy that I wanted to be a gipsy, travelling the country with a cocker spaniel in a vardo, or gipsy caravan, pulled by a docile and well-mannered horse. A lot of children of… Read more

I’m not quite sure what Halloween is or what it’s doing in my country – but I welcome any excuse to watch a good horror movie. By “good” I of course mean “bad”. Seriously good horror films (The Shining, Suspiria) are scary and likely to have me up all night with the lights on, nervously… Read more

So how do we get the best people into government? People who have political skills but who also have some basic nous about actually running things and working on a longer timespan than the next election or, worse, tomorrow’s headlines. Should we ban anyone from becoming an MP until he or she has reached mature… Read more

Here’s a snapshot of my half-way progress with this Halloween cartoon. I gave the monster a top lip in the final drawing because my editor thought he looked a tad turtle-y…

Len McCluskey is scared. It’s not a state of mind normally associated with the head of Britain’s most influential and aggressive trade union. But this morning, the Unite leader is a worried man.

From the @TelePolitics Evening Briefing. ***One-click sign-up*** LABOUR’S TITANIC STRUGGLE David Cameron gave Ed Miliband a kick over HS2. The Labour leader has “cowered in his office, too weak to make a decision” over the high-speed rail project, Mr Cameron said at PMQs. It was part of a confident performance from the PM on the… Read more

The granting of approval to the press Royal Charter is being widely reported as game, set and match to the politicians and those who’ve campaigned for state regulation of the press. It caps a bad day for the press which was unsuccessful in its attempt to persuade two High Court judges to stop the Charter… Read more

Rasmussen has released a striking new poll today on the Benghazi debacle and how it might impact Hillary Clinton’s likely candidacy in the 2016 presidential race. The poll comes in the wake of a CBS “60 Minutes” programme broadcast last Sunday, which gave new details about the killing of former US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher… Read more

Here’s this week’s competition. To recap: The Telegraph Cartoon Caption Competition is a weekly bit of light relief – with a prize! Every week I will post a cartoon relating to that week’s news. It may be straightforward, it may be surreal. All you have to do in post a caption to go with it… Read more

So Barack Obama has been bumped off the top spot of the annual Forbes list of the most powerful 72 people on the planet – one for every 100m of population – by the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Of course this is a cheap publicity stunt by Forbes to draw attention to their list, so I’m guilty… Read more