Politics

You wait eight-and-a-half years for someone to lose their job over the SNP’s ferries fiasco, then two sackings come at once. So which Scottish government minister has finally paid the price for a scandal that has left islanders without reliable ferry services, brought the Scottish government and its agencies into disrepute, and cost Scottish taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds and counting?  Not Derek Mackay, the junior minister responsible for transport when the contract was awarded in October 2015 – in a typically boosterish fashion at the SNP’s conference. He resigned in February 2020 after it emerged he had sent messages to a teenage boy. The first minister at the time the ferry contract

In 1894 Maria Hermann, an Austrian-born prostitute stood trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of a client. The evidence seemed overwhelming and she faced a death sentence if convicted. But she had the remarkable good fortune to be defended by Edward Marshall Hall, the greatest criminal advocate of the day. He produced evidence of the wretched life which had led her into a life of poverty, prostitution and degradation. At the end of his closing speech Hall slowly turned and looked towards the dock. ‘Look at her, members of the jury. God never gave her a chance, won’t you?’ The jury cleared her of murder, and in convicting her of

The herd of Conservative MPs is on the move again, this time obediently setting off towards the abattoir in which the careers of most will meet a grisly end. When historians come to write their accounts of the Conservative administrations of 2015-24, they will have a bewildering variety of ‘worst weeks’ to choose from, but the past seven days will have a strong claim to mark the moment when the fight went out of the parliamentary Conservative party and it became resigned to its fate. Rishi Sunak achieved one thing of note this week Two MRP polls with huge samples offering the possibility of constituency-level projections have offered a new