I once found myself in the same Strasbourg restaurant as Ian Paisley. When Paisley left it seemed half the customers around the room got up to leave with him. They were of course his bodyguards.  No such entourage ever followed John Hume, who despite the many threats he received, refused personal protection.

Big companies are more successful when they have a large group of women at the top. That’s the conclusion of an analysis by Pipeline, a company which advises firms on how to make themselves more diverse.

Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson cannot believe their luck. In 2016, Putin scored his two biggest foreign policy wins since becoming Russian president in 1996. Now a major report in Britain lets Putin off the hook, just as Trump has buried reports by government investigators in Washington on his links with the Kremlin.

UK universities are already reeling from Brexit uncertainty and the fallout from COVID-19. We now learn of new measures, which would impose international student rates on EU students and make them ineligible for student loans, further exacerbating the crisis. 

Anne Corbett and Claire Gordon (LSE) give their critical view of an emerging post-Brexit strategy for universities and warn of its potential negative consequences. 

For decades everyone assumed that Europe would break the Conservative party. Instead it came close to breaking Labour.

While publicly the US-UK trade talks are progressing at pace, with both sides committing to wrap up a deal before US elections (3 November), in reality this will prove impossible.

Over twenty years ago, William Hague, on becoming the first openly Eurosceptic Tory leader, argued that the UK should be in Europe, but not be ruled by it. What Hague meant by ‘in Europe’ was, as far as I recall, never defined, but in the context of the UK formally leaving the EU, the only cause left for Remainers’ is to ensure that the UK remains ‘in Europe’. 

Just over four years ago I met Stanley Johnson at a book launch. In my write up of the encounter, I described him as the “the charming father of boorish Boris, the Brexiteer.”

We got on rather well after I told him I worked for a Labour MP who was playing a leading role in the Remain campaign. 

“It’s up to you in the Labour Party to save us,” he told me. I was too polite to reply: “From your son, you mean?”

We may be gingerly moving out of lockdown, but the toxic combination of incompetence and arrogance displayed by this Tory government over the past three months has irreparably shattered our country’s reputation for sound governance and pragmatism. Ironically, the more the Tories bang on about Global Britain, the more they come across to the outside world as weirdly introverted and out of touch with contemporary reality. The EU increasingly views Boris Johnson as an unreliable partner - given his track record, you can see their point. 

There is a small ticking time-bomb that keeps British Prime Minister Boris Johnson more awake than the crying of his new baby boy, Wilfrid.