In the 18th C this country was the strongest the world had ever seen. In the 19th C we defined liberty & human dignity. In the 20th C we spent ourselves to create a world that upheld those values. In the 21st C we've been asked constantly to apologise. But we're not sorry.

I’ve been glad to defend the statue of my ancestor, Robert Clive, from calls from Thangam Debbonaire to remove it this week. Removing statues doesn’t change our history - it hides it. We must pass on Britain’s extraordinary legacy, positive and negative, to future generations.

New Opinium The Observer poll: 29% say nature of offence & age should be released at arrest. For names, 40% say wait until guilty verdict. On nationality (21% at arrest) & ethnicity (19% at arrest), opinion is split, but pluralities favour info release after a guilty verdict.

"Apologies for briefly going off the script to salute my brave King, who is here with his beloved Queen in spite of the fact that he is undergoing treatment for cancer" ❤️

Opinium and CuriaUK polling shows that while protections for bats and newts might annoy roughly 1 in 7, a majority of the public currently support these environmental protections. In the same polling we found 30% even think these same protections do not go far enough.

Following the Chancellor’s plans to relax environmental protections in pursuit of economic growth, Opinium & CuriaUK polling should make interesting reading for Rachel Reeves 👇👷‍♀️🦇

Reeves team seem to have pivoted from doing absolutely no tax reform in her first Budget (just pushing all the sliders up) to kite-flying for multiple absolutely massive/bonkers/controversial/historic/seismic tax reforms in the second.

We are now probably going to see the supreme irony of this government finding the only place they can house asylum seekers is the Bibby Stockholm.

If this government fails, we can say the single biggest reason it failed was because it promised not to raise tax. They said “read my lips” (as it were) and have been imprisoned by it ever since.

🚨 New Opinium The Observer polling 🚨 Labour’s leader is deep in the red, with Keir Starmer stuck at -41% approval now several weeks in a row. Fewer than 1 in 5 voters approve of the job he’s doing, while while 60% disapprove.

Actually, all these places were provinces of the Roman Empire, and he was of course a Roman soldier. It’d be more accurate to say his life is an advert for imperialism rather than ‘multiculturalism’.

I agree it is very serious. But it was near 1.93 in 2012. If so, the problem comes from issues that are probably more immediate than we might think, rather than say a fatalist "western women just don't want kids in modern Britain".