Shabana Mahmood is in a different situation from previous minority ethnic home secretaries who were accused of catering to far-right racist attitudes – Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly – not so much because she is Labour and Muslim as because they represented constituencies that were mostly white. In Mahmood’s constituency, Birmingham Ladywood, 35 per cent of people are Muslim and 78 per cent are not white. What does she have to gain electorally from deploying a Reform-lite agenda?
Streptomycetes are soil bacteria that could easily be mistaken for fungi, their cells snaking through the earth in long threads that resemble mycelial networks. To propagate when their survival is threatened, they break through the earth’s surface and then cannibalise themselves, using their last resources to build aerial platforms that release spores into the atmosphere to be carried away on the wind. Streptomycetes also produce a bonanza of antibiotics.
Concrete blocks marking the ‘Yellow Line’ drawn by the Israeli military in Bureij, central Gaza Strip, 4 November 2025 (Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty Images)
The Yellow Line is supposed to be temporary, but history suggests otherwise. Under ostensibly transient arrangements, Israel has annexed Palestinian land, displaced large numbers of people and expanded its control. Each time, Palestinians are told to wait for the next stage of the plan, while Israel’s gains become the baseline for the next round of negotiations. And the waiting never ends. Each phase is temporary, but every loss is permanent.
People in the sea near Gravelines in France, presumed to be preparing to cross to the UK, 19 September 2025 (Gareth Fuller / PA / Alamy)
Refugeehood is not supposed to be like this. The ideal envisaged by the Refugee Convention is that refugee status should be a kind of substitute citizenship for people whose bond of citizenship with their country of origin has been broken by the threat of persecution. Those displaced by persecution and war may well want to return when they can, but until then they need to get on with their lives as everyone else does.
I am 22 weeks pregnant. During this pregnancy – my fourth; I have two children already and had a miscarriage in February – I have become unduly superstitious, increasingly preoccupied by the idea of life emerging in the shadow of death, and half-remembering folklore taught to me by my Turkish grandmother.
The day before James Watson arrived to deliver the 2013 Michael Davys Lecture in Oxford, I received an email from his personal physician in New York asking me to arrange for him to be seen by ‘one of your best surgeons’ to remove a skin tumour. Since I had invited Watson to Oxford, it seemed I was also now responsible for his medical treatment.
From the revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 to the gender pay gap debacle in 2017, the BBC was for many years its own worst enemy. Now, confronted with a rampaging US president and increasingly confident domestic opponents, some of whom sit on the corporation’s board, the BBC is embroiled in a crisis that has so far seen the resignations of two senior executives and the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump.