Author: News Desk

Today’s news summary – Paper Talk: Royals named & tributes to Alistair Darling Friday’s newspapers report on the aftermath of a new royal book. Many of the papers’ lead pictures pay tribute to Shawn MacGowan, the Pogues singer, or Alistar Darling, the former Labour chancellor, who died yesterday. Royal scandal continues Several papers have named two senior royals – Charles and Kate – as being the two royals who speculated about Prince Harry’s son’s skin colour. The Daily Mirror reports Buckingham Palace is furious over Omid Scobie’s Endgame. The paper quotes a Palace source: “The entire Royal Family is united…

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Britain was lucky to have Alistair Darling NS says There was a kind of grim symmetry. As the inquiry into the Covid pandemic turned its attention to Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, the death was announced of a very different figure, who had steered Britain through a very different crisis – though one almost as serious. It is hard to imagine a politician more different from the performative, self-indulgent antics of Johnson’s Downing Street than Alistair Darling. Here was a man who listened intently, respected experts and institutions, but who brought a bracing dose of scepticism to every conversation. In…

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Alistair Darling: Westminster stunned by shock death of canny chancellor who steered UK through financial crash Sky News says In life as well as in politics, Alistair Darling was a canny Scot. At a dinner with Sky News journalists when he was chancellor, I told him I’d just bought a new car. “Never buy a new car,” he told me. “They depreciate in value immediately. Buy one that’s a few months old.” Sound advice, no doubt. But it demonstrated how the nation’s finances were in good hands. Like many leading politicians of the Blair-Brown years, Alistair Darling started on the…

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