Telegraph Blogs

This morning Ed Miliband is doing another round of broadcasts interviews on the continuing row over the Daily Mail’s description of his late father as “the man who hated Britain”. The row was given an explosive new twist yesterday when it emerged that a Mail on Sunday journalist had infiltrated a memorial service for Miliband’s… Read more

Something sinister is brewing in Silicon Valley.  It involves  23AndMe, the human genomics startup co-founded by Sergey Brin’s soon-to-be ex-wife Anne Wojcicki. The company, whose investors include Google Ventures – Google’s investment arm – has patented a gene calculator to allow people to pick and choose the physical traits of their future child. Eugenics is… Read more

listen to ‘Has British politics returned to capitalism versus socialism?’ on Audioboo After Ed Miliband’s shift Leftwards, are we back to a simpler era when Labour socialists fought Tory capitalists? In this week’s Telegram podcast, Benedict Brogan, Sue Cameron and Peter Oborne take different views – but they agree that this party conference has unexpectedly reordered… Read more

Day three of the Ed Miliband’s Dad non-story. Now Miliband has escalated it by writing a stiff letter to Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail’s proprietor, lecturing him that the “culture and practices” of his newspapers “jar badly” with those of his readers. But he does rather undermine his point later on in the letter where… Read more

From the @TelePolitics Evening Briefing. ***One-click sign-up*** WHAT IS ED’S AIM? The row between Ed Miliband and Associated Newspapers escalated today. In an open letter to Lord Rothermere, he complained that a Mail on Sunday reporter was sent to his late uncle’s memorial service yesterday – a move which he said “crosses a line of… Read more

One of the most fascinating twists to come out of the bust of the drug dealing website the Silk Road was the final confirmation of just how much money the site was making. It’s far more than anyone expected – maybe as much as a billion dollars. For some time, analysts had speculated that the… Read more

Let’s imagine that America is invaded by aliens. They vaporise Congress and melt down the Statue of Liberty. What does Obama do? He hits the campaign trail. “It’s time for the Martians to pack their bags and leave the USA!” he tells screaming crowds at a university event in Boulder, Colorado. “I won’t negotiate, or… Read more

We all know how ban-happy the EU, the EC and other Brussels- and Strasbourg-based bodies can be. Well, now they have outdone themselves by effectively expressing a desire to ban Jewish boys. The Council of Europe, that gathering of the high priests of human rights in Strasbourg, has decreed that non-medical circumcision is “a violation… Read more

Nigel Farage and the Ukippers may have had a poor conference season, but nobody should underestimate Nasty Nige. “I’m not a populist – I have championed causes that have been very, very unpopular”, he boasted at a YouGov conference in Cambridge a few weeks ago. He listed some of them. There was immigration – “You… Read more

This week Nathan Verhelst, only 44-years old, elected to be killed by lethal injection because he was left traumatised by a botched sex changer operation . It’s a story full of incredible pain: born into an identity he couldn’t stand, abandoned by his mother, revolted by the body that doctors created for him and, finally, committing… Read more

This morning the Guardian has a bit of a first: it heaps praise on Alastair Campbell. According to blogger Alex Andreou, Cambell’s bravura performance on Newsnight, tearing into the Daily Mail’s Ralph Miliband coverage, “was terrifying and brilliant”. Andreou admits: “It was also, personally, a rather odd moment to find oneself rooting for Alastair Campbell.… Read more

One of the best things about the party conferences is that leading politicians sometimes say what they really think. Far from their officials and civil service spinners, wrapped in the warm embrace of the like-minded party faithful, ministers can end up letting down their guard and allowing their gut feelings to spill out. Owen Paterson,… Read more

After all the nonsense that has been written about a possible rapprochement between the West and Iran following President Hassan Rouhani’s masterful public relations exercise in New York last week, the assassination of Iran’s cyber chief has brought the whole issue of Iran’s relations with the rest of the world back to a more realistic… Read more

Sorry Prime Minister, but this was hands down the best speech at this year’s party conference. It was delivered just before Michael Gove’s on Tuesday, part of a package that included a 14-year-old boy at Bedford Free School. The whole package was effective – it was good to hear from people at the coalface of… Read more

Years ago I wrote a study of Alastair Campbell and his techniques of media manipulation – and have done my best to avoid the subject ever since. His Newsnight appearance against the Daily Mail deputy editor Jon Steafel on Tuesday made compelling television, but Mr Campbell uttered one falsehood which was so glaring that it… Read more

This year’s conference season was dominated by news of the Ukip event in London, where Godfrey Bloom addressed delegates dressed as a Zulu warrior before punching a Morning Star journalist in the car park outside Lidls. But there were other parties holding conferences, too – and here’s a round-up of the key points. First to… Read more

For the first time in almost two years, motorcycle-borne assassins appear to have murdered an Iranian official – this time, Mojtaba Ahmadi, the man reportedly responsible for Iran’s cyber-warfare headquarters. Whoever was responsible, and assuming that Ahmadi did indeed hold that position, this would be a new and dangerous escalation of hostilities. It comes at a highly… Read more

First, an admission. I’ve worked for both the Guardian and the Mail, and I can report that both papers are staffed by lots of nice, intelligent people. Really. But that doesn’t stop these papers making complete fools of themselves – as the Guardian has ably demonstrated this week, during the debate as to whether Ed… Read more

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to wonder how we survived a decade or so ago. If you listened to the likes of David Cameron, it’s as if our young people have been a permanent scourge on the state, blood-sucking parasites dragging the nation down. We’re bone idle, useless, lack the work ethic… Read more

The Gambia has withdrawn from the Commonwealth, with President Yahya Jammeh claiming that it “will never be a member of any neo-colonial institution and will never be a party to any institution that represents an extension of colonialism”. Is this a bodyblow from which the organisation will never recover? Well, no. The fact is that… Read more

A brown envelope landed on my desk the other day stuffed with photocopied articles and a letter laboriously scribbled out in blue biro. I’ll refrain from naming the man from North Yorkshire who took such trouble to write to me, but I propose to quote his words because they reveal an important undercurrent of opinion,… Read more

Take a look at this groovy page below: This is our new merged Comment and Blogs homepage. You can find it by clicking on Comment in the top navigation bar of your Telegraph homepage (it’s already active). Meanwhile, the link to our fantastic Blogs-only homepage, which isn’t changing, will move from the navigation bar to… Read more