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Anger as Tory donor’s firm gets £350m coronavirus contract: Healthcare company controlled by Lord Ashcroft is given Covid-19 testing role Deal requires Medacs Healthcase to provide staff for both lab and mobile testing Lucrative contract was awarded without an open competitive tender process Lord Ashcroft’s involvement fuels controversy over the so-called ‘chumocracy’ By David Rose … Read more
When Joe Biden takes the oath of office this week, he will go down in history: having won more votes than any previous candidate, he will become the oldest person ever to become the country’s Commander-in-Chief. He will also, perhaps, be the first President to fulfil his mandate on the day of his inauguration. For … Read more
Who is Rishi Sunak? That’s the question I set out to answer when I decided to write a book about how he landed one of the most powerful and influential jobs in government. It all happened so suddenly. One minute almost nobody outside Westminster and Yorkshire, where he is an MP, had heard of him. The … Read more
Rishi Sunak is pictured on the day of his 2009 wedding to heiress Akshata Murthy If there is such a thing as a perfect childhood, all the evidence suggests that Rishi Sunak was lucky enough to have had one. Loving parents and siblings, a stable home environment, a big house with a garden in the sort of … Read more
When billionaire tech tycoon’s daughter Akshata Murthy first told her father of her plans to marry, his reaction was typically paternal. ‘When a daughter gets married, a father has mixed feelings,’ Narayana Murthy, sometimes known as ‘the Bill Gates of India’, wrote back to her. He admitted to a twinge of jealousy at having to … Read more
It was approaching dawn on August 9, 1944 and the seven prisoners of war caught operating behind enemy lines in German-occupied France thought they knew their fate. After weeks of imprisonment, including brutal interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, their end was near. German SS men, armed with automatic weapons, led the seven SAS … Read more
Wearing the same blue and green school tie as them, Boris Johnson addressed a group of children last week and said: ‘Education is the great equaliser. It’s the liberator. It’s the transformer of society. And it’s the single most important way in which we can unite and level up across this whole country, and deliver … Read more
I cannot abide those who are cruel to animals, but the sad fact is that in our digital age, my strong aversion is aroused all too often. I have lost count of the number of people who post on social media platforms such as Twitter so-called ‘kill shots’ of themselves grinning at the camera (or, … Read more
Lance Corporal Matthew Croucher was on a mission to investigate a Taliban compound near Sangin in Afghanistan in 2008 when he accidentally triggered a booby-trapped grenade. He and his men were heading back to base under cover of darkness when he stumbled into a four-metre tripwire linked to the explosive. Instead of running for cover, the … Read more
As a woman in Michigan put it during my latest round of polling in America: ‘It’s almost painful to watch. I have to change the channel.’ But her comment did not refer to the terrible scenes played out in hospitals and elsewhere as the coronavirus wreaks havoc across the US. Instead, she was talking about … Read more