Latest news with #SW1
Graziadaily
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Graziadaily
Made In Chelsea's Maeva D'Ascanio Shares Sweet Pregnancy News
There's baby news in SW1, as Made In Chelsea star Maeva D'Ascanio has announced she is pregnant with her second child! Maeva, who already shares a son with her husband James Taylor, shared the sweet news on Instagram last night with a video of her showing off her bump. In the video, she shows the scan to her son Beau, while he kisses her stomach. In the post, Maeva revealed they were expecting a girl. She wrote in the caption: 'We can't wait to meet you pretty little girl @jamestaylorldn.' Naturally, Maeva's Made In Chelsea co-stars were quick to share their congratulations in the comments. Inga Valentiner wrote 'congratulations!', and Sam Prince, Yasmine Zweegers and Reza Amiri-Garroussi all shared their well wishes. Maeva joined Made In Chelsea back in 2019, by surprising her ex Miles Nazaire. She's had her fair share of drama on the show, before finding love with her current husband and co-star James. In an interview with Hello, Maeva spoke about their engagement. 'I feel protected - being engaged to the man of my dreams is amazing. It's a different love, it's stronger, it's deeper. I feel safe,' she said. Maeva gave birth to Beau in November 2022. In their announcement interview with Hello , James discussed how he felt about becoming a new parent. 'We are more excited every day. My dad told me that when he had his first child, he never thought he could love something so much. And I'm starting to get an inkling of that feeling as this baby growing in Maeva's tummy is pretty special,' he said. Maeva also discussed motherhood in an interview with Grazia last year. Being a full-time mother is Maeva's 'favourite job', and she said, continuing: 'I have to say that my child is absolutely amazing, obviously he's my child,' she says. But the 'terrible twos' are approaching, and Beau is 'very, very active, and I would say that he's not an easy baby, so it's a lot for me. It's constant. It's a lot of energy 24/7. He's very alert, he gets everything, understands everything. But he's quite hyperactive, I have to say, so it's very intense all the time. That's what's good about him as well.' However, it hasn't all been plain sailing for the couple. In recent episodes of Made In Chelsea, which were filmed earlier this year, admitted Tristan Phipps that the couple were in the 'lowest place they'd ever been'. Meanwhile, at dinner with Tristan and his girlfriend Julia Pollard, Maeve broke down in tears while talking about their relationship, saying they were 's**t at the moment.' However, the pair reconnected on a trip away shortly after. In later scenes, James told his friends that the couple were getting to a good place again, and that Maeve was 'back in love with him'.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Why I stepped in to confront fare dodger
Britain is broken. Law-breaking is rife. Graffiti is everywhere. Many of our high streets are now a mix of charity stores, vape shops, and fake American candy stores. There is a collapse of basic standards in public spaces – hop on the bus and you're likely to be greeted with terrible music from someone else, stubbornly refusing to wear headphones. It's a total mess. Once-proud towns and cities are having their soul ripped out of them by petty law-breakers. Police are bystanders in this new system, reduced to a crime-reporting outfit rather than a proactive law-enforcement body. They seem more interested in poor-taste messages online, than the bread and butter, common-sense policing of our laws. I've had enough. Our public realm has been steadily chipped away at and too few people in authority are doing anything about it. Our leaders seem to just shrug their shoulders, unwilling to act – resigned to defeat. Many of them don't even notice the disorder as they spend their time in the protected bubble that is SW1. That's why last Saturday I went to Stratford station – one of the worst hotspots for fare dodging – to try and shame London's do-nothing mayor, Sadiq Khan, into action. His general approach to stopping law-breaking is to legalise it: just look at his comments on cannabis this week. According to YouGov, 79 per cent of train and Tube passengers say that they have personally seen fare dodging. Statistics show that one in 25 people who use the capital's public transport is not paying. But from my morning in Stratford station the problem must be much bigger than that. I watched as people flooded through an empty barrier, while the enforcement officer was on his backside, feet up, watching on. It was a perfect encapsulation of Broken Britain. Across London, the rate of prosecution for fare evasion is declining year-on-year. Pre-pandemic, in 2018/19, TfL prosecuted 31,003 people for fare evasion – in 2023/24, that figure stood at 18,570. There is now no deterrent for fare dodging and, unsurprisingly, it has exploded as a result. For ordinary hard-working citizens travelling into work on their morning commute, the sight of somebody slipping through the barriers without paying is a slap in the face. People who do the right thing are made to look like fools for sticking to the law, while others benefit from breaking the rules with impunity. The British state needs to reassert itself. In 1982, two social scientists in the US came up with the 'broken windows' theory of policing. They argued that visible signs of crime, antisocial behaviour, and disorder create an environment which encourages even more crime and disorder. That idea was taken up in the 1990s by William Bratton, New York's police commissioner under no-nonsense Mayor Rudy Giuliani, at a time when crime in the city was totally out of control. Bratton cracked down on fare evasion, public disorder, and graffiti. As a result, rates of both petty crime and serious crime fell sharply. Crime declined for the following decade. When the state shows the public that it cares, it creates an environment in which law and order is the norm. The rule of law requires that our laws are actually enforced. When small ones aren't applied, more serious offences inevitably follow. Before you know it, law and order has completely broken down and the state is left impotent, lacking all authority. That's where we're heading.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What is Dominic Cummings doing now, as he breaks silence following dinner with Nigel Farage?
Dominic Cummings has spoken out following a secret dinner with Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK. Just before Christmas, Mr Farage and the former adviser to Boris Johnson met and allegedly talked about 'how to shake it all up most effectively' and how the Conservatives are 'clogging up the party system'. According to The Guardian, Mr Cummings described his recent encounter with Mr Farage as a 'friendly chat', in his first remarks to the public. It is thought that Mr Cummings spoke about 'the core problems' of the 'broken Whitehall' and challenged Mr Farage on the necessity of creating reputable policies in order to draw in funders and hire qualified applicants. He told The Guardian: 'The current crop of MPs and officials by definition can't fix themselves. 'It needs an outside force – just as the vaccine taskforce or rapid tests or sewage monitoring did in 2020, successful only because of forces external to Whitehall forcing Whitehall to act differently against its default mode.' He also mentioned that Mr Farage had stated that 'he didn't want to wait until 2035 so wanted to win a majority in 2029'. The pair don't have the greatest history together. A 'nasty little man' is how the Reform UK leader once characterised Mr Cummings. While Mr Cummings called Mr Farage's return to the political arena 'depressing' last summer. With all this aside, what is Mr Cummings up to now? It was reported in 2024 that Mr Cummings was preparing for a new political party that might replace the Conservative Party if the latter were to fall apart after the 2024 general election. However, Mr Cummings praised Reform UK and abandoned calls for a new party. It doesn't seem that Mr Cummings wants to return to politics. In his recent interview with The Guardian, he said: 'I might spend more time on SW1, depending how things play out, but I do not want a job there. 'My efforts will only be helping people of any party pushing in what I consider a good direction, I'm happy living away from SW1 and SW1 for sure feels the same about me.' Instead of continuing with politics, he has approached a different field of work. He founded Siwah Ltd, a technology consulting business, in 2021. The name of the business alludes to an Egyptian desert oasis. Alexander III of Macedon led an army to Siwah in the fourth century BC in order to retrieve its renowned oracle. According to Companies House, he is the only director of the company, which is registered at an address in Durham, north-east England, where he was born. This seems to be a follow-up to his former tech consultancy, Dynamic Maps. But he hasn't completely abandoned politics. Mr Cummings frequently provides insights into recent political activity. He provided a clear explanation of recent political history during the Covid-19 inquiry in 2021, but he spoke so quickly that he was advised to slow down several times. The inquiry is notable for Mr Cumming's attacks on Mr Johnson. He accused Mr Johnson of being like an out-of-control shopping trolley and that he considered the former prime minister "unfit" for the position by October 2020. He also said: 'Senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me, fell disastrously short', and that 'tens of thousands of people died, who didn't need to die'. In addition to Mr Cummings' insights, he is also an after-dinner speaker, and offers advice on political communications, management solutions, and contemporary European history.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Dominic Cummings breaks silence after secret dinner with Nigel Farage
Civil servants may wish to dust off their CVs. Members of parliament, brace, brace, brace. Dominic Cummings – the political weather-maker behind the tide that delivered Brexit and raised and drowned Boris Johnson – is eyeing up a Westminster come back, of sorts. 'I might spend more time on SW1 depending how things play out,' Cummings told the Guardian after speculation about his intentions in the Westminster postcode, 'but I do not want a job there. My efforts will only be helping people of any party pushing in what I consider a good direction, I'm happy living away from SW1 and SW1 for sure feels the same about me.' The trigger for a renewed interest in the beanie-wearing politico from Durham, memorably portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Brexit: The Uncivil War, has been the recent revelation of a secret dinner with Nigel Farage shortly before Christmas. It has prompted much excitement in Westminster. The two men were daggers drawn for a number of years, partly as a result of a clash between their respective organisations (Cummings' Vote Leave of which he was campaign director and the Farageist Grassroots Out) over which would be the official Brexit campaign group. Farage described Cummings, who went on to be Johnson's chief adviser in Downing Street, as a 'horrible nasty little man'. Last summer, Cummings said the re-emergence of Farage on the political scene was 'depressing', adding that '15% of the country [is] pretty much like Farage and hates everybody else'. He warned that Farage did not offer solutions. It was something of a turn-up, then, for the two men to break bread. Of the dinner, the Reform leader has said only that they talked 'about the blob and what were the practical problems of coming into government and not being able to do what you wanted to do'. In his first public comments about the meeting, Cummings said it had been a 'friendly chat'. The focus, the 53-year-old added, had been 'the core problems that we have a broken Whitehall, a disgraceful and shattered Tory party clogging up the party system, how to shake it all up most effectively. And how to bring some of the great people in this country now excluded from government into it to replace the shitshow we all have to live with every day.' 'The current crop of MPs and officials by definition can't fix themselves,' Cummings said. 'It needs an outside force – just as the vaccine taskforce or rapid tests or sewage monitoring did in 2020, successful only because of forces external to Whitehall forcing Whitehall to act differently against its default mode.' Cummings had pressed on Farage the need for him to build credible policies in order to recruit top-quality candidates and attract donors, it is understood. In turn, Farage, 60, is said to have made a nod to his own mortality. Reform may be on a trajectory to win 100 seats at the next election in 2029, putting the party in the position where it could execute a reverse take over of the Conservative party. But Farage would be nudging at Lord Palmerston's record as Britain's oldest first-time prime minister should he be successful against Keir Starmer in 2035. He would be into his 80s by the end of a second term, should that come to pass. Farage said 'he didn't want to wait until 2035 so wanted to win a majority in 2029', Cummings said. Not everyone who knows the maverick political strategist is convinced that he would turn down an opportunity to be part of that. 'Farage is – much like Boris, although in different ways – a deeply flawed individual,' said a friend. 'So the question is, do you just throw your toys out the pram and say all of the lead actors are shit, I don't want to work with them, plague on all their houses? Or do you try and work with the cranks that the political process has chucked up? I think he's probably found himself in the latter camp.' A second source said Cummings was insistent in private as well as in public that he would 'never work for Farage'. But everyone can agree that he has got his old vim and verve back over the past 12 months. After being fired by Johnson in November 2020, he helped engineer the Partygate scandal that brought his former boss down but then became something of a recluse, friends said. In line with the image of a tortured genius in exile, he purchased a £161,000 home on Lindisfarne – the Holy Island just off the Northumberland coast. A friend added, however, that it was in Cummings' nature to disappear only to dramatically re-emerge. That he did in October 2023 to give evidence at the Covid inquiry and chew up what was left of Johnson's reputation, describing the former prime minister as 'a symptom of the system's sickness'. He still holds Johnson in contempt, friends say. Cummings also believes the Conservative party is moving towards extinction – something he would be pleased to nudge along. In May last year, before the general election, he floated the idea of a startup party and started talking to potential figureheads, it is understood, including those who are former members of the armed forces, although that plan appears to have been dropped. Cummings is now 'hedging his bets', suggested a friend. He retains a few disciples within the parliamentary ranks of the Conservative party, including Katie Lam, the MP for Weald of Kent, a former Downing Street colleague who got on the wrong side of Johnson's wife, Carrie Symonds, after nudging the family dog, Dilyn, away from her handbag over which he had cocked his leg. Of late, though, Cummings has been focused on helping a cross-party movement led by the academic Dr Lawrence Newport, who first came to public prominence with his successful campaign to ban XL bully dogs. The two men are understood to have bonded over their respective tales of receiving death threats for their campaigning efforts. Newport has moved on to champion a tougher approach to crime and, more recently, a plan for economic growth, including the implementation of a fully fledged infrastructure bill. Cummings has opened up his contacts book and is said to be a constant source of advice. 'The hope very much is that it's a movement that grows in size, and the more it grows, the noisier it can be,' Newport said. 'The idea is to create something that politicians have to listen to so that they understand that there is a constituency of people who actually really care about prosperity.' At the first Looking for Growth (LFG) event in December, Cummings was a keynote speaker. He then led a policy 'workshop' on Saturday at an event attended by about 200 people, including the Labour MP Chris Curtis and the shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith. 'I've talked more to Labour MPs and spads [special advisers] than Tories in last year [because] they are more interested in why Whitehall is broken, what we started doing in 2020 to fix it etc,' Cummings said. 'Almost zero Tories are interested in this as 2021-24 showed. And broader Tory ecosystem is also not interested in how power really works in Whitehall. 'I've been helping Lawrence Newport on crime and LFG because he's trying to push things in good directions and LFG is partly about finding talent outside politics and getting it involved in politics.' Cummings wrote recently on his Substack blog, for which he has more than 60,000 subscribers, that such campaigns could be the ''third force' that could help influence things one way or another at a crucial moment'. Should such a crucial moment come, who would bet against him being in the thick of it?
