Tom Peck

4 days ago | thetimes.com | Tom Peck

For five long years, between 2016 and 2021, Yvette Cooper chaired the home affairs select committee. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still see the blood. Things happened around that strip-lit, horseshoe-shaped table in one of Westminster’s more soulless meeting rooms that no one should ever have to see. Home secretaries arrived, were ripped limb from limb, had their innards smeared about the walls and were never seen or heard from again.

5 days ago | thetimes.com | Tom Peck

A lot of things get launched from the shipyards of Govan: Billy Connolly, Alex Ferguson, quite a lot of ships and now a strategic defence review. The prime minister had come to stand in the cavernous hangar-sized BAE shipyard to tell the world the UK was to become a “battle-ready, armour-clad nation”. We were, he said, “moving to warfighting readiness”, perhaps as soon as 2034, so anyone wanting to have a war with us just have to wait until then. Starmer sounded serious. He looked serious.

1 week ago | thetimes.com | Tom Peck

Is it supposed to be good? I ask that with due trepidation but with complete sincerity. The Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… is back for a third series and it now comes with deliberate ambiguity. On whom is the joke meant to be? When, in previous series, things such as the plot, the characters, the writing and the acting were found, by critics and the internet at large, to be terrible, some of the people who worked on the show were disappointed.

1 week ago | thetimes.com | Tom Peck

A rare, perhaps unprecedented request arrived from Downing Street. Those wishing to attend the prime minister's speech in an as yet undisclosed northern location would have to render unto the authorities their shoe size. "PPE will be distributed on site," we were told. When it turned out the speech was at the St Helens headquarters of Pilkington Glass, hopes were high.

1 week ago | thetimes.com | Tom Peck

Nigel Farage is fed up of the tired old ways of doing things. The two main parties are one and the same, he reckons. Can you even tell them apart? "No matter who you vote for, the red team or the dark blue team, you get the same thing," he said. Well not anymore. Things are going to change. Reform UK is going to do things differently. And if proof were needed, then it was right here in front of us. The Commons is in recess at the moment. It's also half term.