Nick Gibb: My advice to my successors at Education. Don’t scrap GCSEs or ease up on standards.

It’s hard work, but the progressive ideology has not gone away. It would be a tragedy for future generations if we gave in and settled for an easier life.

Ben Roback: Biden’s Afghan pull-out represents the rash decision-making we had expected from Trump

‘Sleepy Joe’ has sleep-walked the United States into its biggest foreign policy debacle for a generation.

Afghanistan and America 1) Why British security policy is dangerously exposed

Can we really afford to get on the front foot against Russia and China at once as the United States trends towards isolationism?

Ben Roback: Does controlling migration really matter to Biden and Harris? If not, what follows?

The President has put the Vice-President in charge of a mission in which she is unlikely to succeed.

Profile: Tony Blair. Zealous, unrepentant and driven – the leader who took us to war in Iraq is reborn as our saviour from the pandemic.

It is hard to find any precedent for the path that he has chosen. What furies drive him? Why this frantic activity?

Iain Dale: 400,000 police records have gone. In the Blair years, home secretaries were forced to resign over less.

Plus: Where have Allegra Stratton’s live press conferences got to? And why I hate Twitter.

Daniel Hamilton: So we have a new CDU Chairman. Will a CDU-Green coalition follow after Germany’s federal election?

A Green Minister-President has governed Baden-Württemberg in coalition with the CDU for more than a decade, implementing a pro-business agenda.

Garvan Walshe: Conservatives need to choose. Are they with democracy or with the Capitol terrorists?

The main issue is not that the latter’s actions are extreme, but that they’re anti-constitutional.

Auto-rant, bullshit and self-pity. The conspiracists who stormed the senate. And their right-wing equivalents here.

We feel the power of American culture in Britain – and the shock-jockery, coat-trailing, and oppositional mindset that comes with it. 

Michael Fabricant: Never mind the WHO – the UN is unfit for purpose. Why we may have to look for a successor.

The simple fact is that, despite its lofty goals, it repeatedly fails to live up to the values and standards it was set up to defend.

How Trump made himself the champion of America’s Christian evangelicals

The authors of a new book trace the enduring influence of American Puritanism, and explain how the President appeals to it.

Lord Ashcroft: Will voters still give Johnson the benefit of the doubt? We’re about to find out.

Lessons endure from my polling study of our new Prime Minister, carried out six years ago when he was London’s Mayor.

Ben Roback: Trump’s state visit. Problems abound. But interests – trade, defence, the Special Relationship – endure.

The visit should serve as a timely reminder that the last especially outlasts any individual President or Prime Minister.

WATCH. Bush on Bush. “Let us know the blessings of knowing and loving you, a great and noble man.”

At the funeral of the 41st President, George Herbert Walker Bush, he is honoured by the 43rd, George Walker Bush.

Ben Roback: From Presidents 41 to 45 – different backgrounds, different manners, different beliefs, and a different Republican Party

The older Bush was a man of free markets, small government, global engagement…and good manners.