Kamala Harris and the problem of affirmative action
In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last…
Joe Biden’s Civil War re-enactment
We can’t blame American progressives for yearning to relive the civil rights movement. Those were heady days. Opposition to segregation…
The end is always nigh
Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet…
The Covid dissidents who’ve made my Christmas merrier
A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive…
Will we ever learn to ‘live with the virus’?
Comparing Saturday’s Downing Street press conference to Groundhog Day would insult one of my favourite films. The hilarious, multifarious strategies…
The absurd theatre of vaccine passports
When a column highlighting under-appreciated breaking news has had absolutely no impact on the course of events (per usual), the…
A re-gift to Donald Trump
For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018…
My advice to Dave Chappelle
I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights…
E-everything is heading your way
Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller…
The Covid pantomime at my father’s memorial
This last weekend I attended the memorial service for my father, who died in July. This isn’t a bid for…
Is it time to defund the world’s policeman?
It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary…
Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?
The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and…
Why vaccine passports are pointless
Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally downloaded the NHS app. (Lest I seem a raging…
Am I alone in not wanting to download the Covid app?
As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly…
Immigration is Joe Biden’s Achilles heel
Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants…
The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy
Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes…
Air travel is in terminal danger
During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited…
Give the people what they think they want
I have a mean streak. Perhaps my cruellest urge is to give people what they claim to want. When political…
The strange theatre of mask-wearing
However surreal and dystopian the pandemic landscape seemed at first, no enduring vista feels ‘surreal’ and ‘dystopian’ indefinitely. Citizenries uniformly…
The true cost of make-believe money
I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practising left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency…
The case against reparations for slavery
Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations…
Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?
In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s…
How to make the facts fit the narrative
Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s…
The West has lost its moral high ground
International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return…
Beware the linguistic Trojan horse
It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question:…
