My messiah complex
In June 1999, I described on this page jameitos, tiny, blind, albino crabs on the sea bottom in a cave…
What I’ve learned from a lifetime of travelling
In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking…
Why ‘safe routes’ to asylum can’t work
I have never met Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, but I have not the least doubt…
Death, beauty and the writing of a will
Perhaps there’s a German word – for there’s no English one – for that alloy of liberation with melancholy that…
Britain needs a tremendous shock
Fifty years ago I was hitchhiking down the Eastern Seaboard towards Miami overnight. It was midwinter, icy and way, way…
What would ‘winning’ in Ukraine mean?
I awoke in the small hours last week and began worrying about the Ukraine war. A friend had earlier taken…
The genius of Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything…
The two books that made me a Conservative
From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often…
Lady Hussey and the truth we dare not speak
Though it was sensible for Lady Susan Hussey to resign, I do find the chorus of disapproval that has greeted…
‘We’ can’t know how the very poorest live
I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary…
We’ve lost interest in our dependencies
Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British…
What everyone knows but no one says about Brexit
Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if…
The joy of tuning in to the night
‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet…
Maybe Nanny does know best
Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the…
Must Charles change?
When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step…
Which artists will define our age?
It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the…
This is no way to pick a prime minister
‘Truss’s campaign to be Britain’s next prime minister,’ wrote one political commentator this week, ‘seems to have unstoppable momentum. She…
Liz Truss is no Margaret Thatcher
The late Senator Lloyd Bentsen was 26 years older than the young Senator Dan Quayle when in 1988 they crossed…
The truth about life as a gay Tory MP
Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a…
In defence of Carrie Johnson
One is not usually surprised by opinions volunteered to parliamentary hopefuls by voters on whose doors the candidate has knocked;…
I’m out to get Boris
‘Steady on, old chap. You’re a bit hard on the boy.’ The arm around my shoulder was that of Boris…
The close friend I never really knew
I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one…
The truth about Britain’s Covid deaths
There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally…
What Rishi Sunak could learn from George Osborne
I was walking last week from Canary Wharf tube station to my flat in east London – not far, little…
In defence of healthy opposition
Glasses chinked. From massive chandeliers, lights glittered beneath the high vaulted ceiling; heroic statuary around the carved stone walls stared…
