Columns
Americans are right to hate us
In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history…
Labour’s popularity contest
A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour.…
America is a moral idea or it is nothing
Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical…
JFK conspiracy theories won’t die
One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK…
The Met’s misogyny
My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or…
Don’t write off literary fiction yet
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good…
The shape-shifting Labour party
It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political…
Inside Team Kemi’s plan for power
In elections, as in wine, lesser years can still produce good vintages. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown first won their…
Something is rotten in Stratford-upon-Avon
Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta.…
The cat that tamed Dom
I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke…
Why Nigel should listen to Rupert
I was thinking lately of Robert Kilroy-Silk. For younger readers, and people who were never students or unemployed, a quick…
How to reform Reform
In early June last year I had a reasonably agreeable meal with a bunch of Reform UK activists at a…
Starmer’s tribes are at war
Labour MPs these days are experiencing whiplash. When in opposition, the party attacked the Tories’ proposed benefits cuts for ‘effectively…
Trump wants Putin to win
It is meet, right and our bounden duty to begin any column about Ukraine with a vigorous expression of the…
The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine
How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right –…
Starmer is the unlikely hero of the hour. Can it last?
When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed…
I’m a culture war addict
Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’,…
The weakness of Donald Trump
Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere…
The reformation of the Labour party
The world order has shifted on its axis, having been given a peremptory boot by the US President. What is…
A trap for the right
On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of…
What Europe gets wrong about the far right
The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them…
The engagement vs isolation debate returns
British foreign policy has always oscillated between isolation and engagement. The division has shaped Conservative thinking over generations. The archetypal…
Who’d dare join the SAS now?
We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for…
Starmer’s Scottish headache
What does a party get after nearly two decades in office, collapsing public services, an internal civil war and a…
It’s time to scrap the asylum system
Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t…
