Columns
Why the next election will be harder for the Tories
Ever since Boris Johnson’s disastrous decision to try to stay the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson, things have…
The importance of stigma
Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become ‘sex workers’. This noble institution is offering two…
Why can’t we remember our first few years?
I begin this column on a train from Paris to London. Opposite me are a mother and baby. I don’t…
The sleaze row is a crisis made for Angela Rayner
Almost no MP has emerged with dignity from the sleaze debacle of the past three weeks. Boris Johnson’s botched attempt…
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…
Can Boris weather this new storm?
The row over MPs’ outside interests has landed Boris Johnson in one of the most uncomfortable positions a prime minister…
The dangerous pleasure of hating men
I have Netflix, and in particular the series Maid, to thank for the startling discovery of how easy it is…
Kamala Harris and the problem with racist trees
I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I…
MPs aren’t the elite – faceless bureaucrats are
I see that the most boring conversation in the nation is back. The one even worse than people in 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…
Three little words that could cost Boris
Boris Johnson knows the value of three-word slogans. ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ helped propel him to his…
Do you really need to see the GP in person?
Only later, perhaps even a decade later, as the pandemic of 2020-22 shrinks in our rear-view mirror, may we be…
The burden of being a Newcastle United fan
The second thing I learned about football, after moving to London, is that you can never, ever switch your allegiance.…
What this Budget tells us
The Budget and the spending review gave the clearest indication yet of what the post-Covid government might look like. During…
Who owns the language?
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of…
What if Clinton had come clean?
What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because…
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…
The case for road pricing
Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with…
The problem with ‘David’s law’
Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments,…
The ideology of madness
On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for…
The legacy of Covid: a much bigger state
Covid transformed the role of the state. During the pandemic, the government did things it would never normally even contemplate.…
The characteristic I most admire in politicians? Petulance
Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political…
The pandemic has made cynics of us all
A report by MPs into the spread of the coronavirus has concluded that the government’s approach constituted one of this…
Israel has been spared Sally Rooney
I have not watched the BBC’s new period drama Ridley Road because I knew it would be impossible for the…
Blame it all on the middle-class drug users
We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when…
