Columnists
Bring on the new football season
On a summer’s evening in 1978 I was standing on the platform at Redcar Central station, wondering if I had…
The unfashionable truth about the riots
As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote.…
Starmer’s first big test
During the election campaign, Keir Starmer confessed to taking Friday nights off. ‘I’ve been doing this for years – I…
Market apocalypse? No, a welcome correction
A bout of global stock-market turmoil and an outbreak of UK street violence as adjacent news items gave an apocalyptic…
Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely…
Save our grey belt!
While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the…
Who’ll be blamed for Rachel Reeves’s tax hikes?
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt entered Downing Street with one mission: to clean up the public finances after Liz Truss’s…
Give us a pubs tsar – but spare us Tim Martin
More than a third of UK universities are in financial doo-doo: staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible…
Keir Starmer’s parenting lessons
Before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer admitted he was concerned about what life in Downing Street might be like…
The vanity of Gavin Newsom
Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for…
Why there’s rioting in Leeds
As something of a fan of riots and social unrest I was interested to know who, precisely, had gone doolally…
How many summers do you have left?
If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but…
Will we always have Paris?
There are times when you might be fooled into believing all is well. I had a moment of such weakness…
The Tories are a danger only to each other
On Monday night the Conservatives announced the rules of the party’s leadership contest. The reaction in Labour circles was incredulity…
Joe Biden was never quite all there
As President Biden sank more deeply into the mire this month, kind friends kept urging me to write in his…
How the markets reacted to Trump’s assassination attempt
Market reactions to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania represent, according to taste, rational bets on the significantly increased likelihood of…
David Lammy’s Trump problem
There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the…
Can Starmer control his party?
Labour MPs ought to have been jubilant when they gathered for their weekly all-party parliamentary meeting on Monday. Most were…
In praise of Pat McFadden
There is a small section of the Labour party which I greatly admire – those on the party’s right, often…
Arise, Sir Gareth!
I detected a degree of surprise among those people who were uncommonly cheered by Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory that…
Could Ukrainians ever trust a Putin peace deal?
Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s…
The cognitive dissonance of the Democrats
Believe it or not, I planned to write the gist of this column before Saturday night. However, a caveat. Unlike…
How safe do you feel boarding a Boeing?
‘They knocked down our old house in three hours,’ says a friend who has embarked on what he says is…
The new dark age
We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though…
The great bee-smuggling scandal
The principal concerns of the electors vary rather more widely than the pollsters and pundits would suggest. One man in…
