Columnists
Monkeypox, Covid and the trouble with our species
I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking…
The endless tiny errors of the NHS
I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a…
Are you paying attention?
I have just posted a score of 1,625,000 on Bubbleshooter, my best yet. Bubbleshooter is a game where you fire…
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…
Is the Elizabeth line worth the cost?
It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense…
How far will house prices fall?
‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of…
What we learnt from Eurovision
Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during…
Why parliament should move to Stoke
Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might…
Boris’s plan to divide and conquer
Boris Johnson has never quite been able to decide whether he wants to be a great unifier or a great…
The dishonesty of how we respond to tragedies
It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…
The nonsense world of emotional support animals
Sometimes an event or a phenomenon is so perplexing and so terrible that it’s best not to deal with it…
My list of Britain’s national character flaws
Before we start, let’s firmly establish my long-standing affection for the United Kingdom. Why, some of my best friends are…
Could Haldane have helped save us from inflation?
Would Andy Haldane, the economist who left the Bank of England to run the Royal Society of Arts, have made…
The BBC’s obsession with youth
At long last the state of Oregon has got around to installing tampon machines in the male lavatories of its…
Prince Charles and a living history lesson
When I was a lobby journalist, I never went to the State Opening of Parliament. I much regret it, because…
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…
Why silly scandals suit our politicians
I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious…
Can the Tories bounce back before the next election?
When David Cameron was prime minister, the Tories flirted with the idea of a Queen’s Speech with no bills in…
The truth about Roe vs Wade
As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US…
Will Putin go nuclear?
A ghastly tragedy Ukraine may well be, but it is coming to the rescue of a number of British Conservative…
No, BP’s profit hasn’t boosted Starmer’s windfall-tax call
BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct…
How did we fall for the junk science of forensics?
I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each…
What America gets right about the abortion debate
There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is…
The quiet dignity of Angela Rayner
In those gentle days before internet pornography there was a book you could buy which listed the precise moment in…
The one thing Netflix could do to keep me subscribing
Anecdotes and statistics should never be confused, but let’s do just that to build a composite picture of today’s UK…
