World
Why is Elton John so pompous?
‘All my life,’ Elton John told the Twittersphere last Friday afternoon, ‘I’ve tried to use music to bring people together.…
Why Sikhs love King Charles III
Poor old King Charles has had a tricky start to his reign. Harry and Meghan’s tell-all Netflix show, in which…
How Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle invented the modern celebrity feud
1922 saw its fair share of shocks in the literary world, among them the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sinclair…
Will Republicans learn from the midterms?
The 2022 midterm elections consumed more than 16.5 billion real American dollars. They featured thousands of candidates and the most…
Is Scotland’s strike momentum slowing?
Finally, good news on the strike front: NHS staff in Scotland have decided against walking out after voting to accept…
The National Archives fires back at Matt Hancock
Oh dear. It seems that Matt Hancock has been called out on his Covid record, again. In his newly-published ‘Pandemic…
Can the EU recover from the Qatar corruption scandal?
Four people associated with the European parliament have been arrested in what seems to be the beginning of a major…
Elon Musk loudly booed on stage at Dave Chappelle gig
Is Elon Musk losing his appeal? Cockburn concedes that being the richest man in the world must be pretty sweet.…
Joe Biden, border dodger
President Joe Biden doesn’t answer many questions without his handler-approved list of reporters. So when he does occasionally go rogue,…
Why I’m finished with football
I have spent many, many years dutifully squeezing into pubs full of rapt, drinking men giving excessively loud voice to…
Harry and Meghan have stepped up their war on the Windsors
The first part of the Harry and Meghan show on Netflix was something of a let down. Over three tedious…
Oxford’s highwayman campaign against motorists
Oxford councillors are feeling rattled by opposition to their proposal to divide the city into six districts and to limit…
ChatGPT: a world-class BS machine
Two weeks ago, like most people, I hadn’t so much as heard of ChatGPT. By last week, I was hearing of practically nothing but. After OpenAI…
GDP grows – but the UK isn’t out of the woods on recession
Have the prospects of a recession been overstated? That would be the most optimistic reading of this morning’s update from…
Canada’s assisted dying catastrophe is a warning to Britain
In 1936, King George V lay on his deathbed. As his final hours drew near, the royal physician administered two injections of…
2022 and the Revenge of the Real
Do you get that alarming feeling, right now, that everything is suddenly, rapidly, falling apart? At the same time, does…
Football won’t save France or Britain from decline
Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron rekindled their bromance on Saturday, swapping tweets prior to England’s World Cup quarter-final clash with…
Britain’s young are giving up hope
The Conservative party faces a new challenge in the battle to win back younger voters – how to sell the…
The tricky business of Judges’ names
From now on, barristers like me will no longer have to worry about calling a District Judge ‘Sir’ or avoiding clumsy…
Why Germany shouldn’t cancel Bismarck
What’s in a name? On the face of it, the Bismarck-Zimmer in Berlin’s Foreign Ministry building looks like just another…
The ‘Twitter Files’ are damning for US agencies
There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the ‘Twitter Files’ released by Elon Musk. The first…
John Kerry gets an easy ride from the climate establishment
For climate campaigners, Donald Trump was the anti-Christ, pooh-poohing climate change and withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement.…
China’s dangerous zero-Covid retreat
China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It…
Inside the Iranian regime’s protest panic
During a press conference in Tehran on 3 December, Iran’s Attorney General, Mohammad Javad Montazeri was asked by a journalist…
Peru’s staggeringly incompetent far-left coup
Lima, Peru For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of…
