Toby Young, I salute you
It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert…
The happiness paradox
In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of…
We’ll always have wine
‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a…
Diary
It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt…
Pinch
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking,…
Where’s the art attack fightback?
One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that…
‘It’s just about him’
Westminster has always been run more by convention than by rulebook. Prime ministers are seldom forced out: they are persuaded…
Bridge
In one respect, it would be so much easier to play a game like poker or chess than bridge; if…
Can you feel the empathy?
This week the newly minted Teal Member for Kooyong Monique Ryan gushed on social media about meeting New Zealand Prime…
Japan mourns Shinzo Abe
Cruelly gunned down at a political rally, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister lost his life in a senseless act of…
The (expensive) brave new world of ‘clean energy’
The market was working pretty well 20 years ago and is not expected to be much larger by 2030. It…
‘Rescinded’: LinkedIn users are listing their retracted job offers
Cockburn was on one of his regular jaunts through LinkedIn this week, on the lookout for more gainful employment than…
Ready for Rishi? Sunak launches leadership bid
Rishi Sunak has this afternoon confirmed that he is running to be the next leader of the Conservative party. In…
Shinzo Abe was Japan’s indispensable conservative
Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated today while electioneering, was his country’s indispensable man. Prime minister of Japan for much of…
How Boris Johnson changed my life
Over the coming weeks we will be regaled with dozens of personal recollections, from around the world, of the man…
Boris’s Tory assassins have learnt nothing from Thatcher’s downfall
John Stuart Mill once dismissed the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. When a reader queried the insult, Mill qualified it, but…
Has Jeremy Hunt been left in the lurch?
Boris’s decision to quit yesterday fired the starting gun on the greatest game of them all: the Tory leadership race.…
The problem with Tom Tugendhat’s ‘clean start’ manifesto
Tom Tugendhat has become the first of the Tory MPs depicted on our cover this week to confirm that he…
The attempted murder of Shinzo Abe
BREAKING: [ Edit: it has been released by Japanese media that Shinzo Abe has tragically died of his injuries.] At…
Boris didn’t break the system
Britain’s Donald Trump. A constitutional vandal. A grave and potentially even systemic threat to the rule of law and representative…
Why I’m not celebrating Boris Johnson’s downfall
I know it’s the season of ‘dunking on Boris’, which is fine. He deserves a bit of dunking for the errors…
If the EU disliked Boris, they’ll hate his successor
Three, five, or perhaps even ten whole minutes. In a more civilised, parallel universe, perhaps Europe’s big wigs would have…
Labor: your kids belong to us
The Australian Labor Party believes that children belong to the State. Parents are mere babysitters. Think I’m exaggerating? The Victorian…
The coming age of the vasectomy
The Supreme Court has overturned the tables that have governed our mating and dating for the past half century. We…
We must fix this politician-induced cost of living crisis
With interest rates rising again this week, inflation pushing up the cost of everything, and housing unaffordable for young people, families are…
