After the war in Ukraine
I awoke in the small hours last week and began worrying about the Ukraine war. A friend had earlier taken…
The clippings and sweepings of Soviet history
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything…
And the moral of the story is…
From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often…
The truth we dare not speak
Though it was sensible for Lady Susan Hussey to resign, I do find the chorus of disapproval that has greeted…
‘We’ can’t know how the very poorest live
I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary…
We’ve lost interest in our dependencies
Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British…
The real cause of all the chaos
Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if…
My hour tuning in to the night
‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet…
Maybe Nanny does know best
Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the…
Must Charles change?
When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step…
What art will represent us?
It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the…
The problem with Liz Truss’s ‘momentum’
‘Truss’s campaign to be Britain’s next prime minister,’ wrote one political commentator this week, ‘seems to have unstoppable momentum. She…
Liz Truss is no Margaret Thatcher
The late Senator Lloyd Bentsen was 26 years older than the young Senator Dan Quayle when in 1988 they crossed…
The truth about life as a gay Tory MP
Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a…
Carry on Carrie
One is not usually surprised by opinions volunteered to parliamentary hopefuls by voters on whose doors the candidate has knocked;…
I told you so
‘Steady on, old chap. You’re a bit hard on the boy.’ The arm around my shoulder was that of Boris…
The good friend I never knew
I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one…
How to handle the next pandemic
There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally…
There’s no shelter from this storm
I was walking last week from Canary Wharf tube station to my flat in east London – not far, little…
It’s time to bang some heads together
Glasses chinked. From massive chandeliers, lights glittered beneath the high vaulted ceiling; heroic statuary around the carved stone walls stared…
There’s no putting Putin in a box
At the heart of the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sits an ambiguity that it is convenient, perhaps…
A little Eden
I’m not one of life’s early risers but an exception had to be made on Wednesday last week. In an…
Why should we save Putin from himself?
‘Never interrupt your enemy,’ said Napoleon, ‘when he is making a mistake.’ A Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine would…
Rishi has a horrible task ahead
Whether Rishi Sunak is prime minister or still chancellor this spring, fate is handing him a poisoned chalice. Looking back,…
The good side of guilt
I do not know anyone in the Sackler family. I wouldn’t even have heard of them were it not for…
