Columns
The dark side of ‘cute’ culture
I have become allergic to ‘cute’, bad-tempered biddy that I am. Cuteness and the requirement to be cute have spread…
Falsehoods are running amok
I don’t know how much of a shock this will come to you as — perhaps none, because you are…
No. 10’s no-deal dilemma
Backbenchers are discussing when to give Downing Street a bloody nose, a former prime minister is on the warpath and…
Who would risk being a government adviser?
Poor Tony Abbott. It would seem being prime minister of Australia doesn’t bring you to the attention of the British…
How a lie becomes truth
Teachers were told to exclude children who made ‘inappropriate’ jokes about Covid when they returned to school this week. These…
To save the Union, negotiate Scotland’s independence
The first cabinet meeting of the new term and Boris Johnson’s summer holiday were both dominated by one concern: how…
The trouble with ‘taking back control’
I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country…
Are liberal conservatives now history?
It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a…
Boris the builder mustn’t buckle over planning reform
The government will pass the test it has set itself: schools in England will return next week. Pupils may well…
Our Belarusian blind spot
I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what…
How progressive misogyny works
It happens a lot lately. Not just in a Twitter DM or an email but in real life. Someone tells…
Protestors are clearing a path for Trump
‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protestors] know that this officer has been…
Brits aren’t idiotic – but our institutions are
Two headlines from the same news-paper, less than three weeks apart. So, the Guardian on 31 July: ‘The Guardian view…
The importance of Gavin Williamson
When Boris Johnson tried to call a general election in September last year, everyone around him assumed that Jeremy Corbyn…
Today’s undergraduates are customers – and the customer is always right
If you’re looking for a sign of the academic times, you could do worse than consider the image, published in…
What really makes people fat
In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight…
My pronouncement on the BBC
Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…
The dismal rise of the modern elopement
I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…
When everything is ‘racist’, nothing is
Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get…
Kamala chameleon: the many faces of Biden’s running mate
Kamala Harris, the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, certainly looks the part. Barack Obama once called her ‘the best-looking attorney general…
Could the next Lib Dem leader help Labour?
When Dominic Cummings addressed government advisers recently, he said that he was so out of touch with day-to-day politics that…
Never has a virus been so oversold
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
We are living in a post-truth society
Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which…
Why should anyone be forced to shield?
The best way (and with politicians sometimes the only way) to know whether people are aware they’ve made a mistake…
How the Catholic church betrayed the dying
Of all the sad and surreal things to happen in the past few months, the Catholic church’s decision to abandon…
