Columns
What gets lost amid silly scandals
I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious…
The losing game
When David Cameron was prime minister, the Tories flirted with the idea of a Queen’s Speech with no bills in…
Will Putin go nuclear?
A ghastly tragedy Ukraine may well be, but it is coming to the rescue of a number of British Conservative…
How fact killed my belief in forensics
I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each…
Abortion is still one of the great moral issues
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…
EU: normal disservice resumes
In the past few months, relations between the UK and the EU have been the best they have been since…
America has betrayed its young
Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully…
Have I cured my arachnophobia?
I’ve been an arachnophobe my whole life. I can’t remember a time when videos of spiders, or even photos or…
Reasons not to be cheerful
Mid-term unpopularity is a given in British politics. Veterans from the Thatcher era like to joke that a government that…
My phone call with God
Got slightly wrecked over the bank holiday weekend and had hoped to kind of glide through the early part of…
Being reasonable isn’t easy
Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held…
The rise of the wimps
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
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…
Brave new world
Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis…
Something doesn’t add up
More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time.…
Rishi Sunak’s political naivety
Before the war in Ukraine, ministers and Tory MPs believed a fixedpenalty notice for the Prime Minister would mean the…
Why Rishi shouldn’t quit
Perhaps I should stress from the get-go that I do not know Rishi Sunak. So far as I know, we’ve…
Converting opinion
I see that on the issue of gay conversion therapy, the Prime Minister has been floating around all over the…
How to lose elections
I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject…
The kids aren’t all right – and the grown-ups are to blame
I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every…
The changing face of No. 10
David Canzini has made quite an impression since he joined No. 10 as the Prime Minister’s deputy chief of staff…
It’s so hard to do the right thing
Delighted though we all are that Benedict Cumberbatch has decided to allow a Ukrainian family to live in one of…
Lessons from the ice queen
Spring commonly augers a quickening warmth, but for Britons this year the season coincides with a chilling marker: a 54…
The war’s next phase
A month in, and the war in Ukraine looks very different to how anyone expected. On the first day of…
