Columns
There’s nothing magic about magic mushrooms
For about six straight hours after taking magic mushrooms – psilocybin – I had visions of a vast, skeletal shark…
New dogs, old tricks
Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.…
False advertising
An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an…
Kamala’s blagging it
We throw around pejoratives such as ‘Idiot!’ a bit too carelessly, because then when we need to flag up genuinely…
Tricks of the trade
Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively.…
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 weaponisation of ‘bullying’
Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in…
Deeds not words
Immigration is now at the top of the political agenda in a way that it hasn’t been since the vote…
Cutting the links with reality
It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do…
Give Musk a break
I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk…
The negligence of ‘not in my lifetime’
It is sometimes said, correctly, that conservatism is more an attitude than an ideology. And for me there have always…
Will the Tory truce hold?
During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he…
When money rots
Punters and pundits alike reacted to rising mortgage rates in the wake of Truss’s mini-Budget with indignant horror. Leaving aside…
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…
Licence to kill
So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since…
Playing at morality
The pop-up ad I get most frequently these days is David Beckham’s promotional video for the Islamic sandpit of Qatar,…
The Liz Truss survival plan
At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message…
There’s a blood crisis, so why can’t I give blood?
I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the…
Nobody on God’s earth wanted Truss
One of the most important ingredients in the oil used to anoint King Charles during his coronation is becoming a…
How to protest the protestors
These are bleak times in our land, and we must take our pleasures where we can. Personally I have been…
A very spooky Halloween
Warren Buffett famously said that ‘when the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked’. Now that the tide…
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…
University is supposed to be hard
If I seem to be bashing universities lately, they’ve asked for it. The prestigious New York University in lower Manhattan…
Resistance isn’t futile
Two lessons learned from the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Hotel, Deansgate, Manchester. First, the plates are no longer minuscule,…
The new rules of sex
There are times when I feel like certain rakes must have done when they realised that the Regency period was suddenly…
