Columns
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…
Oxford circus
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…
Ill-received pronunciation
Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…
There’s nothing ‘wild’ about elopement
I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…
The inflated currency of racism
Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get…
Kamala chameleon
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…
How will we handle the next contagion?
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Who cares about reality?
Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which…
Nobody should 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…
The Catholic church’s cowardly betrayal
Of all the sad and surreal things to happen in the past few months, the Catholic church’s decision to abandon…
Can Boris avoid a winter lockdown?
As the government struggled on Saturday with the question of whether to impose a quarantine on those returning from Spain,…
Courting disaster
The case of Johnny Depp vs the Sun, heard over recent weeks at the High Court in London, certainly gives…
Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm
One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that…
Youthful mistakes
In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from…
Boris’s red wall problem
When Boris Johnson met with his cabinet in person for the first time in four months on Tuesday, his aim…
Open letters have become ransom notes
In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary…
Why should opinion matter more than science?
In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached…
The politics of mask-wearing
We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me.…
The state of the Union
The greatest single danger to this government is the state of the Union. Prime ministers can survive many things, but…
My fears for my church have been realised
The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
No one loves a despot
Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last…
