Columns
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…
How the Spanish cover their faces, or don’t
We self-critical British should never forget that other nations are pretty crazy too. I write this from Andalusia, Spain; and…
Can the young avoid the Covid crash?
Coronavirus is deadlier for the old than the young. But for the young, it is economically devastating. A third of…
We’re making a spectacle of shame
When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down…
The pandemic’s invisible victims
I sometimes pick up some food at Tesco for an 86-year-old pensioner who lives a few streets over. At the…
Starmer has already reshaped Labour
For the first time in 13 years, the public, when polled, think a Labour leader would make the best prime…
Rhyme and reason
‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds…
Don’t play a game you can’t win
Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin…
Will Covid change anything?
Earlier this month, a curious report caught my attention. Apparently there exists no rigorously established evidence that electric shock therapy,…
Why Biden might be better for Brexit Britain
At the best of times, US presidential elections require the British government to walk a tightrope. In 1992, a Tory…
