Columnists
Who should get the credit for the climbdown on two-tier sentencing?
In Westminster, politics is often a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. But this week, two politicians…
Trump is giving us a taste of our own medicine
It seems the US State Department sees an impediment to free speech as an impediment to free trade with Britain.…
Who’s in charge here?
I heard the self-important whine of a police siren so pulled back the curtains a little to see what was…
The hypocrisy of the Heathrow Nimbys
Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days.…
UK tax on US tech is a useful bargaining chip
The Digital Services Tax (DST) is a relatively easy bargaining chip to give away in a last-ditch bid to appease…
Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?
The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out…
Americans are right to hate us
In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history…
Labour’s popularity contest
A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour.…
America is a moral idea or it is nothing
Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical…
JFK conspiracy theories won’t die
One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK…
The Met’s misogyny
My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or…
Don’t write off literary fiction yet
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good…
The shape-shifting Labour party
It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political…
Inside Team Kemi’s plan for power
In elections, as in wine, lesser years can still produce good vintages. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown first won their…
Putin is outwitting Trump
In the incessant conflicts of life and politics, people who know what they want tend to win. That is why…
Something is rotten in Stratford-upon-Avon
Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta.…
Will eggflation burst Trump’s bubble?
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ is a maxim attributed to leaders on both sides of the French…
The cat that tamed Dom
I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke…
Why Nigel should listen to Rupert
I was thinking lately of Robert Kilroy-Silk. For younger readers, and people who were never students or unemployed, a quick…
How to reform Reform
In early June last year I had a reasonably agreeable meal with a bunch of Reform UK activists at a…
Trump has breathed new life into Davos Man
So bad was the debut of this Labour government that many think it has already failed. But now, I suggest,…
Starmer’s tribes are at war
Labour MPs these days are experiencing whiplash. When in opposition, the party attacked the Tories’ proposed benefits cuts for ‘effectively…
Trump wants Putin to win
It is meet, right and our bounden duty to begin any column about Ukraine with a vigorous expression of the…
Don’t touch Boots!
‘Don’t stress over short-term stock market swings’ is a maxim on which Donald Trump and I might agree, even if…
The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine
How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right –…
