Columnists
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 –…
Starmer is the unlikely hero of the hour. Can it last?
When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed…
The bully-boy tactics of Trump and J.D. Vance
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a ‘friendship without limits’. The phrase seems…
I’m a culture war addict
Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’,…
The weakness of Donald Trump
Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere…
Do not be hypnotised by Trump’s America
I’ve been judging a beauty parade, but I hasten to add that no bikinis were involved. Four leading investment firms…
The reformation of the Labour party
The world order has shifted on its axis, having been given a peremptory boot by the US President. What is…
A trap for the right
On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of…
BMW’s Oxford retreat signals deep trouble for UK carmaking
Among British car factories, Nissan at Sunderland is the most productive and Jaguar Land Rover at Solihull probably the most…
What Europe gets wrong about the far right
The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them…
The engagement vs isolation debate returns
British foreign policy has always oscillated between isolation and engagement. The division has shaped Conservative thinking over generations. The archetypal…
Who’d dare join the SAS now?
We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for…
