Columnists
Why Starmer’s going after the Lords
It’s not just the government that’s now beholden to forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility. Keir Starmer told the…
The truth about the World Cup
You have to admire their bravery, don’t you? The stoicism with which they put up a fight in the name…
‘We’ can’t know how the very poorest live
I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary…
The welcome death of the ‘my truth’ investment boom
A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos…
Should the better-off pay more for everything?
Once the energy price cap expires in April, the Chancellor is apparently considering the levy of ‘social tariffs’ on the…
The contours of the next election have been set
Since the 2008 financial crash, British politics has been moving faster and faster, and becoming less stable. This frenzy reached…
A course in Rod Liddle studies
As someone who has always had a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance, my experience speaking at Durham University…
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…
The delicious fall of Sam Bankman-Fried
Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.…
Advertising’s false picture
An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an…
Made.com is a dotcom parable from an earlier era
‘Reparations’, much bandied about at Cop27, is a dangerous word. It speaks of an admission of historic guilt, which no…
Kamala’s blagging it
We throw around pejoratives such as ‘Idiot!’ a bit too carelessly, because then when we need to flag up genuinely…
What Liz Truss got right
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…
Cop and the League of Nations
In order to understand why all Cops (Conference of the Parties), including the one which began this week, are so…
The weaponisation of ‘bullying’
Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in…
How to balance immigration and jobs
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…
In defence of Elon Musk
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…
Greta’s right about Cop being useless
Greta Thunberg said, in a newspaper interview, that Cop27 is a ‘scam’ for ‘greenwashing, lying and cheating’. Then she said…
After the Truss-Kwarteng crash, a tentative welcome for Sunak
Let’s hope Tuesday’s partial eclipse of the sun was a good omen for the return of Rishi Sunak to Downing…
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…
