Columnists
How to raise a patriot
‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’…
Beware the restless, shifty liars
I have only been to Alexandria once, some years ago, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, but it struck…
The misplaced sympathy for Angela Rayner
One evening last week I came home, flipped on the TV and saw on the news what must surely be…
The truth about the trans school shooter
True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was…
Kemi Badenoch’s North Sea plan is just another soundbite
‘We’re going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea’ was certainly a winning line for…
Can anyone save Britain from self-destruction?
Tens of thousands of people turned out on the streets last week to protest against mass immigration. The protestors were…
‘He’s like a passive-aggressive Gordon Brown’: inside Keir Starmer’s No.10 reshuffle
Isaac Levido, the Tory election strategist who helped secure Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019 and saved the Tories from…
Leave the countryside alone
I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in…
The ADHD racket
In 1620, in the Staffordshire market town of Bilston, a teenage boy decided he didn’t much fancy going to school.…
Angela Rayner and the spite of Labour
As a snapshot of our country, you’ll be pressed to find anything quite so resonant as the one which depicts…
The wrong kind of flag-raising
At the end of Sky News’s coverage of last year’s Notting Hill Carnival, its correspondent recited the usual list of…
The left’s fightback against Labour has begun
If there is a hallmark of Keir Starmer’s leadership, it is a willingness to bash the left. For five years,…
Don’t bring back British Rail
The theme of my holiday reading has been the insidious ways in which the vanities and fetishes of rulers harm…
The oppression of Sally Rooney
Almost a decade ago the Irish academic Liam Kennedy published a tremendous book with the title Unhappy the Land: the…
When national flags are a warning sign
I don’t quite see the point of flying Union flags in Tower Hamlets, or complaining about it when the council…
Where have all the upper-class Tories gone?
A currently fashionable conservatism is militantly against Ukraine and, by more cautious implication, pro-Russia. We who disagree are, I quote…
Nigel Farage is banking on a political sea change
Nigel Farage is adept at riding the currents of British politics. When he named Reform after the Canadian party in…
My shoplifting shame
On reflection, a tradition of shelving many desirable goods within ready reach is extraordinary – especially because the premises in…
In defence of fat cats’ growing pay packets
News from the High Pay Centre – the revolutionary guard of left-wing thinktanks – that average FTSE100 chief executive pay…
What is there to be optimistic about for British business?
In this season of scant corporate news – a Ryanair rant against the French here, a new BP oilfield there…
Of course shoplifters are scumbags
A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without…
Clive of India must not fall
The only MP I have ever really wanted to marry is Thangam Debbonaire. The former Labour MP for Bristol West…
Who still supports Keir Starmer?
Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I…
Give J.D. Vance a glimpse of real Britain
We’re used to strange sights in north Oxfordshire. The first person I ever met in our small Cotswolds town was…
Has Zelensky become a liability?
Is Volodymyr Zelensky becoming a liability for the West and for his own country? We are entitled at least to…
