Columnists
Will books soon become extinct?
I am glad that Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate…
David Lammy’s depraved new world
Beamish, the living history museum in County Durham, invites visitors to ‘step into the past’. It shows how people lived…
Has Reform peaked?
Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from…
Why is the ‘gay press’ so cowardly on Iran?
Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among…
Another interview goes awry…
Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took…
If oil prices stay high, you can bet on a recession
Shares everywhere dived for cover as missiles started flying. But one stock ahead of the pack, and responding to a…
Could Labour lose London?
After Gorton and Denton, where next? The scale of the Green triumph in Manchester has sent shockwaves through Sir Keir…
Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?
The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran,…
Tracey Emin should remake her bed
Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the US bombing of Iran is inglorious, but one should suspend disapproval to understand how…
If only Britain was as important as Iran thinks we are
I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped…
Is this Starmer’s finest hour?
A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She…
Screens in schools have been a catastrophic failure
About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and…
The homoeroticism of looksmaxxing
‘Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking?’ So asks Derek…
Brace for higher inflation
All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, the 24-mile-wide choke point between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, through…
Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?
The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton…
Has it all gone wrong between Trump and Starmer?
‘The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,’ a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected…
Am I a Zionist?
The death of Quentin Deranque is strangely under-reported here. He was a 23-year-old beaten up in Lyon on 12 February…
My night at the Baftas
Sometimes things work out much better than one could have imagined, as if God, looking down, had decided that for…
The real reason I left Britain
This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re…
The no.1 quango that deserves the axe
There are elements of economic life, such as the impact of President Donald Trump’s ever-changing tariffs, that are far beyond…
My Epstein confession
Is this Britain, 2026, or Spain, 1478? Our era begins to feel horribly like the latter. So, as the flames…
Does Sadiq Khan approve of colonising?
How to report Iran? It is a huge story. Perhaps as many as 30,000 people were recently murdered there by…
Don’t underestimate the ‘stop Farage’ alliance
So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls And made its coward vote and the streets resounded To the…
The thinking behind Nigel Farage’s shadow cabinet
There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?……
Britain’s right is falling into the same trap as the left
As I have suggested here before, there are few joys in life equal to that of watching the left fall…
