Columnists
The City still leads the financial world but faces a fight on all fronts
Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the…
The African bush took me back to my boyhood
Entering the Bulawayo Club, you step out of the blinding African sunshine on that safe and friendly city’s wide streets,…
May’s exit strategy
Nearly all Tory MPs now agree Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister. She must get the party through…
Why English footballers are so useless
It is late in the evening. You’re in a bar. You’ve had quite a bit to drink but you are…
Ten years after the banking crisis began, the unfairness of its aftermath still stings
Arguably it was Robert Peston’s breathless reporting of trouble at Northern Rock on the evening of 13 September 2007 that…
The sinister power of family courts
It’s right that some children are taken into care. One case in point is that of Ayeeshia-Jayne Smith, the toddler…
Oh brave new gender-fluid world…
Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out…
May’s opponents are the mad and the bad
I first met Theresa May, or met her properly, way back in the last century. I’d been invited to speak…
Hurricane Harvey is bigger news than the bankers at Jackson Hole
In Houston last November I spent an evening at the city’s industrial-scale food bank, where I heard a presentation on…
Thanks to Diana, the royals are done for
We are approaching an important royal anniversary, which I trust will be marked with a display of the appropriate reverence…
The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker
Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green…
We’re losing the cat-and-mouse terror game
I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the…
The truth about Brexit? One professor’s guess is no better than another’s
Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to…
From ‘America first’ to ‘pragmatic realism’
So much for Donald J. Trump, ‘America first’ isolationist. Gone is the man who, as a civilian, repeatedly endorsed a…
Beware the back-cracker quacks of Harley Street
All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell…
Forget London’s ramshackle Garden Bridge: bring on Nine Elms-to-Pimlico instead
I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the…
The phoney Tory leadership war
When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a…
The hormone that makes you a liberal halfwit
People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn.…
In my other life, I’m a water engineer
Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with…
Why is your holiday exchange rate so awful? Because investors see hope for the eurozone
As usual for August, I’m in France, where the news in brief is ‘Euro up, Macron down’. The youthful French…
Dave’s kept his head down, so let him chillax
David Cameron was in the news again this week after being paid £1 million a minute to give a speech…
Football wants the ‘somewheres’ to get lost
Some years ago, when Millwall played West Ham United, the Millwall fans sang the following song (to the tune of…
Snobbery in the age of social media
We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or…
Civilised air travel? Pigs might fly
Does anyone actually enjoy flying any more? I know I don’t. I realised recently, while anxiously repacking my tiny carry-on…
Parliament’s new tribe
Politics is such a fickle game that it’s perfectly acceptable to believe six impossible things before breakfast without ever having…
