Columnists
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…
What would Kenneth Williams make of our age?
Sunday marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Kenneth Williams. It’s tempting to try to imagine what he…
Is it last orders for BrewDog?
‘Nostalgia is not a strategy,’ declared Schroders chief executive Richard Oldfield after announcing that the investment firm, descended from a…
To understand pure stupidity, watch The News Agents
There have been numerous surveys over the years intended to prove that conservatives are more stupid than liberals and vice…
How Keir Starmer might still hang on
A government minister and I dined just after the fiasco of the 2017 general election, with Theresa May clinging to…
‘We know where the bodies are buried’: How Kemi put Keir on the ropes
What does a dying government sound like? At 12.08 p.m. on 4 February we got an answer. Keir Starmer admitted…
British politics has become a Devil’s Wheel
There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is…
Who doesn’t want a better life?
Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released…
