Columnists
Sorry fishermen, but we were never going to win back control of our waters
My decision to vote Remain was driven in part by an exercise in which I tried to identify anyone close…
Let’s find the most idiotic Brexit headlines
Gimson’s Prime Ministers, out this week, is a crisp and stylish account of every one of them. I happened to…
Revealed: the Tory health tax bombshell
The single most important domestic policy decision that the Conservatives must take is what to do about public spending. After…
Genocide in South Africa: now that’s a black-and-white issue
Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the…
To those with a taste for desolation, Lake Turkana may be the most beautiful place on Earth
As I write, a great gale is blowing in from Lake Turkana. The dry hills on the other side, always…
How mass immigration drives the housing crisis
Ever since Theresa May’s clarion address of the UK’s housing shortage (and how many successive PMs have embarked on the…
Advice from the Institute of Directors: prepare for the scandal tornado
As ‘business lobby groups’ go, the Institute of Directors has always struck me as worthy but unexciting: a more authentic…
The truth about Max Mosley and that leaflet
Almost eight million people have now watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with Jordan Peterson. This figure must be…
The EU shouldn’t punish Brexit. They’d soon regret it
Last Monday, Theresa May’s chief of staff talked junior ministers through her Mansion House speech. Gavin Barwell was frank with…
Italy’s election result shouldn’t be a shock. The populist revolution has just begun
Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister.…
Commitment-phobic men are the real reason women are having children later
We are becoming a nation of older mothers. The average age at which a woman has her first child is…
How did I learn women are superior? From a burst water pipe
‘It’s always me who gets the worst of it,’ said the Fawn, surveying the wreckage caused by the burst water…
Can Theresa May find time to be her own housing supremo?
Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the…
Tories who side with Labour on the customs union will be rebelling over a fantasy
Jeremy Corbyn wants Britain to ‘stay in a customs union’, according to the BBC. The phrase does not make sense.…
The Tory divide that May must bridge
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every time Conservative Leavers speak up demanding a clean break…
The word ‘extremist’ has lost all meaning
A few years ago, in these pages, Matthew Parris defined Ukip as a party of extremists. Perhaps one of his…
It’s not all Twitter mobs – the internet can be a force for good
Few readerships of any intelligent national magazine will be more alive to the perils and downsides of 21st–century cyber-life than…
The all give and no take of US taxes
Last week, the New York Times ran a very un-New-York-Times-y article, ‘Resentment Grows Over Who Gets Health Care Aid’. It…
Running a bank’s tough. That’s no reason to start handing capital back
A mixed bag of annual results from the big banks. RBS, still 73 per cent owned by the taxpayer, recorded…
This Traveller funeral was the most emotional send-off I’ve ever been to
Bev died, aged 61. She was the wife of ‘Foxy’ John, kennel huntsman of our local hunt. Bev was the…
The Tories’ real dilemma? To spend or not to spend
While the rest of the country waits for this spring to arrive, in Westminster the talk is all of spring…
Why are businesses like Center Parcs so terrified of a small minority?
I am boycotting Center Parcs. Admittedly, this is not going to have an enormous impact upon my life. It’s a…
Even being pro-Trump didn’t lose me as many friends as being pro-Brexit
When I mentioned on social media recently that I’d lost friends because of Brexit, I was quite surprised by the…
Investors were right to sell Carillion shares when they spotted trouble ahead
The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched…
Oxfam is the Harvey Weinstein of aid
The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is headquartered in London, in the splendour of Marlborough House. The…
