Features
The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians
I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I…
‘Do you know the local MP?’ ‘Aye, she runs the sauna’; my Shetland dispatch
The Shetland Islands The SNP have had better weeks. It’s strange to think that it was only this month that…
Is the West deserting Ukraine at precisely the wrong moment?
Moscow is coming under direct drone attack, the Russian economy is creaking, patriotic bloggers are ever more apocalyptic in their…
Mocktails are pathetic
Mocktails. Even the name sounds dodgy. Who is this apparently innocuous canned drink mocking, pray? Probably you, if you’ve shelled…
Remembering my gloriously unfiltered father
Nothing can prepare you for the death of your father because, by definition, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. You have these…
Save the curlew!
Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great…
Who ruined the Southbank Centre?
Europe’s largest hub of the performing arts, which great musicians the world over once called home, is now a grim…
Weight-loss drugs killed my appetite for life
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as…
Why budgerigars are the perfect pets
Geoff Capes, two-time winner of The World’s Strongest Man competition, weighing in at 27 stone, was a budgie fancier. He…
Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis
There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon?…
Burnham’s fate will be decided in the Strait of Hormuz
In the last few days, the government has performed two extraordinary about-turns. On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Treasury…
‘Being a Labour mayor in Manchester is playing politics on easy mode’: Is Andy Burnham up to the job of PM?
When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won…
The performative hypocrisy of the pro-Palestine mob
You haven’t really made it in life until you’ve addressed the Oxford Union. That’s how I feel upon reading the…
The National Garden Scheme is the perfect antidote to Chelsea’s vanity
Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in…
No one recognised me on the Cannes red carpet!
‘We are taking the picture to Cannes,’ said John Gore, the producer and financier of My Duchess, my new film…
What lists of our greatest novels get wrong
‘Where are all my favourite parts?’ Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica…
Cultural amnesia explains our fury at the past
I was in Newcastle the other day and found myself standing beneath Lord Grey’s Monument. The column is 135 feet…
Make the fez great again
Ireturned from a recent holiday to Morocco with three mementos: a bright red pair of swimming trunks (teenager-sized; the largest…
‘It’s like a Mexican stand-off but no one has any guns’: inside the farcical coup against Keir Starmer
It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ –…
The three things Trump wants from his China trip
Donald Trump flew to Beijing this week, and when he sits down with China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday morning…
How the Saudis wriggled out of the Iran conflict
Some of the highest-paid sportsmen in history, the golfers of the LIV league, had bad news recently. Saudi Arabia said…
The great British flower revival
When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common…
It’s time to uncancel Enoch Powell
Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only:…
Starmergeddon: Labour is hurtling further left
There’s a difference between climate and weather. Both change, but at very different tempos. Variations in the weather are seasonal…
Get ready for the ugliest building in the City of London
The City of London is not noted for its beauty. Most great European cities expect their historic streets to retain…
