Features
Ukip is back thanks to the Chequers backlash
The UK Independence Party might be about to make a comeback. Ever since Theresa May’s Chequers deal on Brexit, which…
Australia’s choice: Chinese trade – or American security?
Sydney For decades, Australia has been known as ‘the lucky country’. At the end of the world geographically, we are…
Children are everywhere – and they’re spoiling everything
There was a time when middle-class liberals used to complain that the English were a nation of child haters. They…
The view from Paris: ‘Why are Brexiteers so stupid?’
‘Problème est masculin; solution est féminine,’ says Brigitte, the adored French teacher at the British embassy in Paris. Good way…
Who cares about care homes?
For millions of middle-aged children, finding good care for their parents is akin to a Grail quest — and just…
Brexit: how to make a TV drama out of a crisis
I spent a bit of time last week on the set of the new Brexit film, which James Graham has…
Hastings is pretty – but it’s the people who make it special
Kevin Boorman loves Hastings, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He was born here, he’s lived here all his life and…
Assad is back for good in Syria – and with Trump’s blessing
Amid the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed…
Jean-Claude drunker
The atmosphere in Brussels has become, of late, reminiscent of the late Brezhnev era. We have a political system run…
Hitler’s would-be assassins were, themselves, Nazi war criminals. Why celebrate them?
On 20 July, Germany’s political elite recalls the day in 1944 when Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg exploded a…
The EU is sending migrants home – into the hands of people smugglers
What to do about illegal migration from Africa into Europe? The EU’s repatriation programme seems at first like a great…
Let funerals be sad
My wife died earlier this month. We knew it was coming. A lump in the breast begat bone tumours, begat…
British men shouldn’t go topless in public. Ever
England didn’t just lose the World Cup. When it comes to male nudity, the country has also lost its sense…
How easy is it to break into the Bank of England?
‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady…
The real Brexit drama is just beginning
‘The numbers just don’t stack up,’ one cabinet minister wearily declared to me on Monday night. This is, perhaps, the…
The agony of World Cup penalties
Last week, for the first time since 1996, and for the second time in nine attempts, England won a match…
The World Cup has made us proud to be English
Buying fish at Cambridge market on Sunday, I found myself chatting to the fishmonger about the prospects for England in…
Get rid of the Dangerous Dogs Act and more people will die
When I was a child in the 1950s it was unheard of for someone to be killed by a dog.…
The lost art of patience
I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days…
Donald Trump is coming to Blenheim – and the protesters are ready
For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble…
Alpacas – the latest must-have wedding accessory
Of all the window displays in Amsterdam this spring there was just one that stopped me in my tracks. I…
What do ‘Stop Trump’ protestors think they’re going to achieve?
Last summer, the crowds in the fields at Glastonbury Festival filmed themselves chanting ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. It was the fashionable…
Conservatives are wrong about free speech
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s…
Technology has invaded our once peaceful homes
How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts…
How gentlemen supplanted hooligans in football
Most British sports fans are familiar with the maxim that ‘football is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans, and…
