Features
How Andrew could save the royal family
The tsunami of Jeffrey Epstein material released this month has been both horrifying and gratifying. It makes clear the extent…
What explains the weird military hype around Al Carns?
If Keir Starmer resigned tomorrow, the Labour party would be thrown into confusion. None of its factions has an obvious…
Meet the Jellycat kidults
On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given…
Is Keir Starmer prepared for the AI-pocalypse?
Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI…
The Epstein Files are a reminder that emails live forever
Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other…
The glaring flaw in Keir Starmer’s AI plan
Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the…
AI is coming for the lanyard class
Forgive me. I am going to begin by quoting two prominent left-wing Londoners – and agreeing with one. In a…
‘I want to stop the Antichrist’ – can Peter Thiel succeed?
Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We…
The secrets of Putin’s shadow fleet
Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but…
The inconvenient truth about polar bears
The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as…
Our armed forces are hollow – and our enemies know it
When you’re the chief of the defence staff, the head of the British armed forces, it’s never a good sign…
What Freud would say about your teddy bear
It is widely known that when a Duke of York is down, he is down, and the recent hit-piece in…
The doctor will patronise you now
How a profession speaks to its subjects is always of interest to a writer, sometimes perversely so. Over the past…
‘There’s an awful lot more bile now’: Jonathan Lynn on how politics has changed since Yes Minister
A few years ago, everyone in Westminster was obsessed by The West Wing, but a decade of chaos and populism…
The guilty men: the ideologues who undermine Britain
When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime…
A lament for the landline
Two years ago my quality of life began to go downhill. It happened when BT Openreach gave our old copper…
Amelia: the purple-haired goth girl who became a nationalist icon
It has been obvious for some time that there are basic concepts that the liberal British Establishment simply does not…
How we all got hooked on Calpol
At the present count, we have 14 syringes. Some are stuffed in kitchen drawers, but I have also found an…
Pity the modern-day spy novelist
I write spy thrillers that attempt to deal authentically with the world around us. The Syrian civil war. Spy games…
Why is Ukraine trying to cancel Swan Lake?
Two of Ukraine’s most famous ballet dancers face dismissal, cancellation and possible mobilisation into the army. Their crime? They dared…
Welcome to XL bully death row
‘There’s no way of finding out what’s really happening in there,’ says Aaron Rainey, an XL bully expert who advises…
Why I took my eight-year-old son wine-tasting
My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry…
Robert Jenrick: Why I defected to Reform
Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the…
Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?
Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s…
The Chinese takeover of Britain’s public schools
Roedean is now known as ‘Beijing High’. Cheltenham Ladies’ College is ‘Hong Kong College’. In the country’s most elite boarding…
