‘They call him the tunneller’: meet the new head of the Met police
Dressed in full uniform and clutching a clipboard, Mark Rowley walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice in London,…
Will Sunak’s polished campaign harm his chances?
Rishi Sunak has launched a slick, well organised leadership campaign very early. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that…
What the Tories should look for in their next leader
The Conservatives are selecting a new leader, who will become Prime Minister. What sort of a person should that be?…
How the Tories can avoid a leadership election stitch-up
Boris Johnson’s resignation has fired the starting gun on yet another Conservative leadership election. The race to succeed Boris is…
The world women and children deserve
The magnitude of what has just happened in America is still setting in, and while there are those of us…
All in it together
Only a few months ago it was the Canadian government that attacked its own citizens in the most grotesque and…
London diary
Confirmation that we had finally left Australia’s increasingly stultifying wokeness behind came when our Qantas jet touched down in Singapore.…
Enthralled
The news that Germaine Greer had put herself into a retirement home in sight of the Queensland forest she had…
Aussie life
Coined, as it was, by a dead white man whose oeuvre is considered one of the crowning achievements of Western…
Language
No language column can ignore Professor Brendan Murphy’s extraordinary 78-word definition of ‘woman’. As you know, when he was questioned…
Failure to govern
What is the purpose of a Conservative government? It’s a reasonable question for voters to ask. In 2019 Boris Johnson…
What bow – and why is it burning?
‘Jerusalem’ may be our unofficial national anthem, but don’t ask anyone who sings it to tell you what it means, says Philip Hensher
A death-haunted city
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Mourning glory
On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…
Hysterical accusations
‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go…
