Boris Johnson
The best leader we never had
I spent Monday afternoon with The Wake Up Call, a new book by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge that lambasts…
Boris’s U-turn defence
Is Boris Johnson’s government jumping from one crisis to the next or is No. 10’s agenda progressing roughly as planned? It…
Portrait of the Week
Home Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, made pupils wear face-coverings in school corridors. It didn’t take long for…
Leaked letter: Boris Johnson rejects Trump on Iran sanctions
A leaked letter to the UN Security Council shows that the British government has rejected the US position on Iran’s…
How No. 10 outsmarted Alastair Campbell
LBC broadcaster Iain Dale has moved his Edinburgh Festival ‘All Talk’ series to Zoom, and yesterday he spoke to Alastair…
Justin Trudeau’s prorogation memory loss
A prime minister better known for his charisma than his policy achievements proroguing parliament to ride out a political storm.…
Scottish horror
How can Boris deal with the looming question of IndyRef2?
Mood shift
Throughout the past few months the government has appeared to face an unenviable choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.…
How will we handle the next contagion?
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Who cares about reality?
Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which…
A diplomatic silence
How Boris should handle the US election
Can Boris avoid a winter lockdown?
As the government struggled on Saturday with the question of whether to impose a quarantine on those returning from Spain,…
Peer pressure
It is no credit to British democracy that we have the second largest legislative chamber in the world. The only…
Boris’s red wall problem
When Boris Johnson met with his cabinet in person for the first time in four months on Tuesday, his aim…
No love lost
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir…
On a Roman road
Should the PM move parliament to York? There is, of course, historical precedent for such a move, as he very…
My plans for a Covid inquiry
The public inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has already started. Not the official one, which won’t…
Boris Johnson’s leadership skills are in doubt
Two ‘c’s come easily to Boris: charm and cheerfulness. He has always believed that he can charm his way out…
The continued existence of the United Kingdom is now at stake
When they come to write the history of the Union’s demise, there will be three guilty men. Tony Blair was…
The politics of mask-wearing
We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me.…
The state of the Union
The greatest single danger to this government is the state of the Union. Prime ministers can survive many things, but…
Coronavirus has exposed the EU’s greatest flaw
Politics begins and ends with sovereignty: the duty and right to make the legitimate final decision. We have seen this…
Keir Starmer needs to find his own Guilty Men
This is a week of bittersweet anniversaries for the Labour party. It is now 72 years since Clement Attlee’s government…
Entrepreneurship – not Johnson’s New Deal – will lead us back to prosperity
John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I…
Plan to fail
How was Britain so ill-prepared for a pandemic?
