UK politics
Yes, Britain is a Christian country
I can’t say it was a great surprise to read a letter from a group of well-known authors, academics, comedians…
Why it’s right to criticise the newly dead
I could start by remarking that we should not speak ill of the dead, quoting the pertinent Latin phrase: de…
Gove’s friends are out to get him
From the moment he took his job, Michael Gove knew that he would make energetic and determined enemies. The teachers’…
A reminder of the UK energy gap as Putin prepares to put another knot in his pipeline
To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon…
The dawn of four-party politics
Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is…
A time to spend
There is nothing inevitable about the by now familiar sight of residents being towed away from flooded homes, of shops…
Cameron’s watershed moment
It is all hands to the pump in Downing Street. The entire No. 10 operation from the Prime Minister down…
‘Instant wildlife – just add water’
The ideology that created an unnatural disaster
Union in peril
Alex Salmond is on course to win. Why hasn’t England noticed?
Transparency is the Tories’ greatest legacy to the NHS
Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing…
Armageddon awaits
Sunni vs Shia, Saudi Arabia vs Iran. A new great war has begun
Cameron’s mission for 2014: stay out of third place
European elections are normally an afterthought in British politics. As even David Cameron admits, most of us struggle to remember…
When scaremongering stops being funny
My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally,…
If a bank looks dull, it probably isn’t: so what’s new at Standard Chartered?
The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if…
Britain’s dirty secret
A documentary has finally exposed what life is like at the bottom. So why is the left so angry?
The return of compassionate Conservatism
‘Has the Secretary of State, like me, managed to watch programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits & Proud?…
Labour’s immigration nightmares
Victor Spirescu came to Britain last week looking for work washing cars, but seems to have landed himself with a…
Once more, the spectre of Enoch Powell is raised to stop debate about immigration
One of the genuine seasonal pleasures to be enjoyed as 2013 slipped around the U-bend was Enoch Powell making his…
Fury and loathing in the New Labour gang
There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at…
Diary
The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh!…
Nick Clegg should stick with the devil he knows
I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches…
Why I want my schools to ban the burka (and the miniskirt)
For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As…
Name of shame
The importance of not being Nigel
The revenge of Parliament
Today’s MPs are no longer scared of the whips. Instead, they are scared of their constituents. That’s a good thing
Self-whipping
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…
