Third-party candidates in America don’t make history. But last week the senior senator for West Virginia made headlines, at least. Joe Manchin is hinting that he might run for the presidency in 2024, representing a new “No Labels” party advocating …
Where is our lexicon of love?
I remember the first time I heard The Lexicon of Love. Aged 22 in a no-horse town, more terrified by the day that I had made a mistake in marrying the first man I had sex with, I couldn’t stand …
Britain is Europe’s liberal outcast
When Labour wins the next election, Britain will assume a role in Europe something akin to the indomitable Gaulish village in Asterix: the last holdout of liberal-Left political power in a continent swinging firmly to the Right. Yet for a …
Keir Starmer is no Blair
When men make history, Karl Marx observed, it is not under circumstances of their own choosing, but rather under circumstances given and inherited from the past. History is the one thing we cannot escape; the great epochal force which creates …
How Coutts destroyed capitalism
It began, as crises tend to, with the promise of convenience. Say you will make someone’s life easier, at no apparent cost to them, and you will win their attention. Fulfil that promise, and you will win their favour. Over …
We wouldn’t want Oppenheimer today
The one thing everyone knows about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project, was that as the blast of the first atomic test faded away in the desert of New Mexico, he said solemnly: “Now, I am …
Will Ukraine repel the new Russian assault?
“We saw four of these fucks going into a house, so we decided to strike it with our artillery. To our surprise there was a huge explosion. Clearly, they were using the place to store ammo. Then soldiers started pouring …
Lesbian mothers should be on birth certificates
If you’re a politician, the presence of a global LGBT+ activist movement offers large amounts of political bang for your buck, pound or euro — whether that’s by waving trans flags enthusiastically, or by banning books about gay dads. Last …
Coutts and the rise of private tyranny
Coercion and tyranny are what governments do to us, whereas the private sector is where choice, consent, and spontaneity reign. This is one of the bedrock certainties of the modern Anglo-American Right, and each day brings fresh evidence that it’s …
How Keir Starmer betrayed the North East
For decades, the North East was home to the right sort of Left. Durham, Tyneside — these are places rich in labour history and heraldry, ancient seedbeds of a working-class trade unionism which predates the Labour Party itself. But, though …
Barbie is Fight Club for women
Exactly how old is Barbie, anyway? I speak not of Barbie the product — though her birth in 1959 is a fascinating story — but Barbie the person, the character, the entity who exists in undying hot pink perpetuity, in …
The revenge of Britain’s motorists
In 1934, the developer of a new private housing estate in East Oxford built two large brick walls across public roads to keep out the working-class residents of nearby local authority housing. Nine foot high and topped with iron spikes, …
Putin’s holy war on Ukraine
As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhin’s name, he said that …
The Conservative case for revolution
Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon begins with the fall of Troy. Clytemnestra, wife of the Greek king, hears news of victory, and imagines the “clash of cries” in the captured city, as the victors and the vanquished mingle. Musing on the destruction, …
Will Uxbridge ever trust again?
Uxbridge is Metroland, the paradise at the end of the Metropolitan Line. It is a century-old marketing invention selling the fantasy that, if you got on the Metropolitan Line at Aldgate, and stayed on for an hour, you would alight …