The 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne represents a strange juncture in the country’s history. Her Majesty’s stoical endurance through national and personal tribulation has cut deep. There has not been a life of monarchical duty continuously …
Putin’s Grand Plan Is Failing
Last month there was a three-hour debate in parliament entitled “Putin’s Grand Strategy.” It began with a passionate speech by Tory backbencher Sir Bernard Jenkin, who spoke about the “admirably precise” focus of the Russian president, while lamenting the lack …
What Boris Johnson must do next
In the bowels of Westminster, if reports are to be believed, you can hear the constant rumbling of letters of no confidence being submitted to Graham Brady. At least a dozen Tory MPs have gone public with their desire to …
The Dangers Of Decriminalising Prostitution
“I want to relax, that’s why I go to prostitutes. There’s a great little place near my house, where I can pay a flat fee and get all I want to drink, maybe even a burger, and as many women …
Why the Left eat junk
Back in the Nineties, reading food packets for junk ingredients was a typical Left-wing hobby. It was a fairly safe bet that if you had opinions on pesticides in farming, preferred “unrefined” or “unprocessed” foodstuffs, or questioned the benefits of …
What Can We Learn from Southend West?
Daddy Dragon’s Rally is in Warrior Square, Southend, opposite a blank-eyed Travelodge. It is a gathering of the English Constitution Party, which seeks secession from Britain, its oppressor, in support of its leader Daddy Dragon (or Graham Moore) in the …
We’ve forgotten how to die
Why do some people take a peep at the last few pages of a novel first? Yes, we know it’s cheating. But forget whether a cheeky glance at the ending constitutes a great crime against reading — why do many …
The Medicis Knew How to Level Up
What’s the point of levelling-up? The government’s white paper on the subject was published yesterday — to less than glowing reviews.
But there’s a school of thought that its authors were doomed from the start. If you believe that geography …
The hidden virtue of reality TV
Noel Coward once said that “television is for appearing on, not watching”, but I’m not convinced. Since the turn of the century, I’ve turned down a vast array of reality shows, starting with Celebrity Detox and ending with Celebrity Big …
How Britain became Putin’s playground
On Monday, Liz Truss warned Russia’s oligarchs that there will be “nowhere to hide” their dirty money in London. Which is pretty weird when you think about it, since the statement includes the implicit admission that the money is already …
Should we let children catch Omicron?
As we enter our third Covid year, much of the world is getting back to normal. Denmark yesterday dropped most of its Covid restrictions and welcomed back “the life we knew before”. In the UK, face masks and Covid passports …
Why Canada’s truckers will lose
The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Vasectomies won’t save the planet
When H. G. Wells imagined the end of the world, he thought of a salt dead sea under a dying sun. His time traveller, having navigated his machine 30 million years into the future, saw this: algal slime, lichenous rocks, …
Why the experts are losing
We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management …
The rise of Europe’s fake populists
After seven inconclusive rounds of voting, on Saturday the Italian parliament re-elected Sergio Mattarella as the country’s president and official head of state. It didn’t come entirely as a surprise. As I noted on UnHerd, the two most likely winners …