Someone once came up to me at a party and said “Hello, I’m John Smith, I’m a vulgar Marxist”. I’m still waiting for someone to step up and introduce themselves as an extremist. People don’t do this, of course, any …
How Grenfell exposed Britain
The Grenfell Inquiry began hearing live evidence four years ago, a year after the fire. This mammoth legal process is now coming to a close. Evidence will conclude in July, in an echo of how the process began, with an …
Watergate and the death of the scandal
In 1942, an entrepreneurial gourmet named Marjorie Hendricks opened a restaurant in the down-at-heel Washington DC neighbourhood of Foggy Bottom and called it the Water Gate Inn. Two decades later, developers drawing up blueprints for a waterfront complex of six …
Boris can’t keep a story straight
These days, with Partygate refusing to go quietly, there’s increasing attention paid to Boris Johnson’s incapacity to keep a story straight, not to mention his constant prevarication about what conservatism in practice should look like: lockdowns or wild parties? Or …
The man who broke Boris
Regardless of what he says, the Prime Minister’s time as a mover of events, rather than a prisoner of them, is up. That fate was inevitable from the moment a young Boris Johnson declared he would be “world king” one …
The media is run by trolls
The Star Wars franchise has always been a cultural mirror, with each manifestation reflecting the fears, hopes, and political themes of the moment it was created. The original 1977 film was steeped in the anxieties of a postwar landscape; the …
Grenfell was no ghetto
Underneath the Westway flyover, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, is the much-loved community hub, the Maxilla Social Club. Following the devastation of the Grenfell fire, in June 2017, which claimed the lives of 72 people, it became a collection …
Macron’s tormented second term
Chartres, Eure-et-Loir
The young parliamentary candidate strides down the street looking for people who are local and over 50. I follow. We meet mostly Americans, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Britons.
“See, we have been invaded by foreigners,” jokes Ladislas Vergne, 30, …
How pasta made me a Terf
The other week, my wife kicked me out of the house. She wanted to chat with her Mum for the evening. So rather than get under her feet, I went to a do organised by the Israeli Embassy and then …
We are parading our virtue
What are processions for? Last Thursday evening, around a thousand people of all ages gathered in my local market square, and processed across the playing fields to light a beacon in honour of the Platinum Jubilee. My daughter was near …
Is this the end of Pope Francis?
For well over a year, a nasty rumour has been floating through the Vatican that Pope Francis is terminally ill with cancer. I was told it was true by an Italian prelate in an apartment just a stone’s throw from …
The paranoia of French politics
In rural France there are strict rules about dinner party chat. No politics, no religion, no work. The safe topics are the production of artisan goat’s cheese, floods or droughts, and the career of Rafael Nadal, who, despite being born …
Zero Covid has radicalised Shanghai
Shanghai is finally opening up after three months of coercive detention, although China has effectively been in a state of lockdown for two years. Horror stories abound: of employees who found their office doors chained shut during the working day, …
The dawn of the New Puritans
It looks like some upsetting combination of a homecoming dance and a wedding. The teenage girls are dressed in polyester facsimiles of the big white poofy gowns they’ve fantasised about wearing since childhood, arm in arm with older men in …
Severodonetsk will decide Ukraine’s future
More than 100 days on, the fate of Russia’s campaign to capture the entirety of the Luhansk region still hangs in the balance. If the whole Luhansk region falls, the rest of Ukraine’s east may very likely follow. Both the …