The most damaging political scandals are simple at heart. They involve basic human sins. We all understand stories about greed or sex or hypocrisy because they are such universal human failings. Which is why stories about lockdown parties in Downing …
Is the New Right a grift?
The American Right is turning against democracy, or so we are constantly told. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the “coup attempt” of January 6 — the list goes on. Kamala Harris warns of the greatest national security threat facing the nation. Worst …
We have all lost the argument
The study of arguments is one of the thriving intellectual pursuits of a time — and is it any wonder? Social media’s business model depends on perpetual rancour and the amplification of extreme points of view. Twitter often reminds me …
It’s time to end mandatory isolation
Since they were first introduced, lateral flow tests have been controversial: some scientists have suggested that they miss a large number of cases. Others warned that they will pick up a large number of otherwise undetected infections, and so reduce …
Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of …
The cynical wokeness of Cambridge colleges
“This House is ashamed to be British.” On 11 November, I spoke opposing this motion at the Cambridge Union, one of the country’s oldest debating societies. I didn’t think it was an invitation I could honourably shirk, especially on Armistice …
Britain needs a cigarette
I will be 84 next month — even though I have smoked since I was sixteen. I started with five Woodbines and now I smoke Davidoff magnums which I have to get from Germany.
I recently told my doctor I …
Tribalism has come to the West
About a decade ago, when I worked for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), I had to force myself to go to lunch with a friend. I dreaded the meeting because I knew that she was going to try to convince …
Why we cling on to Christmas
In the strangest of times, the strangest of festivals. Dulled by familiarity, piled over with good food, buried in torn wrapping paper, drowned in good drink: can we see Christmas again for what it is?
In days that seem unprecedented, …
The myth of ‘pagan’ Christmas
In AD 932 the most powerful ruler in Britain spent Christmas on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Never before had a unitary kingdom been fashioned out of all the various realms of the Angles and the Saxons. Never before had …
There’s nothing wrong with a festive fight
Is your quasi-fascist uncle coming over for Christmas lunch? The one who drinks too much gin and loudly shares all his ghastly Seventies jokes about people’s skin colour and his reactionary opinions about women and domestic bliss. How close do …
Dickens hated Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens hated Oliver Twist. Rarely in English letters do we find a case of an author so embarrassed, so fundamentally ill at ease with his own creation. Oliver spends the first half of the novel crying, begging, whining, and …
Why are women becoming witches?
Seattle-based Bri Luna, aka @thehoodwitch, has 472,000 followers on Instagram. On her website, thehoodwitch.com, her profile picture shows an attractive young woman wearing a black dress that reveals both tattooed cleavage and one tattooed thigh, holding a crystal ball in …
He was never really ‘Phil the Greek’
Though most people know that Prince Philip was born in Greece and almost immediately exiled, the precise circumstances of this leaving of his native country are surprisingly obscure. How many are aware, for example, that if Ataturk had lost the …
What’s the point of Prince Andrew?
This article was originally published on August 11, 2021.
What’s the point of Prince Andrew? I don’t ask this only to be cruel, although there is an obvious cruelty in suggesting that an actual person might be pointless. But Prince …