There was one clear winner in last night’s prime ministerial debate on ITV. It was, of course, the moderator. While Kier Starmer droned and Rishi Sunak piped and yapped, Julie Etchingham radiated a sincerity that neither of the men on …
Biden’s secret support for Iran
This past Memorial Day, as Americans honoured their war dead, the Biden administration was running interference for an Iranian regime whose Supreme Leader has described “death to America” as his official state policy. A report in the day’s Wall Street …
Nigel Farage and the futility of British values
Why did Nigel Farage change his mind and decide to once again stand for election? What could possibly compel him to return to British politics? He dropped a hint only last week: he was concerned, he said, that young Muslims …
Trump is converting America’s nuns
Bespectacled and berobed, a softly spoken nun may seem an unlikely figurehead for the hard-Right of American politics — but Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God isn’t just any nun. With her broadsides against liberalism, President Biden, and Satan’s …
How political is Orbán’s football obsession?
The first time I interviewed a president of Ferencváros, Hungary’s most successful football club, the taxi driver who picked me up from the stadium asked if I was a new signing. Nothing, perhaps, could have been more revealing of the …
Clacton: the birthplace of Brexit
Clacton-on-Sea is a funny old place. To reach it one has to drive through the smart commuter villages of the Tendring peninsula, the farthest extremity of north-east Essex, between Colchester and the North Sea. These villages have more than their …
The aristocrats who martyred Trump
I have no wish to add to the existential howl attendant on Donald Trump’s conviction in a Manhattan courthouse for a crime that I, like most Americans, would be hard pressed to explain. I don’t like Trump as a politician …
Keir Starmer: an ungrateful beneficiary of Brexit
A few months before the 2016 referendum, I published an article called “The Left Case for Brexit”. In it, I put forward reasons for thinking that the Labour Party might be the principal beneficiary if Britain disentangled itself from the …
Why I quit as a school librarian
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided to quit my post as an assistant librarian at a private school, but it was most probably when Andersen Press defended its decision to publish a book intended for under-sevens that contained …
Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation
A disrespectful Afrikaans expression refers to a person seeing their gat or backside. It means to get one’s comeuppance. In last week’s South African 2024 general elections, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) saw its gat and the only remaining …
Trump is Hillary Clinton’s spirit animal
Sometimes, I feel a little bit bad for Hillary Clinton — and not just because she missed out on a history-making presidency by a paltry 80,000 votes. It’s because she’s a feminist icon who will nevertheless always be remembered for …
Britain’s golden age of sleaze
For many years now, the gold standard for government sleaze has been John Major’s ill-fated administration between 1992 and 97, but maybe that’s no longer the case. Maybe we’ve just been living through the true golden age. After all, the …
Trump’s conviction is an assault on democracy
Whatever you think of Donald Trump — and I for one think very little of him — his conviction as a felon for what would ordinarily be a minor misdemeanour by a biased jury is a grim day for democracy …
Inside the Labour purge
Diane Abbott, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Faiza Shaheen — within a matter of hours, all had fallen victim to the Starmerite machine. Led by campaign chief Morgan McSweeney and candidate supremo Matt Faulding, Keir Starmer’s inner circle have shown themselves to be …
‘I was offered assisted dying over cancer treatment’
Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor …