“An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned,” was how the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, greeted the news of nine-year-old Emily Hand being released from her Hamas hellhole. He made it sound like the poor …
Israel is no longer Britain’s war
In the wake of Hamas’s bloody and murderous raid into Israel, as Israeli jets pulverise the Gaza Strip in advance of its looming punitive expedition, the Western discourse surrounding the century-old conflict feels both novel and wearily familiar. Familiar in …
When will we forget the Second World War?
The Second World War is Great Britain’s great daddy issue. It is with us from infancy, squatting immovably as a formative weight and wound. We either resent its example or strive to match it, coughing up Blitz spirit and slapping …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
Peep Show is a national humiliation
The history of British comedy is a history of ever-increasing male humiliation. Let’s start in the Seventies, the decade of declinism and brown suits. Forced to bear witness to both is Basil Fawlty, the supreme specimen of self-righteous control-freakery who, …
Britain is turning into South Africa
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning …
Can the Tories stop mass migration?
During a recent holiday in the East of England, I followed a sign through a farm gate offering raspberries for sale. It turned out to be a table in an empty farm outbuilding, with punnets of raspberries, a weighing scale, …
Stop comparing the West to Rome
On both sides of the Atlantic, hysterical comparisons between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the senile polities of the modern West have become the journalistic norm. Every major problem facing our society — from climate change to Covid …
How the NHS conquered Britain
Nothing about the National Health Service makes sense. As an institution, it provokes intense appreciation, and just as intense irritation and criticism. My own feelings about it oscillate between gratitude and fury. It’s our national shame, and the envy of …
A new blasphemy battle is coming
Last summer, Sir Salman Rushdie told a German magazine that some normality was finally returning to his life. Two weeks later, he was stabbed multiple times on stage in New York. The incident was a cruel reminder that, despite all …
The impotence of the Covid Inquiry
Of all the trite statements routinely rolled out by political figures in the aftermath of an atrocity, there is one which is particularly grating: “Lessons will be learned.” It is objectionable not just for its passivity and vagueness, but its …
Will Starmer recapture Nuneaton?
It’s 1pm, and the mercury is kissing 30°C when the first pipers round the bend. Four abreast, they march: drums beating, bagpipes pumping in the heat. Thousands of people line the pavement, pushed up against the verge, clasping warm pints …
How Europe can defend itself
Consider a very British scenario. A beloved monarch has just died, and the stability they embodied is starting to fade. At home, there is growing industrial conflict between capital and labour, and growing constitutional conflict between secessionism and Unionism. Externally, …
Pothole politics is paralysing Britain
Political discourse is stupid. There’s a Twitter account, for example, whose sole remit is to reply to anyone who provides a government spending number, by confirming how many days of NHS spending it represents.
Recently, though, we’ve gained a new …
How Thatcher lost her culture war
Back in the Fifties, when he was still an Angry Young Man, novelist Kingsley Amis declared that he would always vote Labour. Come May 1979, however, and he was one of those feeling jubilant at the election victory of Margaret …