The Democrats seem to have settled on a new and sophisticated campaign strategy: calling the Republicans “weird”. Ever since prospective vice president Tim Walz first aired the insult on a TV show a few weeks ago, it has become the …
What Roger Scruton can teach Starmer
Not long into David Cameron’s first term as Prime Minister, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton refounded an old Tory dining club that had, for a short time in the Seventies, exerted an outsized influence on British politics. The Conservative Philosophy …
And so, farewell conservatism
Conservatism has died, not from an assassin’s bullet, or even from old age or because it was run over by a bus. It has died because there is no call for it anymore. This isn’t to say that nobody wants …
What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing
The Renaissance in Italy came from its cities, and not by accident. What we now call “agglomeration effects” were at work here. Within their curtain walls, all classes and factions were crammed together in lunatic proximity. Unable to grow out, …
Lauren Southern: the tradlife influencer filled with regret
Does promoting marriage and motherhood inevitably make women easy targets for subordinate status, increased vulnerability, and a return to second-class status? One of the very first columns I wrote at UnHerd, back in 2019, described how, for me, becoming a …
What Thatcher can teach the pro-Israel Right
For all their drama, and barring an Israeli counter-escalation, the weekend’s events do not change the course of the Gaza War. Six months in, the campaign has been a disaster for all concerned, apart from Iran and its regional allies. …
The future belongs to Right-wing progressives
Reactionary as I am, it gives me no pleasure to report that conservatism is finished. As Britain struggles with the exhausted death-spasms of liberal Toryism, the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is …
The gravediggers of British conservatism
For the 20th-century Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis, conservatism was a purely historical phenomenon. A Marxist from a distinguished military family, he was lauded as “one of the great conservative thinkers of our age” by the paleo-conservative, Paul Gottfried. Kondylis came …
The year Toryism failed Britain
In early 1960, fresh from another Conservative victory and almost a decade of Tory rule, T.E. Utley wondered what it all was for. “The Tories have shown they can win General Elections,” he wrote. “[But] have they still got a …
David Cameron destroyed the Tories
When the collateral damage from the Gaza War is finally totted up, Suella Braverman’s political career will not top the list of those most deserving sympathy. When the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley publicly mocked Braverman’s characterisation of pro-Palestine …
Rishi Sunak’s annus horribilis
When Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister, he bore a degree of goodwill. The mess he inherited a year ago today was hardly his fault; surely he couldn’t make matters worse. Besides, Sunak represented competence.
He had, after …
Is liberal society making us ill?
As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, …
Britain needs more Stanley Baldwins
One day in the late Twenties, during his second spell as Prime Minister of the greatest imperial power on the planet, Stanley Baldwin fell into conversation with a stranger on a train. A stocky, pleasant-looking man in a tweed three-piece …
Can the NatCon revolution escape the past?
It’s always interesting when the fiendish plans of undercover socialists are dragged into the light. This week, just such an occasion was unexpectedly provided at the National Conservatism conference. Alongside standard Thatcherite fare about free markets, small states, and level …
How Thatcherism outgrew its mistress
An American news network rang, on 8 April 2013, to tell me that Margaret Thatcher was dead. Yes, I was happy to be interviewed. There was the usual awkward silence, long enough that I wondered whether they had forgotten me, …