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, …
Who will stand against Progress?
These days he would be mobbed as an “eco-fascist”, but Edward Goldsmith would probably have been better described as a traditionalist. The founder of The Ecologist magazine, where he employed me as a naive young writer in the late Nineties, …
The Red Wall firebrand is a myth
Some roles in Westminster are not dished out by party leaders or formal elections, but pass by natural succession from generation to generation. One such position is the firebrand Tory “rent-a-quote” — the Honourable Member most relied upon to voice …
How the Online Right gave up on reality
The millennial generation is beginning to show its age. This overeducated and underemployed generation, raised on social media, once sought solace from its diminished life opportunities behind video game controllers, computer screens, and smartphones. Even for those with good prospects, …
Britain’s food wars
In the 18th century, when William Hogarth wished to highlight Britain’s political and cultural superiority to pre-revolutionary France in immediately appreciable terms, he did so through the medium of food, distinguishing between the Roast Beef of Olde England, and the …
Liz Truss still haunts the Tories
If you are Conservative-curious, or simply have a taste for the absurd, there is a good chance that your Christmas stocking included the recent Liz Truss biography, Out of the Blue. Announced in late September, the book was meant to …
Will conservatism survive 2023?
For the Right, 2022 was a year to forget. In Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it is out of power. In the States, the Republicans hold just one element of national government, and only marginally; their main influence comes from …
Japan’s cynical war on woke
When I first came to Japan, about 23 years ago, I watched an episode of a highly popular TV drama, set in a kindergarten, which featured a once-happy toddler who had suddenly become withdrawn. The staff couldn’t understand what was …
Meet Britain’s radical New Right
British conservatism, as a political force and a philosophical creed, is dying. Brexit has failed. The Tories face destruction at the next general election. Demographically, conservatism faces extinction in the decades ahead.
If it has any future at all it …
Elon Musk must destroy Twitter
If there is anything more dull than listening to acquaintances relating their dreams, it can only be reading journalists complaining about Twitter. Yet since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on becoming its main character, the topic has become inescapable. As …
