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, …
How the Tories can survive the wilderness
It may be difficult to believe, but when John Major’s tired and sleazy administration suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997, many Tories weren’t all that worried. Beneath the hype, they believed Blair …
Will Uxbridge ever trust again?
Uxbridge is Metroland, the paradise at the end of the Metropolitan Line. It is a century-old marketing invention selling the fantasy that, if you got on the Metropolitan Line at Aldgate, and stayed on for an hour, you would alight …
Westminster has failed Selby
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining …
The betrayal of Borisland
Through massed ranks of Midlanders, I can see Gregg Wallace’s head bobbing up and down. He’s making couscous and frying some sort of meat, cracking jokes about his MasterChef co-presenter’s drinking habit and flexing his biceps for the crowd. Wallace …
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 …
Boris Johnson should destroy the Tories
Once again, to the delight of our comment class, who will take any opportunity to ignore the country’s permanent state of crisis for the comfortable distractions of meaningless Westminster rigmarole, Boris Johnson has scuttled from his hiding-hole to bask in …
Boris Johnson’s theatre of the absurd
Early one spring morning during the pandemic, I was in the Queen’s private plane on the tarmac of Belfast International Airport watching Boris Johnson frantically searching for the No. 10 mask his team wanted him to wear. He was full …
Biden’s false border victory
One has to admire the chutzpah of Kamala Harris. Less than 24 hours after Title 42 expired, there she was, merrily clinking glasses at a Democratic Party soirée in a wealthy Atlanta suburb. When a journalist asked about the possible …
Do national conservatives trust the people?
It was inevitable that this week’s NatCon conference in London would be met with the usual mix of mockery and outrage. To some, the very concept of national conservatism is anachronistic and ludicrous; to others, it is all-too modern and …
The Blue Wall is crumbling
Driving through an affluent suburb of Düsseldorf in the Seventies, J.G. Ballard had a vision. Like Shepperton, Ballard’s hometown in Surrey, this 20th-century arrangement of wealth, leisure and family located on the fringes of a great city seemed eternal. A …
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 …
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, …
Boris and the world’s worst birthday party
“No cake was eaten, and no-one even sang happy birthday.” As parties go, it was a miserable one; as scandals go, however, it was more than enough. Amid all the political kerfuffle over his appearance at the Standards and Privileges …
How the Tories lost their way
“Is conservatism prepared to supply, in the new era we are entering, the main creative and moulding influence in the national life?” It is a question that the modern Conservative Party — abandoned by the young, flatlining in the polls, …