With Kemi Badenoch’s elimination from the race, the Conservative party lost its chance to win a future. After all, the simplest, if least inspiring case to make for Kemi Badenoch was always that of urging the wavering Tory party to …
Do the Tories care about women?
In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Last week came the discovery, surprising to many, that Tory leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt has always been at war with self-ID. This is the policy — first promoted by …
Boris Johnson was too Dickensian
Everyone has a character, but some people have more character than others. The British, for example, are blessed with more of it than other Europeans. The Germans have intellect and the French have style, but the British are more dogged, …
Penny Mordaunt is hard to read
Penny Mordaunt is the only candidate in this leadership election whose formative political experience was war. She claimed this week that she knew she was a conservative as soon as she watched Margaret Thatcher’s naval task force sail from Portsmouth …
Why millennials are dropping out
With inflation soaring, trust in governments plummeting, and the global economy teetering on the brink of collapse, one might expect to see the masses out in the streets, calling for the heads of their rulers. But instead of rage and …
Why I’m suing Survivors’ Network
The first time Sarah — a pseudonym — was sexually assaulted, she was eight years old and an adult family friend paid her to do things to him she was too young to understand. Her mum later asked what had …
Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher
It is easy — and just — to mock Angela Merkel for her years of reckless misgovernance; thanks to her, Germany is now beginning to ration street lighting and heating, and rushing to install “warmth hubs” so her once-adoring voters …
How Camilla became Queen
Twenty five years ago, Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor threw a party for 80 friends at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire kingdom within the kingdom. Tony Blair had declared weeks before that the Britain of the elite was over. Princess Diana, along …
When did physical approach become scary?
When did physical approach become scary? By “physical approach” I mean what used to happen constantly on the street, in restaurants, in bars, in between classes of all kinds: a person approaching another person to flirt with them or ask …
Is Russia winning the war?
A couple of weeks ago, I was smoking a cigarette outside my hotel in Kharkiv when a Ukrainian man, hearing me speak English, came over to show me a photo on his phone. It was of his 21-year-old son who …
Vikings need to be tamed
Over the last decade or so, there has been a boomlet in popular culture in dramatic depictions of the Vikings, the modern name for the pre-Christian Norse inhabitants of Scandinavia. They’ve inspired countless recent films and TV shows, from Vikings, …
How Boris destroyed Boris
We are in the summer of 2032, and once again Boris Johnson is fighting for his life. Above Downing Street the carrion crows circle, as they have so often in the last 13 years. Once again a senior minister has …
How the Left fell for capitalism
What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the 21st century emerged from the rainforest remnants of southern Mexico on 1 January 1994, carried down darkened, cobbled colonial streets by 500 pairs of black leather boots at …
Ideology has poisoned the West
A century has passed since William Butler Yeats sensed the stirrings of a “rough beast” with a gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun”. That beast’s apocalyptic hour has come around again, its rebirth announced by the galloping horsemen of …
Did Ukraine need a war?
War has always been the father of innovation: a reset for societies forced to adopt whatever methods work just in order to survive. The outburst of voluntarism that has gripped Ukraine is a striking example: mutual aid groups, local volunteer …