Why shouldn’t the Tories make the most of Angela Rayner’s personal housing crisis? When you’re short of electoral options, there’s nothing better than punching your opponent’s bruise. If the police investigation launched yesterday reveals anything, it will land Starmer with …
Welcome to Britain’s prefab nightmare
“Lovely, isn’t it?” I’m standing in the kitchen with a resident of Lockleaze, Bristol, as we survey the construction site just a few yards from the end of her garden. She is, of course, being sarcastic. “I’m just so depressed,” …
Britain is facing a second 2008
In selecting the date of the next election, Conservative Party strategists have a choice between catastrophe and oblivion. Following the Labour Party’s micro-landslides in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, and with Rishi Sunak’s conference reset leaving opinion polls unmoved, it seems increasingly …
Starmer’s hollow vision for Britain
There is a vast, petrifying hollowness to the British economy. As you race around dealing with everyday life, the reassuring facade of the state is still there: the police and roads, the schools and hospitals. And yet, if you ever …
Rishi Sunak’s war on the young
What does a fair distribution of economic resources look like? It is a question that will dog the Conservative Party Conference this week as questions over inheritance tax, VAT on school fees and the triple-lock on state pensions return to …
Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?
It is hard to tell when a crisis in a dictatorial regime, such as the sudden breakdown of China’s economic model, is not about this or that, but about the regime itself. My own experience in this regard is very …
Will Britain ever build beautiful?
On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, in the last days of a monied Britain, Gordon Brown had a rare vision for the country. Amid the burgeoning housing crisis, 10 new eco-towns, a model of future sustainable living, would …
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 …
How landlords became monsters
Everyone under the age of 40 has their landlord horror story. We trade them, like old war wounds. My own, in retrospect, is rather pleasingly metaphorical, something of a capsule (or cubicle) scatological comedy. At one point, as part of …
British renters are losers
My renting life is now on the verge of eclipsing my non-renting life: I have been paying monthly rent for 17 years. As a millennial, I am of the first major generation to get to this age and not be …
The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America
The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands …
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, …
Who will win the gentrification wars?
Gentrification. Are you pro or anti? Perhaps, if you’re reading this article in a small town with a dilapidated high street, this question may be far from your mind. But if you’re inside the M25, it will loom larger, and …
What if King Charles were your landlord?
Nansledan is a partially built village on a hill at Newquay: the wind blows through, almost knocking me off my feet. The Cornish housing crisis is a paradigm of the national one: towns filled with holiday lets and Airbnbs while …
What was the point of Jacinda Ardern?
No one saw Jacinda Ardern’s resignation coming, though many of her critics have been willing it for years. She has, she says, no more gas left in the tank after her five and a half years as New Zealand’s Prime …
