“I see pregnant people.” Somewhere inside my brain, the little boy from Sixth Sense is balefully trying to explain why on earth it is that everywhere I look are expectant mothers. I get on the Tube — a little girl …
Starmer faces a farmers’ revolt
We sheared our sheep today, beneath a sky full of gloomy grey clouds. There were hours of chasing sheep up the ramp to the men on the trailer. The radio blared out country songs and an occasional news bulletin informing …
Labour still doesn’t know what women want
Just before the election, Keir Starmer finally found the third way on trans issues and women’s rights. First, he was damned by J.K. Rowling, who wrote in The Times that she would “struggle to support” Labour and suggested she might …
Starmer is turning Britain into a vassal state
It seems fitting that Keir Starmer’s international debut should be the Nato summit that kicks off in Washington, DC today. Ostensibly scheduled as a celebration of the alliance’s 75th anniversary, it will no doubt be remembered as the moment that …
Welcome to Keir Starmer’s post-liberal order
So now Keir Starmer is Prime Minister, what will change? There are two apparently contradictory responses to this.
The first: nothing. The truly shattering revelation from the era since Brexit has been that you can experience a so-called “political earthquake”, …
How Starmer slaughtered the Tories
This was an election campaign like no other. Less a battle of personalities and visions than of competing strategies to attain power, commanded not by the uninspiring monarchs under whose banners the battle was fought but the generals quietly ordering …
The most infantilising election of all
How do you feel about that most English of vices: gentle whimsy? Personally, I can’t abide unusually shaped teapots, cat cartoons, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, London Marathon costumes, or jokey books you’re supposed to read on the toilet. For the …
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 …
Will Starmer discover his Romantic side?
Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing …
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, …
The last bastion of Tory Britain
The flag outside the Spalding Conservative Club is at half-mast. This is not because of the wider Tory calamity — though it should be — but, the barmaid says, because a member has died. This is South Holland and the …
Will Labour finally save the left behind?
This election has been a missed opportunity to face a grim but manageable reality: beyond London and Edinburgh, the regional economies around Britain have accumulated deep structural problems. Household incomes are far lower than in south-east England because there are …
Tribal Britain won’t be governed
A few weeks ago, I attended a conference in London on the future of British conservatism, hosted by a thinktank funded by the Hungarian government. The future of British conservatism, it was swiftly revealed, was bleak — but not in …
The death of the Conservative Club
In 1993, the then British Prime Minister, John Major, gave a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe: “Fifty years on from now,” he predicted, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, …
In Starmerland, the ladies are not for turning
Turn right out of the station, head down past the village green and the yoga studio and the osteopaths, and you will eventually arrive at the pebbledash semi that made Keir Starmer. Once upon a time, Hurst Green may have …