This was the week a German became the manager of England — or as the Daily Mail put it, a GERMAN. And it was a week of “debate” about the reaction to having a German in charge. “Anyone watching this …
Wes Streeting wants to experiment on you
Only last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting was warning us sternly against “killing the NHS with kindness”. This week, true to his principles, he announced an intention to start experimenting upon fat people in partnership with Big Pharma.
The five-year …
Wes Streeting wants to experiment on you
Only last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting was warning us sternly against “killing the NHS with kindness”. This week, true to his principles, he announced an intention to start experimenting upon fat people in partnership with Big Pharma.
The five-year …
The tortured fame of Liam Payne
On TikTok, the BBC is running a livestream of a vigil in Buenos Aires; women in their mid-twenties gather with candles and side-fringes, singing One Direction ballads in heavy accents. News of Liam Payne’s sudden death aged 31 has broken …
Labour is in denial about knife crime
In the early hours of a recent Sunday morning, not far from my home in a cosy south London suburb, a fight broke out between a large group of males. Eyewitnesses say the assailants were armed with knives, and described …
Why Robin Hood was outlawed
Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s a famous outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin …
Starmer can’t keep Britain afloat
It’s hard to know what is more emblematic of Britain’s economic predicament today: the Government pleading for investment from the owners of a ferry company that sacked all its workers; Robert Jenrick cutting a Union Jack cake to celebrate Margaret …
Jilly Cooper knows what women want
How do you solve a problem like Rupert Campbell-Black? Since 1986, Jilly Cooper’s fictional show jumper has been mounting his way across the wives and daughters of her invented (but awfully familiar) county of Rutshire. Through 11 novels, the most …
Alex Salmond’s failed populism
In the end, Alex Salmond’s was a career of failure — not in the cliched use of Enoch Powell’s aphorism but in the absolute terms of failing to achieve his specific and declared political ambition. Alex — he was a …
There’s no dignity in assisted dying
It was the childishness that pushed me over the edge. As news broke of the forthcoming parliamentary vote on assisted dying, a slew of statements from politicians emerged, each one more simplistically emotive and Manichean than the last.
Labour MP …
The end of the Boris cult
Boris Johnson presented his memoir, Unleashed, at Cheltenham racecourse last week, amid the ghosts of bookies. They, at least, would appreciate him for who he is: a risk-taker who won, then lost, and hopes to win again. But the venue …
Keir Starmer’s insulting hypocrisy
Keir Starmer’s premiership is well and truly goosed. One policy misstep after another, punctuated by tone-deaf doom-mongering and a freebies scandal that refuses to go away, have exposed Labour as a thoroughly undercooked governmental prospect. Some wrongly chalk this up …
What Labour could learn from Japan
The new Labour government appears to be as relaxed about developing a “nanny state” reputation as it is about being seen as a purveyor of economic doom and gloom. From October next year, television adverts for junk food will not …
The Tory counter-revolution has begun
The Conservative Party has two instincts lodged deep in its soul, each battling for supremacy. The first is the desire for the reassuring comfort of what it sees as solid, sensible government. We might call this the conservative instinct. The …
My day in the life of Boris Johnson
When Boris Johnson’s Unleashed was announced there were arguably grounds for believing it might be, in the Daily Mail’s hyperventilating guff, “Political Memoir of the Century!” Surely this self-caricaturing rogue, this Falstaff of British politics, would have some crazy stories …