Was England ever merry? We’re stagnant, divided, increasingly heavily taxed, and even our Prime Minister promises it’s going to get worse. Barely two months into a premiership in which he promised to “tread more lightly” upon the lives of Britons, …
Britain needs its luxury class
It’s an idyllic Friday in Spring and I am standing on the factory floor of a silk factory in the heart of Suffolk. Guiding me through this labyrinth of looms is Julius Walters, the 11th-generation Managing Director of Sudbury Silk …
The worst novelist in the world
Budding novelists are always instructed to start their books in an arresting fashion. L.P. Hartley knew exactly what he was doing in The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” As did Anthony Burgess …
The dark heart of Joseph Conrad
Only once, in four decades before the mast of journalism, has an editor ever asked me to go anywhere in the world that I chose and damn (or at least file) the expense. A newspaper’s weekend magazine planned a special …
Can Labour avoid the stench of scandal?
Keir Starmer is clearly no Lynn Anderson fan. On Tuesday, he stood in the Downing Street Rose Garden, addressing assembled public sector workers, and promised that “this garden and this building are back in your service”. He said this with …
Why is a Brit running a Chinese weapons conference?
The city of Xi’an was once famed as the birthplace of the Silk Road, the tortuous trade route along which caravans bore textiles, jade and other luxury products to Persia, Egypt and Europe for more than 1,500 years. Just outside …
Tommy Robinson, England’s class clown
There is a paradox at the core of the English far-Right: namely, its quaintly un-English preoccupation with race. It’s the reason why, over the past 30 years or so, Tommy Robinson and his ilk have been so marginal to our …
Sven-Göran Eriksson, English revolutionary
First came Carly Zucker, Joe Cole’s fitness instructor girlfriend. Then came a number of other wives and girlfriends as she led them for a run along the canal at the bottom of the park. Behind them was a security team, …
Ballard predicted the collapse of the middle class
“…Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security…
…[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago…
…Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button …
How capitalism stole London’s skyline
Before the coronation muted him, Charles, then Prince of Wales, launched several memorable broadsides against modern architects and planners. Addressing the annual dinner of the Corporation of London’s Planning and Communications Committee at the Mansion House in December 1987, he …
Stop flaunting your trauma
With the Edinburgh Fringe well and truly over, countless performers will be counting up how many coveted four- or five-star reviews they garnered. Most, though, won’t have even landed one. I’ve been there and let me tell you, it’s hard …
The sisterhood is a feminist lie
What is the collective noun for female Labour MPs? The question arose anew last week as 13 politicians glammed up for a Vogue article and accompanying photo shoot.
Written in the hagiographic style beloved of women’s glossies, the piece presents …
We need to talk about violent speech
As the British justice system continues to lock up overzealous keyboard warriors linked to the riots, and as free speech “warriors” respond with dystopian grumblings about an Orwellian police state, we find ourselves in a strange situation. Put to one …
The Conservative Party needs a hero
When the six MPs vying to be Conservative leader were recently asked some quick-fire questions by party HQ, their interrogation was mostly limited to the light-hearted: “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?” But …
The truth about extremist misogyny
“Women have no idea how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). It’s perhaps true that women, at least those who spend time online, have more of an idea than we used to. You don’t …