When Lord Farmer took to X to “put my own views on antisemitism and Israel’s current military campaign on public record” after “public comments from a high-profile member of my family”, I felt the same thrill as if I’d discovered …
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 …
Will we survive the sex war?
Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation …
Why Ukraine is being blamed for Nord Stream
To understand the truth about the Nord Stream pipeline, one needs to master a certain form of “Kremlinology”. Everything about it is designed to obfuscate, every strand shrouded in prevarication and deceit.
From the start, the investigation was a textbook …
Great power politics is an illusion
Everyone of a certain age who passed through British secondary education will have spent a few months learning about the League of Nations, which, to my knowledge, is not a subject of academic study anywhere else. Created by the Treaty …
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 …
The ghosts of the Munich air disaster
The book opens with a haunting scene. As the Manchester United team file out onto the pitch, we find that they are not in their usual red strip. “They came out of the tunnel like a ghost train, all in …
Kamala’s undemocratic convention
We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every …
Why we fell for Molly-Mae
In All Bar Ones up and down the country, a silence descended. In the aisles of B&M, in between pyramids of discounted Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, women softly wept. French bulldogs howled in unison from Astroturfed pens on their new-build …
The men who risk everything
Risk for me is an occupational hazard. Why would I film myself running through a front line in eastern Ukraine to a soundtrack of roaring shells and my own cardio-averse panting? (Hint: it’s not the money, trust me.) What would …
The corrupt heart of Japanese politics
In the Nineties, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her colleagues made a parlour game of seeing whether anyone could name — in the correct order — all seven of the Japanese prime ministers with whom the Clinton administration …
The No-State Solution
When the guns eventually fall silent in Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians will confront a decades-old reality that cannot be overcome by violence and political half-measures. Both Jews and Palestinians will continue to assert privileged ownership of Palestine, citing centuries of …
The housing crisis tearing Leicester apart
The South Asian neighbourhood of Highfields in Leicester is made up of long, sloping streets of terraced houses, built largely between the Victorian era and the Second World War. At that time, Leicester was a major centre of Britain’s booming …
Putin is no longer Russia’s saviour
At the start of this month, Kyiv’s exhausted forces seemed at last overwhelmed by their opponents’ superiority in manpower and firepower. But once again, they have defied expectations. The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ mass incursion into Russian territory has unfolded at …