“Every leader needs a John Prescott,” Tony Blair liked to say of his deputy. “I couldn’t have made all the changes I made, and needed to make, in the Labour Party without the support of John.”
He was right. One …
How Trump will transform Poland
Across much of Eastern Europe, being a Trump whisperer has become an overnight job requirement. Aside from Viktor Orbán and a few other examples of genuine giddiness, leaders right across the former Soviet bloc have rushed to show their value …
Is Josh Shapiro the American Disraeli?
Benjamin Disraeli observed of Victorian England the existence of “two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”. In this perverse order, “Oligarchy has been called Liberty; an exclusive priesthood has been christened a National Church… while absolute …
Burn down the Church Machine
I love the Church of England. I love its liturgy, I love its glorious parish churches, I love its lack of ideological fervour, I love the gentle and inclusive way that it is porous to those outside of the Church, …
The rise and fall of the political maverick
It isn’t unusual for the tail to wag the dog. Time and again in history, the powers that be have been deemed unfit for purpose. Hence the need for another locus for real power — the political aide. Kings have …
How liberals killed the talk show
The day after the presidential election, Stephen Colbert — ostensibly a comic — opened his CBS show by addressing his audience like a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. “Hey there, how are you doing?” he asked, gazing softly into the …
America will always be hooked on drugs
America is the greatest democracy in the world: a place where an incoherent system of contradictory beliefs has produced an equally incoherent politics. In the irrational ferment of what it may be best to call simply the thing that happened …
Jeremy Clarkson: populist tribune
Capturing a glimpse of Napoleon at the head of his Grande Armée in 1806, Hegel described him as the world soul on horseback. Today, such figures do not appear in small German towns leading revolutionary armies, but on YouTube, Spotify …
The progressive case against immigration
The battlelines on immigration have hardened predictably. Left-leaning voters proudly display “refugees welcome” yard signs, while Donald Trump supporters cheer his pledge to implement “largest deportation operation in the history of our country”. Amid such partisan attitudes, it has become …
Humiliation won’t heal hospitals
You learn to be tough as an NHS doctor. But starting my shift a few days ago, even I was shocked. I spotted a patient, clearly someone with severe mental health issues, stuck on the ward without proper care. I …
Elon Musk just wants to go to space
In 414 BC, Aristophanes’ The Birds was first performed in Athens. In this comedy, two disgruntled middle-aged men, fed up with life on Earth, convince a giant bird to create a great city in the sky. Free from the cruel …
Welcome to Thought-Police Britain
“Kafkaesque” has long been a byword for the distinctive type of tyranny imposed by impersonal bureaucracies. Franz Kafka himself was a petty bureaucrat: he spent his life working in insurance, writing late into the night. But as a tiny cog …
Jordan Peterson wrestles with meaning
Like every conservative intellectual, Jordan Peterson once was a man of the Left. Left-wingers were hard to come by in Seventies Alberta; Peterson grew up in what was in effect a one-party state. When he was a teenager, all but …
Will New York abandon the Democrats?
If the Trumpian message of decay and decline has any resonance, it’s in places like Hunts Point. Emerging from the subway here in the South Bronx, I see a man on a payphone pleading to speak with a psychotherapist. Another …
How Israel and Lebanon can stop the slaughter
In the Middle East, transitions between US presidential administrations are often times of bold attempts at diplomacy. It was in the last days and hours of the Clinton administration that intense final status talks were advanced for an Israeli-Palestinian peace, …