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, …
The farmers march on Westminster
I was a teenager when I began to ask my dad difficult questions about our small farm. Questions about whether we made a profit, and if so, what paid best. The sheep? The cattle? The barley or oats we grew?…
What happened to America First?
“No more wars, I’m going to stop wars” vowed Donald Trump in his first post-election speech to voters. And his campaign was marked by his critique of neocon-led military engagements in the Middle East, though with little detail as to …
The NHS is failing epilepsy patients
Megan Gardiner was 17 weeks pregnant when she died alone one June morning in 2022.
She had experienced her first epileptic seizure 12 years earlier, two days after her thirteenth birthday. “We heard a scream and then a loud bang,” …
I was the target of Guardian misinformation
It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organisation would no longer be posting …