The Big Air Con

Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …

The very eccentric birth of Labour

In the freezing West Riding winter of January 1893, around 120 miscellaneous radicals and reformers met in Bradford’s Labour Institute — originally a Wesleyan chapel, later a Salvation Army barracks — to debate the creation of a new political body. …

The EU’s economic war on Le Pen

With France bracing itself for the first round of its snap parliamentary election this Sunday, the near-certain prospect of victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has sent French and EU elites to their panic stations. Reeling from their …

Inside the nudist renaissance

The gladdest sight of a lacklustre May was Charles Dance emerging naked and magnificent, like Botticelli’s Venus, from the sea on Formentera. The UK press pixelated the actor’s genitals as if that justified the intrusion, but prurient types (me) still …

Keir Starmer’s moral vacuum

Who is Sir Keir Starmer, really? It’s fairly clear that the British public have difficulty with this question. Although by now they’ve probably picked up that he’s the son of a toolmaker, much else remains obscure. On the face of …

How will the Ukraine war end?

How will the war in Ukraine end? In an election overshadowed by a grim climate of international instability, it is remarkable that the only candidate to seriously address this question so far has been Nigel Farage. Laying out Reform’s foreign …

Politics is killing the talk show

“I’m not allowed to give any party-political views,” says Julia Hartley-Brewer, on Talk Radio, “but I’m certainly allowed to give my views.” And she goes on to do so. Because this is not the BBC, where presenters are (theoretically, at …