James Callaghan is one of those prime ministers — like Gordon Brown or Rishi Sunak — who seems like a political footnote. That’s a bit unfair, though. True, his premiership only lasted three years, and ended when he led Labour …
Ketamine is numbing Gen Z’s pain
“If someone were to design the perfect drug for a teenager who is depressed and doesn’t have much money, this would be it…”
Ketamine is one of the more interesting drugs out there. It can make you feel relaxed, wobbly, …
Trump’s fantasyland America
Donald Trump is a great uniter, bringing together the most delusional elements of American life. Attacks on his administration’s reactionary turn are, of course, accurate. But it is far wiser to see his cabinet as a crackpot coalition. Served by …
RFK’s drug-ad ban is a bipartisan win
It’s still a surreal sight: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s health secretary under President Trump. The scion of a Democratic dynasty who became an anti-vaccine gadfly and seemed, in his final years, doomed to irrelevancy — a Democratic campaign …
Male repression is good, actually
A couple of years ago, out running on a rural track some distance from houses or paved road, I met a group of twentysomething men running the other way. As we passed, nothing happened beyond the usual countryside exchange of …
How Trump broke the Canadian Right
Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, used to be the future, once. In October 2023, he posted a YouTube video of his interview in an orchard in British Columbia with the unworldly editor of a local …
Manchester City could cripple football
Over the past 15 years, by far the most successful team in English football has been Manchester City. Since being bought Sheikh Mansour, the son of the Emir of Abu Dhabi, in 2008, they have been transformed from a club …
Does Gavin Newsom believe in anything?
Gavin Newsom’s new podcast reveals not only a media-savvy politico seeking more exposure to a bigger audience. It also reflects a concerted drive by the onetime self-anointed leader of the #Resistance to reinvent himself as the unique progressive breaking through …
Why Europe can’t defend itself
Imagine a world in which western Europe was actually able to stick it to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump simultaneously. As if. Back in the real world, there’s a remote possibility the Europeans might get their act together sufficiently to …
Great Yarmouth is stuck in the past
The bookies standing trackside give me a look, the novice punter, a fiver in my hand. The tall one, grey-haired, speaks up. “I’ll give you a good price on that one,” he says. “Two-to-one.” I put my money on Loverly …
How lockdown created Starmerism
Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing …
The greying of the Resistance
Progressives are feeling ambivalent about the fact that none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as the de facto leader of the resistance against the two-headed monster in the White House.
On the one hand, it’s a marvel to …
Will an asteroid wipe out humanity?
During the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, the sky began to fall. Near Normandy, several locals saw rocks smash into the ground on 26 April 1803. At the time, the concept of asteroids was viewed by the French intelligentsia as superstitious …
Erdoğan’s new world order
Celebrating the Turkish centennial, in 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unveiled an outsized vision of his country’s future. The “Century of Turkey” would have his country playing a far more autonomous, assertive role. “The international community will see a Turkey …
How the Right sold out
Everyone knows about the transformation of Che Guevara from a murderous Marxist militant into a T-shirt icon. In recent years, Western elites did something similar to political movements from the Left and the Right, only on a much grander scale.…
