Scotland needed government. It got nationalism instead

As you approach the Scottish Parliament from the Royal Mile, a modest curve juts out from the obnoxious angles. This camber, the Canongate Wall, is studded with 26 slates of Scottish stone each bearing a quotation from the Bible and scriveners of more questionable repute. Among them is the instruction to ‘work as if you

James Forsyth

The whips mustn’t crush every Tory who thinks about the future

The next Tory leadership race promises to be a crowded affair. As I say in The Sun this morning, the whips are now worried about Rory Stewart’s ambitions. In a meeting with the government’s parliamentary private secretaries, the deputy Chief Whip Julian Smith demanded that anyone who had been to dinner at Stewart’s house the

Why we should care about the German elections

German parliamentarians used to pride themselves on being boring, but the past two years have turned Teutonic politics upside down. After a decade of dreary stasis under Angela Merkel, a system designed to run on tramlines has become a rollercoaster ride. So why has the political scene in Germany suddenly become so volatile? And what

Toby Young

J.K. Rowling’s schizophrenic politics | 1 July 2017

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of