The Week

Leading article

How Boris should pick his peers

It is no credit to British democracy that we have the second largest legislative chamber in the world. The only one larger than the 792-strong House of Lords is the 2,980-member Chinese National People’s Congress. In the coming days the House of Lords will grow even bigger as the Prime Minister announces another batch of

Portrait of the week

Diary

The brilliance of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan

Four years ago, I bought a ranch in Wyoming. Not that I was tired of New York, but I’m fascinated by the epic scale of this country, and I wanted to try something different. And different it is. The state of Wyoming is physically larger than the UK, but has much less than a hundredth

Barometer

If curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, what does?

The first nanny state The Prime Minister’s strategy on obesity has been labelled a work of the ‘nanny state’ — not least because Boris Johnson himself, during his campaign to become Conservative leader last year, promised to banish ‘the continuing creep of the nanny state’. The term can be traced to the 12 February 1965

Letters

Letters: What cycle helmets can tell us about face masks

Masking the truth Sir: Matthew Parris is right to laud the importance of embracing the scientific method (‘Why should opinion matter more than science?’, 25 July) to determine the efficacy of face masks. However, his proposed experiment contains a significant oversight — the human factor. That is, how the very wearing of a mask (or