Keir Starmer is worried about who’s coming into the country. This week, he launched a white paper with the aim of cutting migration. Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’, he said. However, it’s not just arrivals that should give him sleepless nights. It’s the number of people in the departures lounge too. London’s private
Every four weeks the government sends me my state pension. Those words have a socialist, almost Soviet, ring. The amount has recently risen to £11,973 a year – a preposterous sum to send a 67-year-old man still in paid employment. But from the state’s point of view, the money is not entirely wasted: it buys
Shabana Mahmood may be the only Labour politician to have persuaded Rishi Sunak to vote for her. The former prime minister was in the year above Mahmood when they both studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, in the 1990s. When she ran for JCR president, Sunak pledged his support. Meeting Mahmood in her ministerial office this
For a century, Kenwood ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath in north London had been a haven for women – gay, straight, secular, observant and everything in between. Then in 2019, the City of London Corporation, which manages the bathing pond, issued guidance dictating that trans women could swim there. Suddenly a schism appeared among the
Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots shopping bag and left on the Greenway, a cycle path built on a Victorian sewage pipe that runs through east London. She was abandoned on 18 January 2024 by
All wars end, one way or another. One of the longest wars in the Middle East, between Turkey and Kurdish separatists, may finally be over. After 40 years of bitter struggle, the Kurdistan Workers’ party, the PKK, has declared that it will disarm and disband. It’s an achievement, of a sort, for the PKK’s imprisoned
Rome In the days before the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, traditionalist Catholics were so worried about interference from evil spirits that, according to reliable sources, they arranged for a priest to conduct what’s known as a ‘minor exorcism’ outside the walls of the Vatican. Such ceremonies, which typically involve the sprinkling of holy
It’s a matter of life and death at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. No murders are planned as far as we know, but there will be gravestones and even a coffin. This is to be a celebration of death. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Flower Show will include funeral flowers in the Grand Pavilion
For years I worked as an NHS manager, seeing first-hand the consequences of Britain’s broken social care system spill over into hospitals. Elderly patients, who no longer required medical care, were frequently marooned on wards because there was no one to support them at home. Behind every delayed operation or jammed A&E corridor was the
There are few phrases more terrifying than ‘men’s fashion’. It reminds me of yuppies in salmon-coloured jorts on their way to play padel; Hackney mullets; white polo shirts worn by blokes who bathe in Joop!; Olly Murs and the era of the trilby; the Peaky Blinders aesthetic. Men’s fashion has now brought us another monstrosity,
