It is more than nine years since I was suspended by the Labour party for – I think – a comment I made about Palestine. I had written: ‘If you handed over Israel to the Palestinians they would turn it into Somalia before you could say Yom Kippur.’ I remember having worried about the sentence
Researchers from Imperial College London this week released an analysis of the health of voters in the UK. In a publication associated with British Medical Journal, the experts claimed to have found that people who vote for Reform are disproportionately sick. I am sure that the researchers in question could not possibly have enjoyed coming
A personal note this week, as 15 October 2025 marked an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese residency permits expired. Isn’t that a bit sloppy, you might ask, allowing your permission to remain in a country where you live to lapse? On one party’s part, very sloppy, but not ours. At least
Poor old Hamas, losing all those dead Jews. The BBC reports that Hamas ‘could not locate the remaining hostages’ bodies’, of which there are 28. One can understand the problem. When you have been starving and torturing so many for so long, you may not necessarily remember where you left them when they died. In
Who knows what Rachel Reeves reads in bed. Perhaps she dips into her own debut book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics (2023), and dreams of those carefree pre-government days when serious people, Mark Carney for one, thought she might make a decent Chancellor. But if she’s also burning midnight oil over drafts of her
