Boris Johnson knows the value of three-word slogans. ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ helped propel him to his two greatest electoral triumphs. But another three words that no one would ever put on a campaign poster might determine the success of his premiership: public service reform. Johnson has taken an unusual decision for
The second thing I learned about football, after moving to London, is that you can never, ever switch your allegiance. That was unfortunate, because the first thing I discovered was that I liked Newcastle United and had already chosen them as my team. It’s been fairly relentless pain ever since. In 2016, I watched Newcastle
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of the roads in which they live. Some Londoners, I believe, find it uncomfortable to live in a street which has a name redolent of colonialism. Fair enough. I hope, though, that Sadiq will also give
The Budget and the spending review gave the clearest indication yet of what the post-Covid government might look like. During the height of the pandemic, government spending exceeded 50 per cent of the economy for the first time since 1945-46. Even this year, public spending will be higher than when Denis Healey had to seek
What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because of the new TV drama Impeachment (being shown in Britain on BBC2) about the Monica Lewinsky affair. Somewhat unfairly to both main parties, it is part of the American Crime Story series. Previous subjects have
I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff
Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age. It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which
On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid
Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments, is the kind of statistic you would expect in a failing state. One of the shocking things about Sir David Amess’s murder is that many MPs weren’t surprised by it. Parliamentarians are acutely aware that
Covid transformed the role of the state. During the pandemic, the government did things it would never normally even contemplate. At the same time as it restricted civil liberties, it intervened in the economy to an extent never before seen in peacetime. Through the furlough scheme, close to £70 billion was spent on paying people’s
Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more. Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy
I have not watched the BBC’s new period drama Ridley Road because I knew it would be impossible for the corporation to commission any series about anything without grafting onto it facile and usually pig-ignorant observations which suggest that history always reveals that the BBC left-liberal mindset is right about everything. So it seems to
A report by MPs into the spread of the coronavirus has concluded that the government’s approach constituted one of this country’s worst ever public health failures. The MPs say the early fondness for herd immunity plus the delay in locking the country down ended up costing thousands of lives. What makes this worse is that
Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller British cities. After a summer in the Apple, I can therefore provide British urbanites with a glimpse of their future. I get around on what I newly perceive as a dumpy, sluggish pushbike. Mayor Bill
We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when Facebook and its various ahellspawn offspring go down for seven hours, the country is sent into a tailspin of misery and confusion. On Monday, Facebook users could be seen out on the streets of our
Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In the Times Literary Supplement my friend Rory Stewart has been reviewing The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock; and last week I went along to the launch at the Frontline Club in Paddington of the BBC
Most prime ministers would be worried about supply chain shortages. But as became increasingly clear at the Tory party conference in Manchester, Boris Johnson has instead spotted a political opportunity. He denies there is a crisis and claims that the recent ‘stresses and strains’ amount to nothing more than the economy reawakening after lockdown. As
I’m not sure very many of our politicians, the London Mayor or even the Met can really be said to care about the death of Sabina Nessa, the poor young school-teacher murdered in London nearly a fortnight ago. If you claim to care about the victim of a terrible crime, if you’re going to grandstand
One day quite soon someone at a petrol pump is going to get a tyre iron wrapped around their head. It will almost certainly be the middle-aged male driver of a Land Rover Discovery — a flatulent showboating car driven almost exclusively by smug pigs — while he is busy filling up his 16 jerry
Late last week the Labour deputy leader was the subject of a glowing profile in the Times. The piece described Angela Rayner’s alleged physical similarity to Nicole Kidman, spoke indulgently of her ‘outspokenness’ and otherwise confirmed my suspicion that most of the people who go into politics should never be allowed near the stuff. Rayner