If, in the days after Storm Arwen, the north of England began to suspect that the south didn’t much care about it, that suspicion has by now hardened into a cert. Many thousands of homes in the north and in Scotland still have no power and, as I write this, Storm Barra has just arrived,
One of this government’s favourite tactics is to act as if the beginning of its time in office was the general election of December 2019. This means it can dodge the usual charge against any party that has been in power for more than a decade: why haven’t you fixed the problem already? Some problems,
I have been reading 39 Ways To Save The Planet by the BBC journalist Tom Heap, which includes such ingenious suggestions as capturing refrigerant gases in a large box and then destroying the large box. It is an interesting book. I would like to suggest to Tom a 40th way in which we might help
Much is now being made of the evils of empire. As a child of empire I bridle. I acknowledge the wrong and injustices of colonialism, the racism, and the greed too. I accept that a re-balancing of history was due. It’s good that the darker side of the picture has now moved into the light.
Comparing Saturday’s Downing Street press conference to Groundhog Day would insult one of my favourite films. The hilarious, multifarious strategies our cinematic protagonist employs to repeatedly negotiate the same day in February are anything but monotonous. No. 10’s top-down strategies for containing Covid are always the same. That press conference seemed like a cheap Chinese
Up until a few days ago, ministers could see how the government might regain its footing in the polls after several weeks of self-inflicted damage. The argument went like this: as Christmas approaches voters will see that life in Britain — and specifically England — carries on with very few Covid restrictions whereas elsewhere in
I’m not sure how many readers know the name of Anthony Smith, who died on Sunday aged 83, but a fair number will. He spent almost a decade at the BBC, helped start Channel 4, directed the British Film Institute, chaired many committees and for 17 years was president of Magdalen College, Oxford. But while
No sooner had an inch or two of snow fallen on our upland areas last week than the climate-change Morlocks were out on social media, shrieking and bed-wetting themselves into a catatonic stupor. Nurse, nurse, bring the meds, quickly. ‘There! Told you!’ was the general gist. If it is snowing there cannot possibly be global
Ever since Boris Johnson’s disastrous decision to try to stay the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson, things have started going wrong for Downing Street. The roots of the government’s problem can be traced back to a speech, though. Not Johnson’s rambling address to the CBI earlier this week, but his speech at Tory
If there’s one thing I misjudged completely, it’s how creepy and long-lasting the effects of lockdown on all of us would be. I’m not in this case talking about the catastrophic medical cost: the heart attacks and strokes, the missed diagnoses. If we’d let Covid rip, if we hadn’t locked down, I’m not sure there’d
There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 the USA was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty
A Church of England primary school in Richmond, London, has junked Sir Winston Churchill and J.K. Rowling as names for two of its houses and replaced them with the names of the footballer Marcus Rashford and the lady who helped out in the Crimean war, Mary Seacole. This was done, the school said, in order
Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become ‘sex workers’. This noble institution is offering two courses in the various forms of harlotry. My only concern is that at present they do not actually offer an academic qualification in these subjects — at the very least an undergraduate degree in, say,
When a column highlighting under-appreciated breaking news has had absolutely no impact on the course of events (per usual), the urge to make the same point again is irresistible. In August, Public Health England released data which shows that vaccination does not appreciably guard against Covid infection and transmission and protection worked out at around
Almost no MP has emerged with dignity from the sleaze debacle of the past three weeks. Boris Johnson’s botched attempt to spare Owen Paterson a 30-day suspension has badly damaged his credibility with his own party. The 2019 intake of ‘red wall’ MPs have turned on the old guard, accusing their colleagues of damaging the
I begin this column on a train from Paris to London. Opposite me are a mother and baby. I don’t know them and will probably never see them again. The baby is nine months old and called Gabriel. A genial and relaxed child, he is grinning at me and waving his soft-toy giraffe. He’s wearing
I see that the most boring conversation in the nation is back. The one even worse than people in the country telling you that the only real difficulty in getting to their part of Gloucestershire/Norfolk/the Orkneys is the drive out of London. I refer to, of course, the reform of the House of Lords. The
I have Netflix, and in particular the series Maid, to thank for the startling discovery of how easy it is to slide into a form of man-hating — not a righteous feminist rage, but a sort of dopey, palliative, unthinking misandry. Maid was released last month, and it’s already one of the stand-out Netflix successes
I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously
The row over MPs’ outside interests has landed Boris Johnson in one of the most uncomfortable positions a prime minister can be in: he has to choose between being on the wrong side of public opinion and his own backbenchers. What makes matters worse is that his own misjudgment got him into this position. Even
