I was recently treated to a small taste of the real China. It was in the incongruous setting of a vast conference centre in east London, directly under the flight path of City airport. On assignment for the BBC, I found myself wandering the stalls of Europe’s largest international security technology exhibition, filming for a
‘I’m going to stick ruthlessly to script,’ says Boris Johnson. ‘This is not the stage of the campaign when you innovate.’ He’s right to worry about the timing. The new Tory leader won’t be chosen for just over two weeks but the ballot papers go out this weekend. Boris is the odds-on favourite. This is
Every prime minister is a sociologist. Theresa May drew a distinction between citizens of somewhere and ‘citizens of nowhere’, a sort of riff on David Goodhart’s distinction between Somewheres (rooted, provincial, less well off) and Anywheres (snooty, international, at home on planes and in the corridors of power). Now Boris Johnson segments the country in a
As I get older I find the idea of wanting to be in a couple more and more bizarre. I’m not talking about sex — which anyway often becomes less frequent after years of familiarity — or marrying for financial security. No, I’m puzzled about people’s obsession with getting a permanent companion. There are all
When so much of the Brexit debate has consisted of slogans and unexamined assertions (‘cliff edges’, ‘crashing out’ and the rest), it is welcome that a more substantial argument has been made by Sir Ivan Rogers, former UK ambassador to the EU. He has been making a series of well-received speeches, some of which have
Sir Max Hastings, whom I engaged as editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1986 and who stayed in that role for about nine years, seems to have installed himself at the head of the rabid mob of journalistic haters of Boris Johnson. In recent pieces in The Spectator and the Guardian he has described Boris
It will be all smiles when Donald Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Osaka at the annual meeting of the G20: a show of comity for the cameras and financial markets. The two are midway through one of the biggest trade wars that the world has seen in recent years, with the US
Last October, Phil Coleman, a journalist on the Carlisle-based News & Star, went to cover the trial of Zholia Alemi, a 56-year-old consultant psychiatrist who was accused of forging the will of an 84-year-old dementia patient in an attempt to inherit her £1.3 million estate. During the trial, Phil realised this complex scam could not
He has been married several times, has a way with the ladies and always seems to land on his feet no matter how colourful his romantic life. Not even the 20-year age gap between him and his current squeeze has tripped him up in the court of public opinion. His looks aren’t conventional and yet
There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life. Everything is broken! All is lost! The end
In the rush to declare Isis dead now that its caliphate has been routed from Iraq and Syria, it’s easy to forget that its Nigerian fellow traveller, Boko Haram, is still going strong. April’s five-year anniversary of the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, for example, passed with barely a celebrity tweet to mark it, despite the fact
Islands have a special appeal. We imagine that on an island we’ll somehow ‘get away from it all’. In the era of Brexit and climate concerns, Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, more than 3,000 miles from the nearest landmass, is flooded with requests from people hoping to settle there. I would advise them to think
In the summer of 1999 I did something radical. Spurred on by my husband’s universal loathing of television I took our TV set to the landfill and I haven’t owned one since. Twenty unrepentant years without the demon box, and alive to tell the tale. My family long ago accepted this stubborn eccentricity. They’ve grown
I switched on the radio last week and caught the tail end of a discussion about the Conservative leadership election. The presenter, who seemed to be in a highly agitated state, was talking about one of the contenders: ‘A man who’s lied to both of his wives, all of his mistresses, every constituent, every employer,
Quietly and discreetly, the planning for Boris Johnson’s premiership has begun. No one wants to be seen measuring the curtains, but his team are confident he’ll be the choice of Tory party members. It would be the most spectacular upset if he is not. Boris has fixed a Brexit deadline — 31 October — and
Beirut Television cameras get everywhere these days. Or maybe that was always true. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, wrote a book in which NBC gets the rights to the crucifixion, live from Golgotha, with St Paul as the ‘anchorperson’. So it was only faintly bizarre when CNN ‘crossed’ to a prison
Is the pope a Catholic? You have to wonder. In the old days, a pope’s remit was modest: infallible, but only in the vanishingly rare cases when he pronounced on matters of faith and morals concerning the whole church. But even at their most bombastic and badly behaved, earlier popes would have hesitated to do
Even before the government this week announced a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, the Tory leadership contenders were competing fiercely to establish their green credentials. Andrea Leadsom has vowed to declare a ‘climate emergency’. Rory Stewart has upgraded it to a ‘climate cataclysm’ and wants to double
Whatever the authorities in Beijing say, the anger on the streets of Hong Kong isn’t synthetic, nor is it stirred up by ‘foreign forces’. The serious, dedicated atmosphere of 2014’s umbrella protest, which lasted 79 days, is back, only this time with more violence. Of course, the vast majority of Hong Kongers won’t be personally
There are plenty of much-anticipated contests in the 2019 Cricket World Cup. But nothing to compare with this Sunday’s match at Old Trafford, where India are billed to play Pakistan in the latest epic in a rivalry that dates back to Partition in 1947. It’s a rivalry that is regularly punctuated by war. No cricket