Features

Welcome to Scuzz Nation

Reform’s success in last week’s local elections has been attributed to many causes. Labour’s abolition of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. The hollowing out of the Conservative party’s campaigning base. Nigel Farage’s mastery of social media. But if you want an emblem of why voters turned their back on the political establishment let me

What does Putin want? Whatever he can get away with

The US general Mark Clark knew a thing or two about dealing with Russians. In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Clark commanded the American occupying forces in Austria. His Soviet opposite number, and nominal ally, was Marshal Ivan Konev. The two war heroes were tasked with pacifying the conquered and divided country

The secrets of ‘God’s influencer’

Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a

AI killed the Easter Bunny

On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my remaining time to things I could properly understand. Then I discovered that one of my own copyrighted properties, the fruit of a year’s work, had been scraped into the AI maw without so much as

The creeping Dubai-ification of London

In December 2023, a TikTok influencer called Maria Vehera opened a packet of ‘Dubai chocolate’ in her car and filmed herself eating it. Since then, 124.6 million people have watched her swallowing this pistachio-based gloop. Oh Maria, what have you done? A butterfly flaps its wings – or an influencer eats some chocolate – and

Ian Williams

How China bought Britain

Somewhere in the bowels of the Foreign Office, civil servants are still working on the government’s ‘China audit’. The report was commissioned by the new Labour government to ‘assess trade-offs in the UK-China relationship’ and to ‘ensure consistency across government, business and academia towards engagement with China’. Little is known about its workings or who’s

Freddy Gray

Trump’s big gambles are paying off

‘I run the country and the world,’ said President Donald Trump last week. That’s not really an exaggeration. In our ever more mediatised age, Trump doesn’t just make the news. He is the news, win or lose. Why did Mark Carney triumph in the Canadian elections? A Trump backlash. What happened at the Pope’s funeral?

Why won’t Hitler conspiracies die?

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who

We should be excited about signs of alien life

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally

Long live the long lunch!

I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Waterhouse, that magnificent chronicler of Fleet Street’s liquid lunches and disappearing afternoons, understood what modern efficiency cultists cannot: that civilisation is measured not by what we produce but by how elegantly we pause. His

Middle-class parents are creating a new breed of brat

I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time. One of them looked up from his screen as we entered the room, faintly curious about the intrusion. The other, with his back to us and his face obscured by a hoodie, didn’t bother. My

Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump

It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language, and a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States. America is a very different country to the four Commonwealth realms sometimes brigaded together under the ugly acronym ‘Canzuk’.

Damian Thompson

The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope

At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta. Two hours earlier, Pope Francis ‘è tornato alla casa del Padre’ – ‘had returned to the house of the Father’. Most people won’t have noticed a curious detail: the cardinal

Melanie McDonagh

Pope Francis had his priorities right

After Pope Francis emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, a reflection attributed to him a few years ago returned to circulation. It was on ‘hospital’. Some of it was the usual, about how it’s where like meets unlike (‘In intensive care you see a Jew taking care of a racist’ etc). Some

How I found Christianity

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs,