Matthew Parris

It’s been a torrid few weeks for anyone who knows anyone who was running in the London Marathon. In have come the emails sent by the sender to himself or herself, and BCC’d no doubt to a very long list of the sender’s friends: ‘I’m running the London Marathon on 21 April, for [insert name

Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a quaint term for that category of human beings who throughout history have been more assiduous than any other in trying to kill each other) have with skill and persistence deployed an argument of great potency. Such is

Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back

For my newspaper I wrote last week about the rocketing numbers (now more than nine million) of our fellow citizens who are ‘economically inactive’ (aged 16-64, unemployed but not seeking work). Within that category, a fast-growing number (nearly three million) are claiming a range of disability or sickness-related benefits, usually a PIP (personal independence payment).

Columnists get unsolicited free copies of new books, it often seems by almost every post. They frequently come as publishers’ ‘uncorrected proofs’, before publication day. Publicists are of course hoping we might mention the book in something we write, and often there’s a friendly note inviting us to provide a quote for the book-cover’s inside

‘If I’d known where it would take me I might never have started.’ This need not be an expression of regret. There are journeys where the final destination is best hidden from the traveller, due to the psychological difficulty he may have in embracing the future until we’re nearly there. This column will move on

The Covid Inquiry grinds on. The process is ‘too focused on office tittle-tattle’ says one former minister in my newspaper this morning. Possibly – though it may also be that the warped focus consists in the media reports filtering out the worthier but more boring stuff. The inquiry (say others) is too focused on the

Sorry Santa, but there’s no sugar-coating this: you’re eating too much. And it’s nobody’s fault but your own. Human beings have agency. You have it within your power to cut down. An excellent book written by restaurateur and policy adviser Henry Dimbleby, with his wife Jemima Lewis, sets out the figures. They’re shocking. In Ravenous:

It’s with triple reluctance that one disputes anything said or written by Jonathan Sumption. First, Lord Sumption is among the commentators I most admire, with an intellect against which it must be foolhardyto pit one’s own. Secondly, as a former Supreme Court justice, his legal expertise will be immense, whereas I only read law as

Abraham Lincoln’s ringing declaration echoes down the years. His 1863 Gettysburg Address, delivered 160 years ago this Sunday, gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’: a clear and simple formulation, it has come to be seen as the very definition of democracy. But Lincoln was wrong: wrong then and wrong

From abroad I’ve returned to a country where, in language to which the word ‘shrill’ hardly does justice, fellow British commentators have been letting fly on both sides of the argument about Gaza and how Israel should or should not respond to Hamas’s unspeakable attacks on 7 October. There’s just one thing both sides –

I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom handed down to us. Proverbs, adages and aphorisms (‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ says my dictionary) are recited to children by grown-ups, often in a singsong, holier-than-thou voice; and I couldn’t help