Nigel Jones is a historian and journalist
We writers generally live dull and boring lives, tied to our desks painfully wresting words out of mundane experiences: not so Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86. Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of his bestselling thrillers Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of
These days almost everyone you meet is a member of a gym, and instead of attending church every week – as they did in days gone by – they make regular visits to these temples of the body beautiful: the new religion of our times. Yet despite these obligatory bouts of body worship, the general
The sudden resignation of Reform UK’s chairman Zia Yusuf came as a shock in Westminster yesterday – but is unlikely to do the party much lasting damage. Yusuf, 38, a successful businessman and a former Goldman Sachs banker, said in a terse and huffy statement that working for the election of a Reform government was
It is an axiom of political debate that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have definitely lost the argument. That golden rule seems to have escaped the notice of the Attorney General Lord Hermer, who, in a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank did just that. Hermer,
Reform is now touching 30 per cent in the polls, as Labour lags on 22 per cent and the Tories trail on just 15 per cent. As such, the insurgent party must prepare for more frenzied attacks from the old parties whose dominance it now seriously threatens. Is Nigel Farage’s party ready to face the
I was belatedly baptised last week in the Church of England, and though Christians are enjoined to show compassion to sinners and forgive them their trespasses, my eyes do not fill with tears at the plight of 18-year-old Bella May Culley from Middlesbrough. Bella currently finds herself in Prison No. 5 in the Georgian capital,
The relentless rise of the populist right in Europe has been confirmed by provisional first results of elections held yesterday in three different countries: Poland, Portugal and Romania. In Poland, there will be a run-off in the second round of the presidential election. This is after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centre-left candidate close to the Civic Coalition
Eighty-five years ago, on 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden, newly-appointed secretary of war in Winston Churchill’s government, went on the radio to appeal for volunteers to join a newly formed defence militia to guard against a German invasion. Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, this force later became the Home Guard, immortalised on our TV
Rupert Lowe must currently be the most frustrated man in British politics. The MP has been exonerated of accusations brought against him by Reform, yet his political career appears to be over. The police have said that there is insufficient evidence to justify proceeding with charges after leaders of his old Reform party accused the
Two of the top ten stories on the BBC news feed yesterday concerned the travails of leading rap and hip hop stars in different kinds of trouble in the United States. In one case, the 55-year-old rap singer Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs – one of the biggest names in the business – is on trial in
The attack on a prison officer by Axel Rudakubana, the killer of the three girls at a dance class in Southport in 2024, has revived calls for a restoration of capital punishment, as many ask why he is serving a 52-year jail term at huge public expense, rather than have been put to death at
The news that First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Ben Key, the head of the Royal Navy, has stepped down from his job while claims of an alleged affair with a junior female officer are investigated, have come as a shock. The armed forces have been relatively free of the sex scandals that have become so common in
I have never been a big fan of my own name. The name ‘Nigel’ has romantic origins – it means ‘dark champion’ in Celtic lore and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle titled one of his dashing medieval historical novels Sir Nigel. But by the time of my birth the name had become indelibly associated with cerebrally
President Donald Trump has again demonstrated his less than impressive grasp of history with a statement on his Truth Social site on the 80th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe – claiming that the US ‘did more than any other country by far’ to win the global
Though local polls and by-elections are notoriously unreliable guides to general elections, and a week is indeed a long time in politics, what happened at last week’s local elections could portend one of the greatest changes in our political system in over a century: the permanent presence of Reform UK, and consequently the demise of
By officially classing the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as ‘right-wing extremists’, the German establishment may have scored an own goal – or even shot itself in the foot. The domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), announced its decision today after keeping the insurgent party under close observation –
The Turquoise typhoon that is Reform UK has swept through the English council and mayoral elections – and winning by just six votes the first by-election of this Parliament in Runcorn and Helsby, hitherto in Labour’s 50 safest seats. As Labour narrowly held off the Reform challenge in closely fought mayoral contests in the West of England,
Next week, after Francis’s funeral, the College of Cardinals will assemble in Rome to choose the man who will lead their Church through these increasingly troubled times. That gathering has become more familiar to a wider, non-Catholic public thanks to the recent films Conclave and The Two Popes – though these are far from the
I blame The Spectator. The chain of events that has led me to be christened and confirmed in the Anglican Church began with an article I wrote for Spectator Life in January. I had spent New Year’s Eve with a friend, a former vicar, who had lost his faith and honourably resigned his living as
Most writers – like the vast majority of actors, artists and other luminaries of our culture – belong to the political left, but the death aged 89 of the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa reminds us that this is not always the case. Most unusually for a Latin American author, Vargas Llosa, who won
