Philip Collins

Cambridge in crisis, Trump’s wicked humour & the beauty of AI ceramics

53 min listen

This week: Decline and Fall – how our greatest universities are betraying students.Our greatest universities are betraying students, writes David Butterfield, who has just resigned from teaching Classics at Cambridge after 21 years. What went wrong? First, class lists of exam results became private, under alleged grounds of ‘data protection’, which snuffed out much of

From The Archives: Speeches that shape the world

28 min listen

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam’s conversation from 2017 with Philip Collins, former speech writer to Tony Blair, about his book When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape The

Would Starmer’s government have any cash to spend?

16 min listen

If Labour wins the next election, will Keir Starmer have any money to spend on his programme of government? In a piece for the Times yesterday, journalist Philip Collins says it won’t, and he thinks Labour is suffering because of this constraint. How can Labour be intellectually interesting if the government purse strings are so tight? Fraser