Tim Stanley

Tim Stanley is a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph and a contributing editor at the Catholic Herald. Tim Stanley’s Whatever Happened to Tradition? History, Belonging and the Future of the West is out now.

Would I die for Britain? No thanks

The West’s military posture has moved from ‘thick’ to ‘suicidal’. The recent speech of General Sir Patrick Sanders, the head of the British Army, in which he suggested that Britain needs a ‘citizens army’ to see off Russia, has forced the Government to deny that it wishes to introduce conscription – in advance of a

The Pope’s pursuit of relevance is embarrassingly outdated

The Pope is old and unwell. In whatever time he has left, he surveys his years as pontiff and counts only failure. What does he leave behind? Collapsing attendance, theological confusion, a few sentimental encyclicals and a positive meeting with Whoopi Goldberg. Francis called a synod and it gave him nothing. So, in a last

What have the Conservatives done for us?

Assuming this is the Conservative party’s last conference in power, I decided to investigate what kind of country they leave behind. Thirteen years on, are we richer, poor, happier or sadder? I started by asking MPs to name their biggest achievement. No one said ‘the economy’; Ukraine and Brexit were popular. Two replied: ‘Kept Labour

The lost shepherds

40 min listen

On the podcast this week: In his cover piece for the magazine, journalist Dan Hitchens examines whether Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis can heal the divisions threatening to tear apart the Church of England and the Catholic Church. He is joined by Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to ask whether these two men – once heralded as

The Union has no substance

It’s always useful to be told what we’re allowed to think. The news from the Kate Forbes leadership campaign is that you can’t make it in politics unless you swallow sex changes and celebrate same-sex marriage.  Fascinating. Especially since the former is actually very controversial – hence the backlash against the SNP’s gender ID reform

The Conservatives know they are beat

The mood at the Tory conference is grim to funereal, and for good reason. They know they’re beat. There’s a sense that something has changed in British politics and we ain’t going back. Labour is revived; the Tories are divided and unpopular. But it’s about more than just a 45p tax cut, which was a

Water woes: who’s to blame for the shortages?

39 min listen

In this week’s episode: Who’s to blame for the water shortages? James Forsyth, The Spectator’s political editor and Ciaran Nelson from Anglian Water join us to discuss the UK’s deteriorating water supply. (0.29) Also this week: Is it time for some old-fashioned Tory state-building? Tim Stanley from the Telegraph shares his vision for a Conservative

It’s time for Tory socialism

The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a low-tax auction, which is not a good thing. The implication is that the Conservatives think government should be minuscule at the very moment when private enterprise is letting us down – the energy companies are raking in cash and spending it on stock buybacks – and the

Baby doomers: why are couples putting the planet ahead of parenthood?

38 min listen

In this week’s episode: Why are a growing number of people putting the planet before parenthood? Madeleine Kearns writes about this phenomenon in this week’s issue and thinks that some of these fears might be unfounded. Tom Woodman author of Future is one of these people that Madeleine’s piece talks about. Tom has very real

Brexit has ended Thatcherism. And about time, too

A Conservative government is raising taxes to fund the NHS and telling business to pay its workers more. The world is upside down, and classical liberals are furious. Steve Baker, one of those MPs, tweeted a picture of a pile of books including Hayek, Popper and Von Mises and said ‘This is what we believe’,

How Labour wins

Labour can win the next election. The winds that blew apart their electoral coalition in 2019 can change in their favour; Brexit has destroyed old certainties but also made anything possible. The party needs first to analyse honestly what went wrong and then conjure up a new, yet old-fashioned progressivism to fix it. The most

Pope Francis is losing his culture war

Since I wrote about the Pope’s declaration of war on the Old Rite, something unexpected and beautiful has happened. Many bishops have held the line. Far from all: some have gleefully welcomed the opportunity to extinguish the pretty rite, and intellectual justification has come, predictably, from the Jesuits, who haven’t been sound since The Exorcist.

The Pope’s merciless war against the Old Rite

I am going to have to boil this down as crudely as I can, because it’s a complex subject with a simple message, but the Pope is attempting to make it as hard as possible to say, and thus attend, the Old Rite Mass. This is the form of Mass most Catholics went to before the

The banal presidency is back

One era ends; another begins. As J-Lo sang her patriotic wine bar set at Joe Biden’s inaugural in Washington DC, the outgoing president and his outgoing wife landed in Florida, Melania looking happy for the first time in four years because it was finally all over. Donald Trump’s refusal to attend the inauguration reminded me of

Should Trump be impeached?

32 min listen

Freddy Gray talks to historian and Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley about the crazy week in US politics that has just happened – they discuss whether there’s any point in impeaching Trump now; the importance of understanding exactly what happened on Wednesday; and what will happen to the Republican party after Trump.

Has Donald Trump already lost the election?

17 min listen

Joe Biden is well ahead of Donald Trump in the polls, but few are willing to say that the three-time presidential hopeful will win November’s election. Are commentators underplaying the Democrat’s chances? Freddy Gray speaks to Tim Stanley, historian and leader writer at The Telegraph.

How Republicans became the anti-Islam party

Ilhan Omar will come up a lot in the 2020 US election. She’s part of the ‘Democratic Squad’ of congresswomen that Republicans hate, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — but she outshines them all by being a foreign-born hijabi who supports boycotting Israel and is accused of immigration fraud. If Donald

Capitalism in America: A History

Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the book deals. Two impressive volumes illustrate both agreement and disagreement, both concurring that America represents the search for something — but the jury’s out as to precisely what. Capitalism

Father of the nation

Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it be known that he was reading a book about FDR, and tumbleweed blew through the newsrooms. Which is odd because for many decades FDR was every bit the model liberal as Ronald Reagan was the