Keir Starmer, Karl Marx and the cant of ‘working people’
Labour has promised that, come what may, they will not be increasing taxes on ‘working people’. Well, jolly good. Those…
Is it time to ban the boy band?
It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that ‘if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it…
Labour were right to protect Taylor Swift
Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its…
Sue Gray, Keir Starmer and the centre-left’s self-righteousness problem
‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha,…
The tragedy of Phillip Schofield
Robinson Crusoe on Mas a Tierra; Napoleon on Elba; Schofield on Nosy Ankarea. Island exile is an opportunity for man,…
Trump could teach Starmer a thing or two about speeches
The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be…
Why are you proud to be British?
Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose…
Why do the Starmers need a personal shopper?
Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that…
We should hunt down the companies responsible for Grenfell
I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath…
The expensive business of quoting poetry
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…
Charming and silly: Sam & Max – The Devil’s Playhouse reviewed
Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the…
The war on smokers has gone too far
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to…
In defence of Kirstie Allsopp
The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment.…
Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?
Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English
Can video games be funny?
Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often.…
What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’
There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of…
The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God
CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the…
It wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet. It was all of us
Hard not to think that that’s the election in the bag for The Donald. Surviving an assassination attempt was always…
Let’s give Keir a chance
I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going…
Keir Starmer channeled Obama in his first Downing Street speech
In his first speech from the Downing Street lectern, Sir Keir Starmer was setting out to reaffirm those qualities that…
Why is Putin really trying to interfere in the UK election?
Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand…
Michael Gove is right to compare the betting scandal to partygate
Poor old Rishi Sunak. You would have to have the proverbial heart of stone not to feel, at least, a…
The terrible consequences of the Hay Festival grandstanding
Just three weeks ago, I wrote about Hay Festival sacking their main sponsor Baillie Gifford after pressure from the campaign group…
