Inauguration Day is here again, and what a difference four years makes. Trump is back, and Trump’s version of conservatism looks like it has a future in a way that once seemed unimaginable. On Inauguration Day four years ago, I had just moved to America. Back then, it was Britain’s conservatism that looked like the […]
‘How could they! How can millions of Americans vote for Donald Trump?!’ Being a Brit who has made my home in America, I am often asked this kind of question by friends back home, where according to a recent opinion poll, over 70% of people had an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Instead of asking why […]
The saga over Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s former Chief of Staff, is finally over. Forced out by rival Downing Street courtiers, Gray looks destined for well-deserved obscurity. If the briefings are to be believed, this ruthless decision by Keir Starmer is evidence that he is going to ‘get a grip’. The chaos of the […]
The next round of EU-UK negotiations have begun. Now Britain has left the EU, the aim of these new talks is to work out what kind of relationship we will have once the transition period ends in ten months time. Given their opening position, it’s clear that the EU thinks these talks are about the […]
Now we have left the EU, is Britain going to be a serious state? If we are, then we need to recognise that self-government is not enough. Britain needs to get serious about statecraft. That means deciding what core capabilities we need as a nation. A serious state would not, to pick one recent example, […]
When Britain reasserts her right of self-government at the end of this month, she will be doing so at an extraordinarily auspicious moment in history. The world around us is undergoing rapid growth. Remarkable advances in technology are underway, particularly in digital and biotech. The general condition of human kind has been elevated almost everywhere. […]
“My Government’s priority” the Queen told us yesterday “is to deliver the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union”. Let that sink in. For years, those of us who advocated leaving the EU were frequently demonised by the mainstream media. We were, it was routinely implied, extremist – indeed, xenophobic! – for wanting Britain to […]
Spare a thought today for Hugh Grant. Having got involved in the election campaign by urging us to vote to stop Brexit – along with former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major, as well as assorted celebrities such as Steve Coogan and Eddie Izzard – he will have now woken up to the realisation […]
The big loser in this election campaign so far is not any party but television broadcasting. Presented with an opportunity to inform us about some of the policy differences between Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, the TV producers have made a mess of it. The leadership ‘debate’ hosted by ITV managed to […]
There’s not much bold about the Conservative’s 2019 manifesto, we keep being told. It is, suggest the pundits, anodyne and unambitious. Really? The opening paragraph alone promises to take Britain out of the European Union within the next ten weeks. Having spent much of my adult life campaigning for precisely that, I found myself doing […]
It’s election time, and the twists and turns of the campaign are being reported all around us. Last week Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour party, announced he was standing down. Then there was ongoing speculation about a possible pact between the Conservatives and the Brexit party. We even had a debate about what […]
As public relations campaigns go, it could hardly be much worse. At the start of a crucial week in the great Brexit battle, the campaign group set up to fight for a re-run of the referendum, the so-called People’s Vote, is fighting itself. Over the weekend, Tom Baldwin, the campaign’s head of communications, was apparently […]
Do you know much about Dar es Salaam? Perhaps you might only be vaguely aware of this remote coastal city in Tanzania. But by the time your grandchildren are your age, more people will live there than in all of France. Population growth in Africa means that a whole load of places we currently consider […]
The outcome of every General Election, we are always told, is critical. And for those politicians whose names are on the ballot papers, you can see why they might say that. But what about for the rest of us? Was the 1992 or the 2005 General Election really that important? Had say, John Major lost […]
‘Boris has bungled it!’ they scoff. ‘He’s made an absolute mess of everything’ various pundits imply. Among the opinion-forming classes it has become common wisdom that it is all starting to unravel – not just for Boris Johnson’s unapologetically pro-Brexit administration, but for the Brexit project itself. Are they right? Things certainly haven’t been easy. […]
What, ministers asked their civil servants, might happen if the UK were to leave the EU without a deal? What would be the best and the worst-case scenarios? So off their civil servants went, preparing a report which outlined precisely that; the best and worst case as to what might happen. This report into the […]
I know all about switching to insurgent Eurosceptic parties. Almost exactly five years ago to the day, I left the Conservative Party – and a safe 12,000 majority seat in Parliament – to stand for UKIP in a by-election. If your overarching objective is to get Britain out of the EU, switching to UKIP made […]
Britain doesn’t just have a new Prime Minister. Yesterday’s Cabinet reshuffle makes it clear that we now have a new government, with a very different set of priorities. The composition of the Cabinet tells us a lot about Boris Johnson’s attitude towards an election. Faced with the narrowest of majorities in the House of Commons, […]
Unless there’s an extraordinary upset in the Tory leadership election, Boris Johnson will become Prime Minister next week. What kind of government are we going to get? Could this be the start of something extraordinarily significant, a pivotal moment in our history, like the formation of the Attlee government in July 1945 or Margaret Thatcher’s […]
Unless Britain joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, they once said, it would face economic instability. So we duly joined the ERM. But instead of stability, pegging our currency to those of our neighbours meant we endured an economic boom-bust cycle, with interest rates raised to an eye-watering 15 percent. A decade later, we were […]
