A confession: I have never read Karl Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. I don’t have a noble excuse for not having done so, just bone idleness. Nonetheless, I have Wikipedia, a penchant for clichés and a horror at the evolving Labour leadership race. If the fall of Boris Johnson was a tragedy for […]
Last Friday morning, there was a palpable sense that Britain was having a nervous breakdown. The abominable Greens had stormed to victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election; in Parliament Square, the statue of Winston Churchill had been defaced with graffiti branding the Greatest Briton a ‘Zionist war criminal’ and calling for the globalisation of […]
There is something endearingly ridiculous about Matt Goodwin. The gamekeeper turned poacher of national populism is like the Alan Partridge of political studies: self-important but not self-aware and in a relentless pursuit of self-promotion. He was responsible, during his (very) brief time as a ConservativeHome columnist, for the funniest article that I have ever edited. […]
Au revoir, auf wiedersehen, goodbye – Morgan McSweeney has departed Downing Street. But no Irish goodbye for this son of Cork. Instead, the Prime Minister’s ex-chief of staff’s exit from Number 10 threatens to bring the whole Starmer project down with it – a house that McSweeney built, and remained the central pillar in, far […]
I am a man (well, boy) with many awful habits. I bite my fingernails. I forget to make my bed. I file copy desperately close to deadlines, don’t brush my hair and haven’t called my grandmother half as many times as I should have done. But among all these egregious Atkinson sins, there is one […]
For many of my fellow Conservatives – all five of us – Angela Rayner’s ongoing tax travails have brought a deep sense of satisfaction. Since her election as Labour’s Deputy Leader five years ago, Rayner has been the Tory bête noire – the class enemy writ large, Aneurin Bevan in a power suit, who happily […]
Like Lieutenant Frank Drebin, I am a great lover of a well-stuffed beaver. Until a decade ago, the medium of taxidermy was the simplest route by which one could see a Eurasian beaver in England. Castor fiber were hunted to extinction for their fur, meat and scent glands – originally used in castor oil, hence […]
Some things in life are inevitable: death, taxes, and Dominic Cummings branding the latest leader of the Conservative Party a ‘complete useless dud’. When asked about the current plight of a party with which he has a tangled past, the Machiavelli of Durham was far from complimentary. The Tories are ‘intellectually dead’. Their new leader, […]
As any young right-winger who spends a little too long on Twitter will tell you, the struggle of Nick (30 ans) is the struggle of our age. The social contract is fixed against him. His pay is meagre after the rent for his Zone 4 flat; his ever-growing tax burden goes to subsidise the housing […]
In the recent debate on Britain’s hideous and historic rape gang scandal, Jess Phillips has played the unwitting part of Gavrilo Princip. I have mixed feelings about Phillips. Her buddy cop routine with Jacob Rees-Mogg was charming. Her commitment to helping victims of domestic and sexual violence is long-standing and noble, with her appointment to […]
It can be a struggle to take Ed Davey seriously. The Liberal Democrat leader’s choice of arriving at his party’s seaside conference via jet ski reminded me of Jeremy Thorpe’s ill-fated attempt to tour Britain by hovercraft. The heir of William Gladstone and David Lloyd George devotes as much attention to publicity stunts as his […]
They’re not laughing now. On his eighth attempt, Nigel Farage is now an MP. Reform UK won over 4 million voters and delivered 5 MPs, and came second in 98 seats. A fragile Labour landslide, a grim inheritance, and a bleak international picture: could these enable a 2029 Reform breakthrough – taking Farage where Giorgia […]
Do I owe Boris Johnson an apology? Having backed him twice in 2019, I was apathetic about his premiership, embarrassed by his fall, and critical of his ongoing mystic hold over certain Conservatives. But last night he reminded us Bojo-sceptics of his finer qualities which Rishi Sunak, alas, does not share. Our ex-Prime Minister (but […]
I like Nigel Farage. This is not a new habit, prompted by his popularity with ConservativeHome readers (of which I am Assistant Editor) or his willingness to have me on his show. It is long-standing. Somewhere in the dark armpits of the internet exists a picture of my fourteen-year-old self in a UKIP rosette I […]
What to make of yesterday’s announcement that single-sex loos will become a compulsory requirement for all new restaurants, bars, offices, and shopping centres? The change to building regulations will come in later this year. Gender neutral lavatories have become increasingly common – not just ‘because of woke’, but because they are easier to provide than […]
Rishi Sunak’s commitment to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030 is long overdue. In his words, our defence industry must be put on ‘war footing’ in an ‘increasingly dangerous world’. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s machinations in the Middle East and China’s covetousness towards Taiwan, the global outlook is more threatening […]
One glance at the opinion polls will tell you ‘Popular Conservatism’ is something of an oxymoron. That is especially true when such a movement is promoted by Liz Truss: the shortest-serving and perhaps least self-reflective Prime Minister in our history. Notwithstanding her own culpability for the Tories’ dire position, the ex-PM remains active, unrepentant, and […]
Jeremy Hunt opened his Budget by announcing £1m towards a national memorial to the 750,000 Muslims who fought for Britain in the world wars. Reflecting on the ‘tragic loss of life in Israel and Gaza’ and the ‘need to fight extremism and heal divisions’, the Chancellor said Britain would honour those who died ‘in the […]
‘I’m afraid of Americans/I’m afraid of the world’. So sang David Bowie. Having seen a McDonald’s spring up whilst travelling in Java, the great ‘Starman’ felt a profound sense of revulsion at our neighbours across the pond. This is not, alas, a sentiment shared by our politicians, who can’t seem to get enough of Old […]
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a formative political moment for a generation of liberty-lovers. As East and West Germans merrily smashed their way through the symbol of their division, liberal democracy and free-market capitalism seemed to have totally triumphed over authoritarian socialism. As the late great P.J. O’Rourke put it, a ‘huge totalitarian […]
