Category: 8. Columns

My esteemed colleague who last week was bemoaning BBC announcers’ pronunciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s film A Bout de Souffle has a new grouse, one that I heartily share. His home town is being disrupted by roadworks and the accompanying “signage” (signs?). The one that particularly irks him proclaims “Footway is closed”. What, he asks, happened […]

So this is what a Liz Truss foreign policy, freed from the constraints of EU membership, looks like. She may be unworried – perhaps even pleased – that her consideration of transferring the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has appalled the Palestinians. She should perhaps be more nervous about the impact on Britain’s […]

‘Do you want Total War?” Goebbels demanded of the Nazi faithful as the Second World War went south for Germany in 1943. He depicted a Reich surrounded by evil Jewish cosmopolitan conspirators bent on its destruction and he advocated for total mobilisation and to embrace a glory-in-death ideology. Vladimir Putin delivered his own (partial) version […]

Boris who? Theresa who? David who? The names escape her. Rishi who? Philip who? George who? The names elude him. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, the devil-may-care duo of Downing Street, declare themselves an audacious break with the failed orthodoxies of the past and bold heralds of a new era for Britain. After the chancellor […]

In the second week of December 1978, between 1 and 2 million people marched peacefully through Tehran calling for the Shah to leave. Around a fifth to almost a half of the city’s population was on the streets. The CIA, warily watching opposition in a key regional ally and client for US arms, noted that […]

‘The ‘woke’ outlook on national identity, national sentiment and immigration now tends to be the more popular”; and “whereas it might once have represented a widespread view, now the ‘anti-woke’ position on ‘culture war’ issues often appear to be more of a minority one.” It’s a striking conclusion from psephologist and political scientist Sir John […]

Winston Churchill wasn’t immortalised on British screens until five years after his death. The Profumo affair took a quarter of a century to dramatise. But the rate at which politics is appropriated by showbusiness – prosthetics obscuring the traditional difference between the two – is rather faster these days. On Wednesday, we’ll get This England, […]

Britain is on the cusp of a financial crisis. On Friday, the prime minister, Liz Truss, and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, comically parading false claims of their toughness, elected for the softest of economic options. In a “mini-budget” – an obvious misnaming to avoid presenting elementary fiscal arithmetic required by law for a proper budget […]