I probably shouldn’t start my Sunday mornings by looking at Twitter, but that’s what I did yesterday. It’s how I saw the news that drone strikes had taken down a massive chunk (half, according to...

The BBC’s most interesting news programme is broadcast just once a year. It’s Radio 4’s Correspondents’ Look Ahead — in which a group of the Corporation’s finest get together to anticipate the events...

Drop what you’re doing and read this: it’s one of the important pieces of opinion research this year. Entitled Britain’s Choice, and published by More in Common, it doesn’t analyse Britain by...

How Rishi Sunak could remodel capitalism — and save the economy

Now that the great vaccine roll-out has begun, I can reveal its active ingredient: sour grapes. At least, that’s the impression you get reading Fintan O’Toole’s column in The Guardian. According to...

A whole generation has been terribly misled about how best to pursue a life of meaning and resilience

Highly recommended: an eye-opening, heart-breaking tweet thread from Create Streets entitled ‘the world we’ve lost’. It is dedicated to the landmark buildings that were destroyed during the 20th...

It’s been suggested that England is the only country “where the people feel Schadenfreude towards themselves”.  I don’t know if that’s generally true of either the English (or the British as a...

Dame Alison Rose was doomed from the moment that the NatWest Group board expressed “full confidence” in her as CEO. The context was her own admission that she’d “made a serious error of judgement” in...

The Mail on Sunday “can reveal” that “campaigning football star Marcus Rashford has bought five luxury homes worth more than £2million.” There was no direct allegation of hypocrisy in the article,...

To fail a test as big as Covid has existential implications for Europe

Anthony Fauci — America’s recently retired Covid supremo — has played an influential role in the debate over the how the pandemic started. Though he’s previously claimed to have an open mind as to...

Pennies are dropping all over Labour-land. They’ve finally realised that they’re not running against Thatcherism anymore, but a very different kind of Conservative Party. Here’s Owen Jones making the...

I’ve never had any illusions about the nature of the Chinese regime, but I used to think that constructive engagement was the best policy. Not anymore. Not after the Covid cover-up, or the crushing...

Today’s state funeral brings an end to the official mourning period. It has also brought an end to The Queue — perhaps the most extraordinary of all the tributes paid to Elizabeth II over the last...

One might expect the Governor of California to praise his state at every opportunity. But here’s what he had to say last week: “What the hell is going on? We look like a third world country.” It...

The new political correctness hasn't the power to overwhelm our existing order

There are those who’d like Emily Maitlis to shut up. But not me. For a start, she no longer works for the BBC and is therefore free to speak her mind. This isn’t just her right, it’s also genuinely...

It's Davos Man — rather than conspiracy theorists — you should be worried about

With so much happening in Europe right now, yesterday’s news from Denmark hasn’t quite got the attention it deserves. The gist of it is this: the Danish government is proposing to limit the share of...

Very few private individuals have had a bigger impact on the global fight against the Covid pandemic than Bill Gates. Through the work of his foundation, the tech billionaire is a major player. What...

The vaccine debacle is a sign of the EU's future direction

A Land Value Tax would help pay for the Covid crisis — and give more people the chance to own a home

Maria Ressa is a brave woman. Best known for her campaigning journalism against Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian government in her native Philippines, she has defied arrest and the threat of a long...

Evil does not matter to a movement that only cares about itself

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Davos week! This is when the global elites gather together under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the rest of us get to bask in their...

My podcast recommendation of the week is Tyler Cowen’s conversation with historian Niall Ferguson. The whole interview is worth a listen, but the most intriguing bit comes right at the end. Ferguson...

It's time for London to take back control

A year of Covid has crushed the texture from our lives. For the millions of working-from-home-workers, life is especially flat. One day is much like the next — the same surroundings, the same people,...

She is proof longevity doesn't lead to success

These five principles will enable society to recover from the excesses of liberalism

A pipeline of natural gas from Russia to the West is also, in effect, a pipeline of money from the West to Russia. Neither side can cut off supplies to the other side without cutting itself off. ...

Oil shocks crash economies and enable enemies

New research from the United States confirms a worrying trend — a long-term decline in IQ scores. In cruder terms, Americans are getting dumber every year. According to a report in Popular Mechanics,...

Dominic Cummings has hinted at a bold new direction for the Government

Six years ago, a distinguished American oncologist published an essay in The Atlantic. In ‘Why I Hope to Die at 75’ Dr Ezekiel J. Emanuel argued that for most people “creativity, originality and...

Quiet capitulation is its greatest failure

Once again Donald Trump has defied expectations. In proving the pollsters and pundits spectacularly wrong, he’d be a position to present a narrow advantage in the Electoral College not as a win, but...

Meghan, Harry and Oprah? Don’t waste your time — the real interview of the week was Freddie Sayers’ conversation with the deep green thinker (and doer) Paul Kingsnorth. It’s well worth an hour of...

A future in which young people cannot buy homes is a bigger threat to capitalism than Gove's rent reforms.

In the dim and distant days before word processing, editors used to wield a blue pencil to make changes to copy. Hence the universal symbol of censorship: to ‘blue pencil’ a piece of text means to...

Compared to their continental counterparts Brits have been slow to return to the workplace. Or to be more exact, Londoners have. That’s according to research from Morgan Stanley quoted in a Bloomberg...

A shocking number of influential Britons used to think it necessary to wipe out 'inferior' citizens