Opinion

Liz Gerard’s question ‘Should we feel sorry for the PM?’ deserves a response. There is nothing about Boris Johnson and his premiership that can be commended. The Vote Leave regime that he leads is the architect of the hapless state of affairs in which we find ourselves and we haven’t even lived Brexit yet. He […]

The protections offered by the European Convention on Human Rights were hard fought. They now need our defending, says ROGER CASALE. It was seventy years ago this month – on November 4, 1950 – that the European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome. The ECHR was a remarkable achievement. Like it’s better known cousin, […]

DAVID BLUNKETT and MATTHEW FLINDERS warn that Dominic Cummings’ technocracy model for government lacks emotional and political understanding. They call for Boris Johnson to ditch it. If crises bring with them new opportunities to think afresh, then the combined impact of Brexit and COVID has been to focus attention on the capacity and structure of the […]

Greta Scacchi reveals her thoughts about Hollywood and how she retained her self-respect at all times. You could be forgiven for thinking that before the Me Too movement began to get traction three years ago, men in Hollywood had behaved impeccably towards women. That of course is arrant nonsense and Greta Scacchi was one of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the lost links that gave us surnames like Nelson, Hobson, Hodgson and Dodgson. There are not too many men about nowadays who are called Peter, but those of us who do still bear this name are quite liable to get called Pete, especially by family and friends.  In the same way, women […]

William Hogarth exposed the chaos, hypocrisy, corruption and pollution of the world around him. A new exhibition showcases his work and that of contemporary artists performing similar tasks in their own society. The first image to greet the visitor to the exhibition, Hogarth: London Voices , London Lives is a photograph of a block of […]

Geoffrey Howe – the story behind the greatest Commons speech ever made. The most memorable thing about Sir Geoffrey Howe was how unmemorable he was. Margaret Thatcher’s most decorated cabinet colleague – he was her chancellor, foreign secretary and deputy prime minister – had many qualities but charisma wasn’t one of them. Hence Denis Healey’s […]

Roy Jenkins – the man that helped Britain join the European Community. This week sees the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roy Jenkins, one of the outstanding British statesmen of the post-war period. He was one of the greatest reforming home secretaries in history, arguably the most successful chancellor of the exchequer since the […]

The two films – and a TV show – that helped make conspiracy theories mainstream. So let’s recap. This virus that you’re all so scared of isn’t actually real, just a flammed-up cold that’s been exaggerated to enslave the easily-led. But if it is real, then it was cooked up in a government laboratory either […]

As Boris Johnson attempts a pivot to Joe Biden his time is running out. It may be time to dig out that line of Kipling in which the imperial poet, almost certainly an instinctive Brexiteer, tells us all to beware “those two imposters”, triumph and disaster. Yes, it looks as if an effective Covid-19 vaccine […]

The election of Joe Biden is a rare moment of opportunity for British advocates of internationalism to help cement the president-elect’s world view. The moment will be short-lived. The news agenda will move on and the Bannon/Cummings right will regroup and chip away at the new White House. Now is the time for Keir Starmer, […]

Even when he is finally turfed out of the White House, the US president will likely remain a toxic figure in US politics and society, says JAMES BALL In the weeks immediately following a US election, coverage typically turns to the future. Who might the incoming president look to for his – it’s always been […]

For liberals, good news has been a long time coming. So don’t feel inhibited about celebrating two key moments, says IAN DUNT. There’s been some kind of glitch in the Matrix. We seem to have ended up in a tolerable reality. When we woke up last Wednesday morning, things were operating as normal. Joe Biden looked […]

Joe Biden’s triumph is a source of great celebration, but it also adds to the sadness I feel about the UK’s self-imposed decline, says ALASTAIR CAMPBELL  Sometimes, it is in emotion that deep truth is spoken. Anyone who, like me, was glued to CNN from Tuesday to Saturday last week, will have seen such a moment […]

Playwright BONNIE GREER on what she is learning about herself, and society, from the year of lockdowns On a recent appearance on Question Time, I mentioned that my husband and I had not been together since he decided to check in on his place in France at the end of February. The lockdown came soon after that, […]

Readers have their say on how politicians can be more in touch with the people they represent. What a splendid idea by Nick Roberts to make MPs go on annual ‘life experience’ in order to keep them connected to the communities they represent. Another idea worth trying is one of term limits. MPs in safe […]

MITCH BENN on why he would almost be as bad as Boris Johnson. There’s a very useful expression which succinctly encapsulates the difference between the concepts of knowledge and wisdom. As is sometimes the case with such modern aphorisms, I’ve heard a few different versions of it, and I’m not sure with whom the phrase […]

John Kampfner, author of the much discussed Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country and a regular contributor to The New European, has written in the New Statesman that “monolingualism is one of the enduring motifs of British mediocrity”.  It is hard to query the basic accuracy of his observation, but we should probably […]

Labour has long been seen as a party of factions, while the Tories just had ‘tendencies’. But, asks TIM BALE, are the Conservatives now also splintering?  ‘You’re joking. Not another one!’ – not just Brenda from Bristol in the spring of 2017, reacting to Theresa May calling a snap election, but also Tim Bale (whose […]

In a deeply personal essay, writer PETER GUMBEL explains how the waning of national identities, combined with Brexit, has led him to reassess his own sense of who he is. November 9 is a day heavy with significance for my family: on that date in 1938, my maternal grandfather was arrested in his German hometown […]

STEVE ANGLESEY on how it doesn’t matter if Trump is in The White House in January as the intolerance, rage and loathing he has boiled up will remain. Everyone was surprised but them. As America’s election headed to VAR with the pollsters having got it wrong again, members of a British pro-Trump group on Facebook had […]

While all countries are grappling with coronavirus, France is also facing another profound crisis. JASON WALSH reports As France hunkers down for its latest coronavirus confinement, or lockdown – announced last week by Emmanuel Macron – the country knows it is heading into a period of unease, angst, economic devastation and death. And yet the […]

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL on how the UK government shows contempt of near Trumpian levels. Needless to say, the government’s fabled miscommunications team got itself into all sorts of muddles over its reaction to the Sunday Times’ revelation that the chair of the UK’s ‘vaccine task force’ briefed American venture capitalists on details of which projects the government was […]

MICHAEL WHITE on the growing twin nightmares of authoritarianism and incompetence in the week arch-opportunist Nigel Farage returns to frontline politics. Whatever the final outcome it was clear within hours of the polls closing that the result of the US election has not been the decisive repudiation of the Trump Era for which progressive opinion […]

CATHRIN SCHAER on the latest European country coming to terms with an atrocity. This week’s terror attack in Vienna was the first in the Austrian capital since 1981, when Palestinian gunmen stormed its main synagogue and killed two people. Monday evening’s atrocity was also the most murderous, resulting in four deaths and more than a […]

LIZ GERARD is second to no one in her criticisms of Boris Johnson. Yet for all his manifest failings, she cannot help feel some sympathy for his current predicament. But when anger starts turning to pity, how long can a prime minister last? At what point does anger turn to pity? Do we rediscover our essential […]

America’s battered and bruised democracy has taken another beating. And that means pain for the rest of the world, says JOHN KAMPFNER. A month or so before the US election, European officials were under no illusions. They were wargaming scenarios around legal challenges and civil disobedience in the event of Joe Biden securing the votes […]

JAMES BALL gives his initial analysis on the US election as the results pour in.  In Hamilton – a musical many of us have watched and rewatched during our pandemic confinement – there is a moment shortly after America wins its war of independence when an aghast and outright baffled King George III has one […]

SIMON USHERWOOD on the new defining issue in British politics. In the autumn of 1991, a meeting was held in London. Convened by a lecturer at the London School of Economics, it resulted in a commitment by a cross-party group of individuals to stand in elections to protest at the big expansion of powers of […]

Dear America, We all know Trump’s only campaign tactic is to stop people voting. He doesn’t want you to vote, because he knows that if you do, he will lose. He won four years ago because people that didn’t like Trump and didn’t like Clinton, stayed at home. You cannot afford to stay at home, […]

The brilliant neurologist-cum-writer Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Musicophilia in which he explored his own great passion for music through the lens of scientific detachment. The work is full of delights – not least Sacks’s unpicking of the troubling phenomenon of the ‘earworm’, or tune we cannot purge from our brains. The explanation? Invariably […]

Charlie Connelly on the perils and pitfalls of a much-missed fixture of the literary scene… the book signing. Last week something happened that felt like a communication from a different age: I was asked to appear at a literary festival. It’s not until next year and “obviously a lot of the details are TBC depending on […]