Opinion

With the very fabric of the country threatening to tear apart, ANDREW ADONIS outlines his bold vision to reconstitute, and revive the United Kingdom. Everyone knows that Attlee’s 1945 Labour government founded the NHS and the welfare state. It is less famous for founding Europe’s greatest federation, yet seven decades later this federal state is […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can speak […]

Rather than a reset can’t we just rewind by four years back to June 2016? With the departures of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain there has been much discussion of this being an opportunity for the PM to ‘reset’. Personally I would prefer a ‘rewind’, specifically to that point in June 2016, before we broke […]

He might have gone, but Dominic Cummings has left a poisonous legacy which will cause untold harm to the UK, says JAMES BALL. Pity poor Dominic Cummings, who entered Number 10 last year believing he could transform a nation, and exited last week having accomplished little more than a series of blundering encounters with the media […]

What the world craves now is some slightly more ‘precedented’ politics, says MITCH BENN. I don’t know about you, but I could really use some boredom right now. It’s pretty exhausting living in ‘unprecedented’ times, isn’t it? Every day something else unprecedented befalls us, whether it’s an unprecedented pandemic, an unprecedented level of chaos in the response […]

WILL SELF on a neighbourhood mystery that has been troubling him. What links Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda and James Joyce? They’re all ranged along Shakespeare and opposite Evelyn Grace. But who is or was Evelyn Grace? I don’t know – I phoned her eponymous Academy and the receptionist said: “Isn’t that something you’d research on […]

The theatrical resignation of the PM’s chief adviser takes ALASTAIR CAMPBELL back to a piece of advice given to him by Princess Diana in the 1990s. Let’s start with a couple of people who are good at their job, and then move on to the government. Emma Corrin is an actress. Peter Morgan is a writer, […]

Joe Biden is renowned for his experience in foreign policy – yet he has a far from unblemished record. BONNIE GREER reports on what the world can expect Anne Hidalgo, the first woman elected mayor of Paris always manages to catch the moment.  She came to London to congratulate Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim elected mayor […]

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 […]