Opinion

A long time ago (2004 to be precise) in a galaxy far away (but not that far away) a young right winger established a think tank (as almost everyone was doing at the time). The right winger was called Dominic Cummings and the short-lived think tank was portentously titled the New Frontiers Foundation. All of […]

Never mind the polls in the race for the White House, a new survey shows a more complex picture of America’s deeper fault lines. The bitter polarisation of the American election is only too obvious. For many of us, the contours of the battle are clear: in one corner, Joe Biden: a decent, moderate candidate […]

The world knows by now that Kamala Devi Harris, the junior senator from California and number two at the top of the Democrats’ electoral ticket this election cycle, was born in October 1964 to a Jamaican father and a Tamil Nadu mother. Both were immigrants and both were PhDs. Her babyhood was spent being taken […]

Piers Morgan is one of those Marmite characters people tend either to love or to hate. My relationship with him is more complicated, and can and does veer between the two. One of the things that is often said of him, and of me, is that we have strong opinions, never change them, and always […]

Believe it or not, I try not to yield too often to the temptation to join the dots between the stance politicians took on Brexit to the ones they now advocate on the appropriate government response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a bit mean, especially to voters in deprived areas who voted Leave in […]

Other than the group of shrieking conspiracy theorists who tried to break into the German parliament the other weekend after an anti-lockdown protest went awry, it seems most Germans do actually trust their government.All around the world, the pandemic has raised questions about how much voters trust their leaders – and by international standards, the […]

When Boris Johnson announced Tier Three restrictions for the Liverpool City Region earlier this week it appeared that one of the longest running battles in British politics had been brutally re-opened: The Tory party versus Merseyside. The Region’s mayor Steve Rotheram rejected the suggestion that he had agreed with government plans to lockdown saying the […]

A week is a long time in politics. In this Covid crisis – it’s a lifetime. Or more accurately, it’s the difference between life and death. Tragically, this government’s inability to act swiftly has led to untold thousands of deaths. They dithered in March. And now we know if Boris Johnson had instructed the full […]

Let me be very clear about this – what people on the ground are saying is that the response to our last collection of meaningless political cliches has been world-beating. These are not ordinary times and we are all in this together. So the fact of the matter is that here is another collection of […]

If the definition of insanity – apocryphally attributed to Einstein, though he never said it – is repeating the same thing and expecting different results, then the definition of idiocy must surely be facing an existential crisis and doing… nothing. Coronavirus was an international crisis in March and remains an international crisis seven months on. […]

The contenders are… NIGEL FARAGEThe nicotine-stained man-frog certainly knows a gap in the market when he sees one. Farage has been hinting he will soon revive the Brexit Party – because with only the Tories, UKIP and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim out there, the British people must be crying out for a right-wing grouping that hates […]

Rob Davidson of Trade Deal Watch looks at Boris Johnson’s Internal Market Bill and says the result of it will determine how history remembers the era of “Johnsonism”. The people of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland are about to pass a terrifying deadline set by our Prime Minister. Boris Johnson proclaimed that we should […]

Don’t expect to see the back of Boris Johnson any time soon, says one reader. Reports of Johnson’s early political demise may well titillate but I suspect are exaggerated and probably over-hopeful. I would be the first to admit that I read with relish how this most rubbish of prime ministers is on the skids. […]

Readers have their say on reports of a Tory war on the BBC. Peter York and Liz Gerard are very informative about the battle for the BBC (“The war on the BBC is real and organised”, “Blue sky blogs have BBC in their sights”, TNE #213). However, they did not touch on two aspects of […]

Readers have their say on Keir Starmer’s performance on Brexit and Europe. A lot of us are trying to get our heads round Keir Starmer’s “the debate between Leave and Remain is over” (it certainly isn’t) and “we are not going to be a party that keeps banging on about Brexit” (yes we are). We’re […]

DENIS MACSHANE on why Boris Johnson will end the Brexit transition period with a deal. 1) UK Brexit negotiator, Lord David Frost has been instructed to say UK will honour its European Convention/Court of Justice Human Rights obligations which Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in particular opposed as since 2010 he has called for UK withdrawal […]

I must confess that I do not normally read the angling section of my local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, but from time to time I do catch sight in its columns of the name wrasse. As many readers will know better than me, this word refers to a particular species of marine fish, some […]

Hounds chase foxes not out of any personal antipathy, but because it’s what their lords and masters train them to do. It was once a bit like this between Hugh Grant and me. The stand the actor has taken on media intrusion into people’s lives – including his own – meant he was considered to […]

Melburnians have a long history of outspokenness. The 1854 Eureka Rebellion of miners which led to an expansion of the electorate, the 1856 stonemasons’ march on parliament which resulted in the eight-hour day, and even the last stand of Ned Kelly, symbolic of defiance of the colonial authorities, are foundational events of the city’s history. […]

Many years ago now, I was on a panel at a sceptics’ conference with, among other luminaries, professor Richard Dawkins (it’s on YouTube if you look for it). Towards the end of the discussion we were asked if there could be a version of ‘God’ which we could find easier to believe in than those […]

The deadline for the post-Brexit trade talks between the EU and the United Kingdom UK looms, and with it concerns about a no-deal. The outcome is being closely monitored in South Africa – and elsewhere – where it will have significant implications. The EU as a regional bloc is South Africa’s largest trade partner, and […]

Nine writers from across the continent tell us what ‘Europe’ means to them… Ana Pessoa, Portuguese authorEurope is about multilingualism and multiculturalism. We might not speak the same language, we might not share the same cultural background. Perhaps we don’t laugh at the same jokes even and we live very different lives. But we share […]

Each year sees more books being published in English about the Nazis, but then, when it comes to post-1945 history, this flood of books about German history suddenly dries up. There are a few English language history books about Germany and the Cold War, but much fewer about the country’s politics in the immediate post-war […]

Winston Peters – leader of the New Zealand First party – has long been described as a populist, both in New Zealand and internationally. At different times during his career he has embraced the label. As he said recently, populism to him “means that you’re talking to the ordinary people and you’re placing their views […]

Dr Sean Conley, in one of his appearances outside the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center – where Donald Trump received his treatment for coronavirus – put his best diplomatic foot forward. What was the president’s mental fitness? We should look at ‘the tweets’ as a gauge, he replied. So I did. “Don’t be afraid […]

There are now fewer than 30 days left until the USA goes to the polls to select its next president: Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That polling day will come just two weeks after Trump should stop self-isolating to protect those around him from catching the deadly illness his White House admitted he’d contracted late […]

The past few months have been rocky for Franco-British cooperation on migration, with Priti Patel denouncing Channel crossings and the dire conditions of migrants living in the streets of Calais and other cities in northern France. A ‘Clandestine Channel Commander’, Dan O’Mahoney, has even been given the job of making the crossing route unviable for […]

China was the gift that kept on giving. What was there not to like about a country that was bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty and into the global consumer market? Certain human rights indiscretions might need to be mentioned, ever so politely, but Western governments, policy makers and business leaders saw China more […]

How did it come to this? We are a moderate nation; most of us stand somewhere around the centre politically. Get on with your life without too much interference from the state, work hard, pay your taxes, be tolerant, do what you can to help those worse off than yourself, create safety nets for the […]

As tighter lockdown looms, what does Donald Trump’s response to his coronavirus infection tell us about leadership in a crisis like this, his own and that of others stricken by illness at a crucial moment? How does it compare with Boris Johnson’s behaviour after he too succumbed as the pandemic took hold last spring? And […]

If your internal bullshit detector has been sleeping on the job lately, it’s time to wake up and smell Therese Coffey. Eyebrows were raised when the work and pensions secretary advised newly unemployed cinema workers that they had “transferrable” skills suitable for work in care homes – because scooping up a 50/50 megabucket of sweet […]

In his brilliant new book Who Enters Politics and Why?, academic James Weinberg provides possibly the most sophisticated analysis of why some people decide to stand for office and others don’t. His research discovers that when it comes to their basic human values, politicians really are “different”. Having spent the summer reading just about every […]