Should it be Boris? He was twice elected mayor of a Labour city and if the Tory mission is to stop Jeremy Corybn, surely you need someone charismatic to see off a populist. Then again, David Davis is a dependable caretaker, a bruiser who can hold the line on Brexit. Or why not skip a
Dear John, I really hope you won’t be offended by this letter from your uncle. I have nothing but respect for you and I would hate to damage the friendly relationship we have had since I first met you when you were six years old. I understand from your aunt that you voted Labour in
Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver. When I remonstrated with him, he leapt out of the cab and assaulted me, with a violent shove in the small of my back, trying to push me off my bike. It was the heat
The Tory party is having the wrong conversation. Whenever two or three Conservative MPs are gathered together, they discuss who should succeed Theresa May. They lament that the front-runners all have their flaws, scan the ministerial list for a ‘dark horse’ candidate — and debate whether it’d be better for May to go at this
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower
Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk named Abed al-Hamid Hakim. The subject was the blockade of Qatar imposed by the Saudis and a couple of other despotic Sunni Arab rulers to punish the country for its ties to Iran, Hamas and
The last housing scandal in Notting Hill brought down a Conservative government and transformed the social policy of Britain. Peter Rachman was a slum landlord with a pink Rolls-Royce. His appalling treatment of poor immigrants, exposed during the Profumo affair, magnified the myth of exploitative, capitalist, decadent Tories. The 1964 election swept Harold Wilson to
I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with a blinding headache accompanied by creeping nausea. My limbs turned rubbery, and I was reminded of when Winston Churchill cruelly compared Ramsay MacDonald to a Barnum’s Circus freak dubbed ‘The Boneless Wonder’. I felt just
BBC Radio 4 – The Reith lectures A few years back, before I began writing novels about the Tudors, my partner and I bought a new-build house in Surrey. We bought it off-plan, and watched it grow out of an open field. The site looked like a battlefield from the Great War. It was a
Which Hogwarts house would you be in? There are four options, and everybody fits into one. The brave and chivalrous are put in Gryffindor. Patient and loyal types head to Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw is for the witty and intelligent. The cunning and ambitious — and potentially evil — are destined for Slytherin. In the Harry Potter
When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I always come up trumps. Boastful but true. In fact, even friends who’ve lived in London all their lives are impressed when I suggest a night of opera at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre.
