On a summer’s evening in 1978 I was standing on the platform at Redcar Central station, wondering if I had just missed my train. So I approached the only other person on the platform and asked him: ‘Excuse me, do you know what time the next train is due?’ He replied ‘What if it is?’
Before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer admitted he was concerned about what life in Downing Street might be like for his children. It was, he said, the ‘single thing’ that kept him awake at night. What’s notable is that we aren’t even aware of Starmer’s children’s names. They are teenagers but that’s about all
More than a third of UK universities are in financial doo-doo: staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible bankruptcy beckon. Behind this is the fact that domestic students paying £9,250 in fees (way behind inflation since that figure was last raised in 2017) cost £11,750 to teach, representing a collective annual £5 billion
About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely ridiculed vice president. Party wonks despaired that their elderly candidate was handicapped by a veep whose prospective ascendence to the presidency terrified voters. Dems anguished about needing to sideline an unpopular ‘woman of colour’. Remember
While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt entered Downing Street with one mission: to clean up the public finances after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget debacle. They posed as the fiscally credible option. All bills would need to be covered, even if the tax burden had to rise. If the Tories were to lose power for being disciplined and
Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so. Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People
There are times when you might be fooled into believing all is well. I had a moment of such weakness the other day when I saw our new Prime Minister welcoming his European counterparts to a summit at Blenheim Palace. When Keir Starmer came down the steps to greet King Charles, he even did a
On Monday night the Conservatives announced the rules of the party’s leadership contest. The reaction in Labour circles was incredulity that their run of good luck has not yet ended. ‘A three-month contest?’ asked one amazed party figure. Are there any candidates who Keir Starmer’s team fears? ‘I doubt the next Tory prime minister is
As something of a fan of riots and social unrest I was interested to know who, precisely, had gone doolally in the Harehills area of Leeds last week and started setting fire to buses and so on. The local police announced that it was a ‘serious disorder incident’, but I could find no information at
Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s a writer who specialises in Eastern European history, was once the Economist magazine’s correspondent in Ukraine, and made her name with a brilliant book, Borderland, which was both a portrait, a history and an appreciation
Believe it or not, I planned to write the gist of this column before Saturday night. However, a caveat. Unlike the newly christened Republican VP pick, J.D. Vance, I don’t directly blame hyperventilating Democratic rhetoric for last weekend’s attempt on Trump’s life. Responsibility rests with the would-be assassin. Nevertheless, the party’s off-the-charts argumentation has rankled
There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the comparison has been made on magazine covers from America to Germany. Neither is it uncommon for people to say that Trump is planning to usher in an authoritarian state and is a Nazi, neo-Nazi or
I detected a degree of surprise among those people who were uncommonly cheered by Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory that England failed to beat Spain in the final of the European Championship. That wasn’t in the script. For those Labour supporters in the press and floating in the shallow trough of luvviedom, an England victory
Labour MPs ought to have been jubilant when they gathered for their weekly all-party parliamentary meeting on Monday. Most were still riding high after their party won a landslide majority. Yet there was a frisson of unease as some of the new flock took the opportunity to raise a grievance: the two-child benefit cap. ‘It’s
Robert Jenrick, once immigration minister and still, just, MP for Newark, said on Sunday that the Tories lost not because ‘they had this slogan or that slogan… but because they failed to deliver’. Yes, absolutely, they failed to deliver, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the slogans were diabolical too. In fact it
We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though if I were, that too would seem irrefutable. I mean in a far broader sense – that the world has entered a new dark age. The first dark age was characterised by a lack of information.
The principal concerns of the electors vary rather more widely than the pollsters and pundits would suggest. One man in Guisborough – probably middle-aged, short of teeth, a little unkempt – suggested to me that the government needed to clamp down on foreigners importing bees into the country. This was being done covertly, he said.
Rishi Sunak performed a mea culpa when his shadow cabinet convened on Monday, taking full responsibility for the election loss. There were, he said, lots of lessons to be learned. He tried rallying his team, reminding them it was time to knuckle down and prepare for the King’s Speech. When those around the table began
Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’
