Church attendances may be falling, but there’s a new religion in town: recycling. Its followers are devout and full of missionary zeal. They follow the collection day rubrics to the letter and if you ask them what evidence they have that sorting their polyethylenes from their PVCs is any more effective than lighting a penny
Today nearly all real public discussion has become impossible. Which is why nearly all public thinking has become impossible. Which is why the thinking has gone bad on nearly every major issue now facing us. It isn’t just politics that is finding it hard to operate. It is also the media and every other piece
Who wants to be a billionaire? Not, apparently, Alexander Lebedev, the self-described ‘Russian ex-oligarch’ who has tried billionaredom and found it not to his liking. Lebedev opens his new book, Hunt the Banker, with a nostalgic riff on his happy youth in a tiny Moscow apartment and the observation that ‘the ideal menu consists of
Charlotte Edwardes reports that Boris put his hand on her leg during lunch 20 years ago. Full disclosure, I put my hand on Boris’s leg 20 years ago during lunch. It wasn’t that I was making a pass at him. I just wanted to hold his attention while I was telling him something I wanted
Over the past three years, as we have torturously debated our departure from the European Union, we have heard a lot from the Brexiteers about the industries that might benefit from leaving the EU. Some of these predictions may materialise, others may not. There is one industry, however, that is already doing very well as
At first glance, Nathan Taylor might seem the very definition of a ‘right on’ hipster. He goes by the name of ‘Sockmatician’ online and he’s famous in the knitting world for his complicated double-knit patterns. On his Instagram, in between videos of people speed-knitting and many, many photos of socks, Taylor had posts about what
Democrats have long criticized Donald Trump for his addiction to Twitter, his rolling-news attention span, the backlit narcissism of his reality-TV presidency. But the most media-addled people in public life are, in fact, Trump’s critics. Nobody is quicker to reach the most hysterical conclusions. The anti-Trump show must go on, just like the president’s Twitter
When Jeremy Corbyn declared at Labour conference that his party would only allow an election once no deal had been taken off the table, MPs began to wonder if it could be put off until the new year. The Prime Minister’s tormentors can’t agree when exactly they would like to go to the country, but
You’re surprised? Really? What are you surprised by? The specifics — that 11 non-elected, mostly public-school-educated judges, and doubtlessly Remainers I’d guess, should put the final nail into the lid of Brexit? Yeah, sure — that knocked me for six. Never saw that coming. Or was it the generality that surprised you — we’re not
Michael Gove stands in front of an empty throne in the magnificent Cabinet Office room. George III was the last monarch to use it and there it has stayed, beneath his portrait. For a second, it looks like Gove is about to sit in it and grant us an audience, but he’s only leaning over
The oil-for-security alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz aboard a US Navy destroyer, is now over. Just look at the American reaction to the attack by Iran on Saudi oil facilities. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo duly called it an ‘act of war’;
The election campaign was off to an unexciting start even by Canada’s standards. A well-known but fluffy incumbent, Liberal Justin Trudeau, faced a Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, whose strategy had been to lay low. The Trudeau message these past four years has been total political correctness: equal numbers of male and female cabinet members, ‘peoplekind’
When my siblings and I were clearing out my dad’s bookshelves (he died earlier this year), I made sure to keep any books in which I’d written a personal dedication to him. For some reason I baulked at the idea of them passing into the hands of strangers, or just being left to languish in
The first book I ever produced, some 50 years ago, was a collection of poetry written by children. I called it Children’s Words. There are poems in there by the young Daniel Day Lewis and Montagu Don, among others, and another by one Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was a young teacher trying all I could
Drones have come of age in the war on terror. When the United States and Britain invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the technology was barely out of the lab. Today, these flying machines represent a huge security threat. If reports are to be believed, a Houthi rebel-launched drone attack in Saudi Arabia last weekend shut down
Who runs Britain? When Boris Johnson’s lawyers made their case in front of the Supreme Court this week, defending his right to prorogue parliament, they in effect brought it back to this simple question. This was a controversy for politicians to settle, not courts. Judges, they said, should think twice about ‘entering the political arena’
‘How have you been?’ David Cameron asks, bounding up to meet me. Fine, I say, then make the mistake of asking him the same question. His face drops. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Well. So-so.’ Watching the political news, he says, has been getting him down (in a way it didn’t when he was in office) and
Since I’m not an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, I don’t belong to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) but I am close to several people in this ‘12-step fellowship’ who have changed their lives for the better through it. Most of them say its ‘programme for living’ would help anyone, drinker or not, to cope more successfully with
When I told two neighbours that I had become a no-deal Brexiter they physically recoiled from me. ‘You can’t.’ ‘But there’s no other option,’ I said. ‘You can vote Lib Dem,’ they said. ‘But that’s the same as a second referendum. Even if the Lib Dems came to power, the ones who hadn’t voted for
Boris Johnson’s opponents love to accuse him of using the ‘Trump playbook’. Some on the left have become so obsessed with this comparison that they’ve even demanded that the Prime Minister be impeached. But over the past few weeks, Johnson’s behaviour has borne a far closer resemblance to a man he claims to look down
