There’s still a month of the Labour leadership contest to go but most MPs have already concluded that Keir Starmer will win. The shadow Brexit secretary has led in every category so far: MPs, unions and local parties. As the contest enters its final stage, polling suggests the membership agree and Sir Keir will sail
When Alpha Condé ‘Le Professeur’ became president of Guinea in 2010, he was hailed by Tony Blair as an ideal leader — the very model of what an African premier should be. Unlike previous rulers, Condé didn’t shoot his way to the top, but arrived armed with a law degree from the Sorbonne and Guinea’s
‘Can my dog meet your horse?’ asked the woman, as her German shepherd lunged at me, making my thoroughbred jump up and down in panic. We had been riding through the woods, a friend and I, when we came across one of those dog-walking clubs. Up to a dozen of what looked like former guard
When Boris Johnson and the new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met in Downing Street last month, they agreed on one thing immediately: that it was time to stop the sniping, animosity and backbiting that had characterised the first round of the Brexit talks. The Prime Minister emphasised that Britain wanted to be
Like Ozzy Osbourne, I was last year diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the degenerative condition that impairs the functioning of the body. In a series of recent interviews, Osbourne has spoken frankly about the impact of the neurological disorder. ‘That thing has knocked the shit out of me,’ he said, Brummie-style. I’m with Ozzy. It’s done
I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a bacterium or animal parasite, and that we would catch it from a wild animal. ‘My money is
‘There are two things that are important in politics,’ said Mark Hanna, the American senator, in 1895. ‘The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ In 2020, Hanna’s maxim could be updated: the second thing is being an old white guy from New York. The presidential election is 36 weeks
‘Quotation (n.) — The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.’ Ambrose Bierce said that, or at least wrote it in the Devil’s Dictionary. That was in 1906, and those are words for the ages. In his Rhetoric, centuries before the birth of Christ, Aristotle identified one of the most common and effective ways
If you ever need a reminder of what northern Britain has achieved, I’d recommend a trip to York. The National Railway Museum brilliantly evokes the local creative energy that produced Stephenson’s Rocket which ran on the world’s first inter-city passenger railway and ushered in the railway age. Just over the River Ouse is the chocolate
Like the Trumpton fire brigade, Britain’s disaster planners have had precious little opportunity to show off their skills over the past few decades. Plans for a nuclear war merely gathered dust. Global pandemics failed to arrive, as did a no-deal Brexit. Just about the only crisis requiring nationwide emergency planning concerned foot and mouth disease
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Leo Varadkar. He positioned himself as Ireland’s champion and even ended up with a decent deal. He expected some kind of electoral dividend in the snap election as he urged voters to stay away from the dangerous fringes occupied by Sinn Fein. Instead, they turned to Sinn Fein
Saatchi & Saatchi started it. ‘V&A: An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached,’ said the ad campaign of the late 1980s. Other slogans in the series played on themes of taste and tastiness — ‘Where else do they give you £100,000,000 worth of objets d’art free with every egg salad?’, ‘All right, the
Pangolins are in the news. It may be that the small ant-eating mammal covered in armour plating was the source of the virus striking fear into the heart of the Chinese state and giving us all a nasty turn elsewhere. I rather hope it does turn out to be the pangolin, for if that is
If you think that Boon Jong-ho’s Parasite (which won four Oscars this week, including Best Picture) is pretty black as comedies go, you should try the South Korean film The President’s Barber. Set in 1970s Seoul, a working-class hair clipper is appointed to tend the dictatorial leader Park Chung-hee, and tensions grow between his family
It’s been only six weeks since the death of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, but already there are a number of local hardmen vying to take his place. Most notable are his sidekicks, the Kray twins of the Shia world: Qais al-Khazali and his brother Laith. Qais and Laith who? Unless you’ve scanned Washington’s latest
Any florist will recognise the look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to buy flowers. Some of them try to make it easier for you. I used to go to a splendid florist in Ealing who talked to me about rugby for no less than five minutes
Though Scots are doubtful about secession from the UK, Scots literary figures and intellectuals are likely to be strongly, even aggressively, for it. Conspicuous in this is Anglophobia, which is a default position for many. At an extreme, it amounts to a rejection of the English and Scots unionists which conjures up the rhetoric of
One has to feel for the good old Church of England. If there’s not a public relations crisis, best to create one. Sex outside of marriage, gay or straight, ‘falls short of God’s purpose for human beings’, the Church declared. A few days later, after a colossally negative reaction inside and outside of the Church,
Sometimes it appears as if, over the past ten years, the government has been actively trying to destroy the whole criminal justice system. It’s like an evil experiment: impose a 20 per cent cut in the prisons budget, meaning a 26 per cent reduction in the number of operational front line staff — then sit
What happened on Streatham High Road last weekend was exactly what I had feared during my time as prisons minister: a recently released convict mounting a terror attack. It was the second incident of this nature in Britain in three months, but the truth is we are lucky that there have not been more like
