Features

Blood Brotherhood

 Istanbul In another time, in another place, we might never have known about the death of Jamal Khashoggi. In a Saudi consulate, the staff are guaranteed to say nothing. The reason we know so much is that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been willing to tell the world not just what he

Freddy Gray

American nightmare

 Washington, DC As if American politics were not scary enough, the prospect of President Hillary Rodham Clinton has once again reared its frightful head. The woman is a proven horror, politically speaking. One senior Democrat strategist calls her the ‘kiss of death’. She loses elections she ought to win because people don’t like her. Just

Homage to Ambazonia

 Calabar, Nigeria Simon Ngwa is a gentle and polite man, and he apologised to me first for what he was about to say. ‘I’m sorry if this upsets you, but we in Cameroon are very bitter towards Britain,’ he said. ‘As a child, I was taught to look up to the British Crown as a

Isabel Hardman

Mad about the beast

Richmond Park is an eerie place at this time of year. It’s not just that it’s the deer rutting season, when huge stags fight over their harems, charging heavily about the misty grassland and bellowing as they go. It’s also the herds of photographers looming out of that mist, as strange as the prehistoric cries

How to save Brexit

It’s pretty hard for Britain’s friends, here in Australia, to make sense of the mess that’s being made of Brexit. The referendum result was perhaps the biggest-ever vote of confidence in the United Kingdom, its past and its future. But the British establishment doesn’t seem to share that confidence and instead looks desperate to cut

Grosse negligence

A decade ago a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat took the Anglophone world by storm. It was a bestseller in Britain and America because, as the blurb explained, the French author ‘unlocks the simple secrets’ of why her people aren’t fat. So here is my sequel: Why French Kids Don’t Get Fat. Admittedly,

Damian Thompson

The steady ship

Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue Peter!’ my mother would call out, in a voice that made it clear that my presence was required in front of the television. Blue Peter — 60 years old this week — was top of

Virtuous vice

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, feminism and sexual exploitation — and still gets to walk on the wild side. Political principles tend to get in the way of politically incorrect passions. You like to watch porn, but as a good

Fact cats

Bellingcat is an independent group of exceptionally gifted Leicester-based internet researchers who use information gleaned from open sources to dig up facts that no other team of journalists has been able to discover. Or, Bellingcat is a sophisticated front used by western intelligence agencies to disseminate stories that would be considered tainted if they came

On being sacked

It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to find an item in the UK Press Gazette saying that Decca Aitkenhead had just been appointed chief interviewer at the Sunday Times, and an email from the Sunday Times magazine editor, Eleanor Mills, saying we

Pret a danger

Each year, about ten people in Britain die from allergic reactions to food. The case of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died after eating a sandwich from Pret a Manger, was a nasty reminder of how allergies can claim young lives at any moment. But it also raises a difficult question: to what extent are businesses that

Death of a dissident

As someone who spent three decades working closely with intelligence services in the Arab world and the West, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife.

Beware!!!

‘The trade deal USMCA has received fantastic reviews. It will go down as one of the best ever made, and it will also benefit Mexico and Canada!’ These are the words of Donald Trump, not tweeted, not spoken, but written down on the headed notepaper of the White House and finished off with an exclamation

Uncommon knowledge

So farewell, then, to the Common Entrance Exam, bane of a million schoolchildren’s lives since it was introduced in 1904. Three of the biggest public schools — St Paul’s, Wellington College and Westminster — are giving up the exam. From 2021, they will do the pre-test: verbal and non-verbal reasoning, maths and English, taken at

Greek tragedy

‘Now Greece can finally turn the page in a crisis that has lasted too long. The worst is over.’ With these triumphant words, Pierre Moscovici, the EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, declared an end to the EU’s eight-year €289 billion bailout programme to Greece, the largest rescue in financial history. Except Greece’s financial

Don’t tell the parents

How can we help transgender children? This is a question greatly exercising politicians and many are confused about what to do. In Scotland, children are now expected to ‘demonstrate an understanding of diversity in sexuality and gender identity’. The Scottish government supports a new classroom resource that tells primary school children that they may consider