No sacred cows

Watching Lord Hannan of Kingsclere being introduced in the House of Lords on Monday was a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, I’m delighted for Dan. He is one of the heroes of Brexit, and his impromptu speech about Margaret Thatcher in the pub following her memorial service brought a tear to my eye (you

As an ambitious journalist making my way in Fleet Street, I dreamed of becoming a Mid-Atlantic Man. Tom Wolfe came up with the term in the mid-1960s to describe someone who divided his life between London and New York. Not for social reasons, but because his career required him to spend time in both cities.

I heard the shocking news last week that one of my oldest friends — Richard Edwards — had died suddenly of a stroke. He was just 54 and a picture of health. I met Richard in 1988 when we were both PhD students at Cambridge. He had got the second-highest First in English in his

Caroline was pretty heroic during the first lockdown. She’s used to having no children to deal with between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., into which she crams her part-time job, food shopping, exercise classes, tennis lessons, dog walks and a hundred other things. But during our children’s three-month break from school they

The Dogs Trust charity received 114 calls on 27 and 28 December from people wanting to offload their puppies. No, these weren’t unwanted Christmas gifts, but dogs they’d bought during the first lockdown. According to the RSPCA, demand for dogs soared last year, with breeders and rescue centres reporting unprecedented levels of interest. But some

As I gaze at my four children on Christmas morning, clambering on to the bed with their stockings, I will think of one particular person to whom, in a roundabout way, they owe their lives. He was a colonel in the first world war and, had it not been for his generosity, my children, their

If you’re a journalist with a fondness for appearing on television — and, let’s face it, most of us are — the Covid crisis has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you’re no longer expected to drag yourself off to a studio at the crack of dawn, whether it’s Broadcasting House in the

When trying to get my head around the row that has engulfed Eton College in the past two weeks I keep getting sidetracked by the comic details. Like the fact that the headmaster, Simon Henderson, is nicknamed ‘trendy Hendy’ on account of his mission to transform Eton into a modern, progressive institution. By all accounts,

I’ve moved out of my home. No, Caroline and I haven’t broken up. It’s just that we’re having the house rewired, which means we have to be out of our bedroom by 8 a.m. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter but about eight months ago I started a blog about lockdown and I’m usually up until 4

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media companies which fail to ‘stamp out dangerous anti-vaccine content’ can face financial and criminal penalties. ‘The government has a pitiful track record on taking action against online platforms that are facilitating the spread of disinformation,’

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling exemption’ in the Public Order Act 1986, people were understandably horrified. As things stand, you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred because you’ve said something inflammatory about race or religion in the privacy

A second lockdown won’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that will go out of business. As a freelance journalist, I’m not at risk of losing my job. I don’t have a life-threatening disease so I’m not going to die because my local hospital won’t admit me.

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran an article attacking Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, for engaging in a friendly Twitter exchange with me about the coronavirus pandemic. According to the article, I was a ‘eugenics advocate’. How could the apparently respectable industrial designer sully himself in this way? Didn’t he realise I was

One of the things I hadn’t anticipated about the pandemic is that it would turn me into an English nationalist. At the time of writing, the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have decided to place their countries under various forms of lockdown, while No. 10 has stopped short of imposing one on England

At a Conservative party conference fringe event last Sunday, Lord Bethell, a health minister, was asked where he thought Britain ranked in the world in terms of its response to the pandemic. ‘I think there have been some outstanding pieces of delivery that have not been fully appreciated,’ he said. ‘And I think it will

From the moment I started criticising the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis people have been urging me to start an anti-lockdown party. The idea would be to run candidates in the local elections in May, particularly in those areas that have been under almost permanent lock and key for the past six months, such

Kristie Higgs, a 44-year-old school assistant, didn’t realise that criticising the sex education curriculum at her son’s school on Facebook would get her fired. For one thing, her account was set to ‘private’, so only her family and friends could read it. For another, she was posting under her maiden name, so no one could

Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I turned away from journalism to become a free-school evangelist in 2009 is that I wanted to make my late father proud. He helped set up the Open University, among other things. No doubt there’s something