I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Fringe for five years, but this is the first time I’ve dipped my toe into the stormy waters of performing. My show Iain Dale All Talk is a series of 24 interviews with politicians, media personalities and, er, Christopher Biggins. As I write this, I’ve just compèred the last
‘Volcanic temper… suspicious of everyone… irritability, mood swings… terror stalking the shadows… devastating collapse of Europe’s economy… rampant insecurity, unbridled hypochondria…’ Trump? No, it’s Henry VIII, according to Robert Hutchinson. But the ‘king’ across the water is uncannily like the Tudor tyrant; the discarded wives, the wenching, the rival heirs, the fawning, the flattery, the
Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the city. The smog comes from diesel generators: almost every building in Lebanon is hooked up to one because of rolling power cuts. This isn’t because Israel bombed one of the country’s few power stations in
As I left Lord’s at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon to go to The Lion King European premiere I felt uneasy. Not because I doubted England’s chances of overhauling New Zealand’s apparently modest 241, but because I felt guilty at deserting Bairstow for Beyoncé, Morgan for Mufasa. There was no reason to suppose the
Northern Italians often speak of Sicily as a Saracenic darkness — the place where Europe ends. The Arabic influence remains strongest in the Mafia-infiltrated west of the island, where the sirocco blows in hot from the deserts of North Africa. When the Arabs invaded Sicily in 831 they introduced mosques and pink-domed cupolas, as well
Someone should write a guide to the best literary festivals. Sydney and Auckland would certainly be there, along with Sri Lanka, Jaipur and Dubai. Later this year I’m off to Mumbai and I’ve been invited to Mandalay. I swear there are writers who never actually have time to write any more, they spend so much
Our upstairs neighbours are not the sort of people you want to have run-ins with. They have regular moped deliveries and I see packages exchanged through blacked-out BMW windows. I once knocked on their door to ask if I could borrow a potato masher. They looked at me as if I were mad. They seem
I’m meant to be peering into a tunnel hacked out by Hamas a few hundred metres from Gaza City into Israeli territory but my attention has wandered. The air around us, above this parched, scrubby wasteland, is fecund with life. A pair of black kites are circling and below them a steppe buzzard is lumbering
‘It’s official. Turkey is a banana republic!’ My friend Mustapha, a serial entrepreneur, sends me a flurry of doom-laden WhatsApp messages on hearing the news that Istanbul’s mayoral election is being re-run. One of them is a cartoon of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan standing in front of the national flag, crescent turned into a banana.
In the past few weeks, on three separate occasions, I have met three different women who for years (one for more than 30 years) volunteered for the Samaritans. All three have now quit. One, Sarah Anderson, said: ‘Chad Varah [the founder] must be spinning in his grave.’ The Samaritans has changed, they say. It still
The power of editors is comically overstated. I’m struck by the number of politicians who imagine that there’s a hierarchy: that editors shape the opinions of columnists who, in turn, shape opinions of readers. The truth, I’m afraid, is that the hierarchy works in the other way. People like reading well-argued pieces with which they
In a blink, everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. Life goes on. The long, hot days of a record summer are lazily tumbling into autumn, gridlock has returned to the motorways, the kids are back at school. But the murderous events in Christchurch last Friday have distorted everything for us as a nation.
One of the great things about touring with a band is that it gets me away from my little west London bubble and out and about around the towns and cities that I haven’t been to in quite some time. So off we go with my new boots and panties and my escape-from-the-band book, Larry
India is not preparing for war, but picking up the newspapers in Delhi you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For weeks, the papers have been blowing the horns of retribution against Islamabad after a convoy of police officers was rammed by a suicide bomber in Kashmir. Since both sides acquired nuclear weapons, neither had
At the end of January, I had the honour and pleasure of being on Desert Island Discs. I liked Lauren Laverne and enjoyed talking with her. Afterwards I wondered if I’d been careful enough about what I said. Had I made a fool of myself? As the transmission date approached I was anxious. I told
One of the few pleasures of advancing age is that, no matter how awful some looming catastrophe may be, you can always remember a time that was worse. On hearing the polar vortex was headed for Chicago last week, my wife and I smugly reminisced about having survived the coldest night in the city’s history
A man stopped me in the street in Caracas and grabbed my hand. I was alarmed, but tried not to look scared. This city sometimes ranks as the most dangerous capital in the world. The practical advice we tend to be given by security consultants boils down to ‘Don’t panic’. ‘Gringos,’ said the man, ‘are good people.
Somehow I had managed more than a quarter of a century in journalism without ever going to Davos. It had become almost a badge of honour, the one gathering of global nabobs I had been able to dodge year after year. But here I am in the mountains of Switzerland, a new boy amid the
I’m moving house, parting ways with my beloved friend Georgia. For eight years, the two of us have laughed madly, danced wildly and cried horribly. But life moves on and so must we. Boxing, labelling and filing items is not in my nature, which makes Operation Declutter rather difficult. Instead, I sit amid a sea
I’m not surprised that black people are still eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the police, despite the less frequent use of those powers. It happened to me regularly in the 1990s. One rainy night I was driving through the City of London in one of the cars