From our UK edition
That sound you can hear is panic. In the past week, articles have appeared by leading Conservatives including Danny Finkelstein, Charles Moore and Michael Gove attacking Reform for a range of crimes, from backwardness, to policy weakness, to (in the case of Moore, scurrilously) anti-Semitism. The onslaught is getting heavier, and more bitter. Suella Braverman’s
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‘Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ After last week, I feel like Evelyn Waugh at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. The politics of ‘progress’ has found its fulfilment in the union
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They tried, they really did. Dignity in Dying, the lineal descendent of the 1930s Euthanasia Society and therefore great-great-niece of its sister the Eugenics Society, has been struggling for weeks to frame a bill that’s innocuous enough to pass through parliament. Today we saw the fruit of their efforts. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of
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There is a tension at the heart of conservative thinking today – one that the Conservative party must address if it wants to win again at the next general election. The National Conservatism conference, being held in Westminster this week, is a bold attempt to speak to this internal struggle: how to strike the right
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‘The people of England were long habituated to queues; some had joined the procession ignorant of its end – hoping perhaps for cigarettes or shoes – but most were in a mood of devotion.’ In Unconditional Surrender, his novel of the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh describes the queue to see ‘the Sword of Stalingrad’,
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Everyone agrees the Grenfell Tower disaster must usher in a new era of social housing in the UK. The danger is that it sends us back to a very old era, when the council owned, managed and controlled community housing. There is another way forward, one which meets the rightful sense of injustice felt by
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Once again public figures are fanning themselves with shocked surprise at something perfectly comprehensible to everyone else: men behave boorishly when drunk, sans wives, in the company of young women in short skirts paid to make themselves friendly. Of course, what went on at the Dorchester that night is seriously not okay and it’s good news
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The last housing scandal in Notting Hill brought down a Conservative government and transformed the social policy of Britain. Peter Rachman was a slum landlord with a pink Rolls-Royce. His appalling treatment of poor immigrants, exposed during the Profumo affair, magnified the myth of exploitative, capitalist, decadent Tories. The 1964 election swept Harold Wilson to
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Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto, slides into his restaurant chair and twinkles at the waitress. He’s 6ft 6in, white-haired now but perky. Bill has 120 years of policing behind him. He, his father and his grandfather all served 40 years in the force. Now he’s an MP and he’s legalising cannabis in
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‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David
From our UK edition
‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David
From our UK edition
Danny Kruger explains how his theatre company helps offenders to go straight Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson was a drug dealer, with a five-year stretch for murder behind her and no nice future ahead. But then a random meeting in a Baltimore nightclub, with an actor in the hit TV show The Wire, led to a starring
From our UK edition
Danny Kruger, who was David Cameron’s speechwriter, defends his most notorious piece of work for the Tory leader and says that love is a neglected crime-fighting device It happened to be the day that Boris Johnson took office as Mayor of London with a mandate to tackle youth crime. My wife and I were coming
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I’m in Sedgefield, County Durham, contesting the nomination for the Conservative candidate who will fight the Prime Minister for his seat in Parliament. I make my speech to the assembled Tories: tax, Europe, crime, education, pensions. Afterwards I go into the corridor and make agonising conversation with the other finalist. I smoke a cigarette. I