Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
Chris Patten has held almost every great and good job the great and the good can offer: Governor of Hong Kong, Companion of Honour, European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. Only his parents’ decision to send him to a Catholic church will prevent him becoming Archbishop of
Listen to John Prescott on the Today programme this morning and you may begin to understand the complexity of the task Labour faces. Prescott was putting the best gloss he could on Labour and the vastly incompetent civil service wasting hundreds of millions on regional fire stations. Listening to his bluster, even the most loyal
Writers of my generation are comparing the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy – the highpoint of the golden age of British television drama in my view – against the new film. You can see the 1979 series now because rather magnificently, if not perhaps legally, someone has put it on YouTube. The film,
Today, Johann Hari admitted to vandalising his enemies’ Wikipedia entries using the psydonym David Rose. One of his victims, the writer and Spectator blogger Nick Cohen, suspected so all along. His dairy, from July, is below: I learned that Johann Hari was a journalist who was better at attention-seeking than truth-telling when a small American journal
It is a sign of how serious economic thought disappeared in the bubble – “who needs it when we’re all making money?” – that public opinion is not pummelling Labour for its failure to regulate the banks. Even the most conservative of Spectator readers might have once have said, “Well I expect Labour governments to
All politicians require a thick skin, but Gordon Brown must have an elephant’s hide. If an ordinary man had presided over the greatest crash since 1929, shame would compel silence. Not so with Brown, who is unable to see himself as other see him, and has written an account of the European crisis for the
Andrew Neather of the Evening Standard was — and, for all I know, still is — a decent man. Although he worked as a speech writer for Jack Straw around the turn of the millennium, by the time I knew him he in the late 2000s, he had sensibly decided that bicycling was more interesting
Spectator readers are not going to like this, so I will keep short. Ed Milliband spoke for Britain last week, when he became the first senior politician in living memory to stand up to Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron looked and still looks like a little man and a bought man, who cannot say what he
I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I
Why, I hear you ask, did the editors of the New Statesman and Independent do nothing about Johann Hari? Private Eye and many others had been raising killer questions about his journalism for years before the scandal broke, and yet they stood aside and let him be. Why, to raise the obvious follow up question
Whoever first came up with the saying, “the left won the culture war, the right won the economic war and the centre won the political war,” deserves some kind of prize for encapsulating the politics of the late 20th century. It is a sign of the extent of the shock the current crisis has brought
The American journalist Michael Weiss wrote recently, “Tony Blair can’t be a war criminal. If he were, George Galloway would support him.” The joke works on the assumption that the backers of despots in the West are always from the Dostoevskian dregs of extremist politics: wild and frothing men, far from the polite and sensible
Dear Mr CTB, We often say that the best advice a solicitor can give a client is to tell them when to back off from a confrontation. The time has come to give it to you. You must know that your cause is hopeless, and our so-called privacy injunction a laughing stock. Your name is
Bernard-Henri Levy begins his polemic on the alleged rape of a hotel chambermaid by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with a priceless example of what a better French philosopher called “bad faith”. ‘I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York. I do
Liberal Democrat fury at the behaviour of the prime minister is all over this morning’s papers. They are not just blustering because they lost the referendum – although, obviously, there is an element of that. They are also genuinely outraged that Cameron used the fact that Clegg compromised to form the coalition that put Cameron
I have a piece in Time on why British republicans are the true patriots. Here’s a taster: “If you doubt the patriotism of British republicanism, consider trying to explain to an American why the U.S. should import the British constitution. ‘You must make someone President for life,’ you begin. ‘It might as well be Barack
I have a piece in the Norwegian daily VG about how the Libyan war is destroying old certainties. I point out that although: “Den europeiske liberale middelklassens illusjoner ødelegges av krigen i Libya. Tenk på hvordan deres ulike talsmenn og –kvinner snakket om internasjonal politick i tv-studioer i Oslo eller London for få måneder siden.
One should never be too prissy about political campaigns. But even when the usual excuses about the “rough and tumble of politics” have been trotted out, the argument about AV has been so dire it would have embarrassed an unusually truculent toddler. David Cameron elevated Sayeeda Warsi to the peerage and gave her in a
Being the second in an occasional series. Part one is available here. Let me see if I can get this straight. The British Conservative Party has not won a general election since 1992, in part because the voters did not trust it to run the NHS. Ever since David Cameron became leader, the Tories have
I worry that Coffee House sometimes fails to enrage readers sufficiently, so let me run a scenario past you, suggested to me by Rafael Behr, the Observer’s brilliant leader writer. The AV referendum is going to be the oddest vote. Turnout will be low, but how low will depend on where you live. Scotland, Northern
