Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
By the standards of what was to come in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not so bad – it was not a police state with concentration camps like the 20th century fascist and communist regimes. But in the 19th century its subject Italians, Serbs, Czechs and Slovaks could not see the future and insisted that
For the past week, the papers have been full of the woes of David Cameron as Tory backbenchers sense the possibility of a new European settlement and try to put pressure on him to loosen Britain’s links or leave completely. In more elevated moments commentators have discussed whether a new Euro bloc, bound in a
Fraser asked how Britain can compete in the new world of global television. Here are two answers: 1) Don’t give up on the BBC. To use the language of marketing that has been polluting English for a generation, the BBC is a “global brand”. Fraser’s idea that Sky could ever win the same levels of
Being an occasional series in which the writer confesses that supporters of the British Conservative party leave him in a state of perpetual perplexity. Part one here and part two here. In my political neighbourhood, the image of the Cameron is now set. He is the smiling assassin whose affable public image hides his
Here we go again. According to the surprisingly reliable Gudio Fawkes, the New Statesman has forced Dan Hodges, a lively young writer, whom you actually want to read, to resign for being a lively young writer, you actually want to read. Specifically, he had done what free journalists in a free society are meant to
I apologise for the advertisement, but there is a piece in the Observer that is well worth reading. Michael Cohen describes how Obama has tired of offering the hand of friendship, only for the Republicans to accuse him of being a socialist Mau Mau on a mission to destroy America. He will abandon bipartisanship and
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
