Nigel Jones

Nigel Jones is a historian and journalist

Disloyalty is the true Tory secret weapon

It is a very long time since David Maxwell Fyfe, a Tory home secretary in the early 1950s, said that ‘Loyalty Is the Tory party’s secret weapon’. It may not even have been true when he uttered the quote, and as the party messily defenestrates its latest leader, it is certainly not true today. In

Keir Starmer has got the Zzzz…Factor

Is it a fatal handicap for a politician to be dull? Since he became Labour leader two years ago, there has been a growing feeling that Sir Keir Starmer not only lacks the magical ‘X Factor’ that makes for political success, but is in proud possession of its polar opposite – what might be called

Boris looks doomed, but can he escape the inevitable?

Is Boris Johnson’s government about to fall apart? Twice since World War Two, Tory governments have broken up after a prolonged period of rule. They have died not because of a single crisis, but slowly expired due to sheer exhaustion, disunity, and lack of purpose or ideas. Now Boris’s regime, after another lengthy Tory period

Is this the week Boris Johnson’s luck finally runs out?

‘Is he lucky?’ Napoleon demanded to know of one of his generals. When Sue Gray’s partygate report is released in the coming hours, we’ll soon find out if the luck Boris Johnson has enjoyed during his rise to the top continues. Given that Boris managed to escape from the Met police investigation into the festivities that

Pestminster’s return spells trouble for Boris

Some male MPs behave ‘like animals’. In the wake of the recent spate of bad behaviour among our lords and masters, Attorney General Suella Braverman’s comments confirm what many of us already knew. So what is going on down at the Westminster farm? Whoever is to blame for the moral degradation in SW1, this string of stories should

Putin, Bucha and a tale of two Russias

The scenes of butchery and barbarism in the liberated Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin and nearby villages – civilians tied up, tortured, mutilated and shot; women raped, burned to death in their cars, and buried in a mass grave – have been compared to the worst slaughters of World War Two. The West struggles

How Sunak sunk himself

Whatever his myriad faults and foibles, Boris Johnson has the one essential quality that Napoleon demanded of his generals: luck. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister was on the point of being dethroned by his own MPs. Today, thanks to two men, Vladimir Putin and Rishi Sunak, he strides the stage again, basking in

What Ukraine can teach Britain about patriotism

I live near the small Sussex seaside town of Selsey. It’s the sort of place that gets right up the well-bred nose of Labour’s Emily Thornberry with her famous disdain for flag wagging patriotism. For in normal times the many flagpoles in the tidy gardens of the resort are flying the St George’s flag of

Is Zelensky’s party crackdown his first mistake?

The news that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has banned eleven opposition parties – including the pro-Russian ‘Opposition – Platform For Life’ which holds 44 seats in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament and has spoken out against the Russian invasion – may be the embattled leader’s first major mistake in the month since Putin launched his brutal invasion.

Is Boris channeling Churchill in his response to Russia?

Boris Johnson’s hero – apart from himself – is Winston Churchill, who led Britain through the dark valley of World War Two. Our present PM has even written an adulatory biography of the great man, and clearly would like to channel Churchill as a war leader and emulate his success. Will the war in Ukraine

Putin’s taste for terror is nothing new

There is tragically nothing new about the scenes of indiscriminate terror unfolding in Ukraine: bombing and shelling unleashed by Putin’s forces in the streets of Kharkiv and Mariupol against civilians today is a familiar tale – almost a reflex action – of what Russia does whenever it is faced with opposition or the defiance of

Could a Kremlin assassin get to Putin?

Could an assassin kill Putin? Just as the second world war would not have happened without the demonic will and agency of Adolf Hitler, so the invasion of Ukraine – and its horrific bloodshed and unspeakable human misery – is Putin’s war. Can he be stopped? The bad news is that the chances do not

Scholz’s token military gesture won’t undo years of neglect

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s announcement that Germany is sending weapons and missiles to Ukraine – and is increasing its defence budget to two per cent – marks the mother of all U-turns. But it comes too late, too late for Ukraine. Years of Germany allowing its military to atrophy cannot be done overnight. Compromised by her cosy relations with the tyrant in

Why Ukrainians fear the Russians

The Ukrainian word ‘Holodomor’ meaning ‘death by hunger’ is not as well known in the West as the word ‘Holocaust’, but it should be. In 1933, a decade before the Nazis began to deliberately murder some six million European Jews, Stalin’s Soviet regime starved to death – equally deliberately – some four million men, women

How Putin is following Hitler’s playbook

Like many rulers of Russia before him, especially Stalin, Vladimir Putin is a keen student of History. Judging by his current actions, it seems as though he has been particularly brushing up on the story of 1938, when another dictator, one Adolf Hitler, deliberately provoked the destruction of an independent European state – Czechoslovakia –

Get well soon, your Majesty

The news that the Queen had tested positive for Covid must have sent a shiver of dread down the spines of all but a tiny minority of hardhearted Republicans. Most of us don’t want to even imagine a country bereft of the monarch who has been a seemingly immortal part of the fabric of the

Are Tory MPs too ‘frit’ to bin Boris?

Boris Johnson is in the midst of the bleakest period of his premiership, but he can at least nibble on a crumb of comfort from history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Tory party is not at all ruthless in dispatching their prime ministers when they have fallen out of favour with voters, or appear to have passed