Nigel Jones is a historian and journalist
Soon after Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February a rash of stories appeared in the western media speculating that the Russian president was dying, or at least very seriously ill. The evidence offered was circumstantial but superficially compelling. This ranged from the absurdly long tables the dictator uses to keep his distance
It has been less than a fortnight since Boris Johnson’s premiership exploded so spectacularly just three short years after his triumphant election victory, and he became the latest Tory PM to perish at the hands of his own party. Yet two weeks on, the people who brought him down are already wondering if they hit
As the Tory party leadership race enters its next stage this weekend, one thing is becoming very clear: the two candidates that MPs will select for party members to vote on may not be the people that, if it was up to them, the grassroots members would pick themselves. The yawning gulf between Westminster and
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar says of Gaius Longinus Cassius, the chief conspirator: ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look: he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’. None of the eight Tories fighting like ferrets in a sack to succeed our own fallen Caesar, Boris Johnson, looks leaner or hungrier than the former chancellor
John Stuart Mill once dismissed the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. When a reader queried the insult, Mill qualified it, but not by much. ‘I never meant to say that Conservatives are generally stupid,’ he wrote. ‘I meant that stupid people are generally Conservatives’. More than a century and a half later as the party implodes once
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
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
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 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
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
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
Richard Cohen was once one of our foremost book editors as well as being an Olympic sabre champion. Since moving to New York 20 years ago he has turned author himself, writing books on Tolstoy, the sun and his own sport of swordsmanship. Now he focuses his attention on historians. His aim, he tells us
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
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
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.
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
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 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
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
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
