The energy price surge caused by war in the Middle East has sent shockwaves through Westminster. It has pushed up inflation and the cost of borrowing, causing panic in the cabinet and the recognition that government intervention could be needed on a vast scale to support the cost of living. The UK Prime Minister told
Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out on top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour.
Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took a prickly turn. My interviewer had tripped across some remark in one of my podcast appearances that set her off. So much for talking about my new novel. For the following 20 minutes, leaning over
Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things. At the end of February, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. There are many things to be said
I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped into Venezuela and took President Maduro to New York to face trial, Keir Starmer was keen to get straight out in front of the cameras. There he said that he wanted to stress that “the
After Gorton and Denton, where next? The scale of the Green triumph in Manchester has sent shockwaves through Sir Keir Starmer’s party. Much has been written about looming losses in Cardiff and Edinburgh. But the Greens – with their appeal to urban professionals, young Muslims and the economically disaffected – pose a threat in the
“Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking?” So asks Derek Zoolander, before pulling his trademark pout, exhibiting cheekbones that look like they were engineered by Brunel. Zoolander came out a quarter-century ago, but now looks prophetic. Ben Stiller’s gullible, self-obsessed moron would fit right in
The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran, the worry about what might come next, we can still find time to feel a warm and comforting sense of schadenfreude over the large number of British women with stapled-on lips who are cowering in
About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by
“The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,” a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected the Chagos Islands deal. There are profound differences between London and Washington over military action against Iran while the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine this week has exposed further fault lines. The result
As the flames of the Epstein Inquisition burn higher, let me get my general confession into the public domain before the guardians of public morality come for me. Here begins my deposition. I, Matthew Francis Parris, do solemnly confess that I know slightly and have been on mostly friendly terms with former British ambassador to
Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defense, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys
No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a “one-time” (ha!) 5 percent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about
They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it
Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic…
I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is in Britain: the conversation underneath every conversation. When I first heard that remark I slightly balked. Not least because one had rather hoped that class would be less of a thing in Britain in the
After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ “sanctuary cities” unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that
I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolás Maduro and she replied: “I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?” This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I
For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped
I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following
