I come from the Lancastrian town of Ormskirk, which, though pretty, provided little in the way of opportunity or aspiration. No one in our family had been to university. I qualified for free school meals. Expectations for my future were low. But I was lucky. I had great mentors and ended up in Downing Street.
Not for the first time, our Prime Minister has executed a very sharp U-turn. Last month, heralding the achievements of AstraZeneca, Boris Johnson professed that the vaccine had been made possible because of greed, echoing the phrase used by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street that ‘greed is good’. Now, though, he seems to be of
My brother recently decided to get a DNA test. He discovered that our family were all descended from a mix of the usual British suspects — a bit of Viking, Anglo-Saxon and Celt — and were predisposed to standard diseases and health risks. But there was one surprise. My siblings and I had double the
Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States, has never been able to keep his mouth shut. Throughout his absurdly long career in politics, he has always said too much, made stuff up, gone too far. His friends and fans just shrug it off. ‘That’s our Joe.’ The trouble is, Biden is now America’s
Compared with the United States, the UK has so far been relatively cautious about launching stimulus programmes to kick-start the economy. And yet perhaps it doesn’t need to. People are paying off their credit cards, putting some money into the stock market, buying new houses, as well as finally booking a restaurant and getting back
In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some clothing off the ration
It is not unusual for governments to focus on a big event after a period of crisis. In 1951, the Festival of Britain was meant to rejuvenate the country after years of post-war austerity and rationing. The 2012 London Olympics, presided over by Mayor Boris Johnson, supposedly announced the UK’s recovery from recession with a
I started working for the royal family in a temporary role at Balmoral Castle, Her Majesty the Queen’s residence in the Highlands, in 2006. I spotted an advert on my university careers website and thought it might be a good summer stop-gap job until I found something more permanent. I must have made a good
One of my favourite things on British Muslim TV is Ask the Alim. An alim is a learned expert in the law. He’ll answer anything, live. The 2020 Best Bits highlights programme included a question about divorce. Can a man take back a woman he has divorced? Good question. It depends whether the divorce is
The government’s decision to water down new foreign investment rules designed to protect national security casts serious doubt about its resolve to keep China out of the most sensitive parts of the British economy. Raising the threshold above which an overseas stake must be examined from 15 per cent to 25 per cent will sharply
No one can say that, over the course of the past year, we have not had the opportunity as a country to practise the grim arts of grief and mourning. We all know the figures — 127,000 Covid deaths and counting — but I wonder if, in the face of this onslaught, we have lost
The secret is out: the Russian government has been lying to its people. Officially, Russia’s coronavirus death toll for last year — as reported on state television and logged at the World Health Organisation — was an impressively low 86,498 for a population of 146 million. In his traditional December press conference Vladimir Putin proudly
Do you remember the first wave of hygge, in 2015? It seems a long time ago — back in the freewheeling technicolour of a pre-Covid world — but at that time hygge was the hottest thing to come out of Denmark. The country already attracted envy for its vigorous welfare state, covetable knitwear and high
I hadn’t heard of Everyone’s Invited until a few weeks ago, despite being mother to a 15-year-old girl. I was a little surprised to learn that the forum making the front pages, on which predominantly teenaged schoolgirls share their experiences of every-day sexism, sexual harassment and worse, was actually founded in June last year. The
Prince Harry is now chief impact officer for BetterUp, a Californian corporate consultancy whose ‘mission’ is to sell online life coaching with — in his words, — ‘innovation, impact and integrity’. Harry may not realise it, but he is the latest celebrity frontman for the rapidly growing, broadly unregulated and frequently dubious corporate ‘coaching’ industry.
In November, when cases were surging and a second lockdown was under way, Boris Johnson made a big promise: things might look bleak, he said, but the ‘scientific cavalry’ would arrive. It duly did, with a vaccination programme that became the envy of Europe. The mood of the country lifted. Today, Britain is still on
‘I loathe the idea on principle. I never want to be commanded, by any emanation of the British state, to produce evidence of my identity.’ From the ‘personal notes’ on Boris Johnson’s website, February 2005 ‘There is the loss of liberty, and the creepy reality that the state will use these cards — doubtless with
Jerusalem The vaccination centre where I got my jabs was in the cavernous foyer of the Jerusalem Arena, Israel’s largest indoor sports venue. Through the locked glass doors, I could see the seats where my 15-year-old and I spent so many hours cheering on our basketball team. Putting my ear to the door, I could
When Mao’s Red Guards first got to work in China, they defaced statues before they tore them down. It was common to find a statue of Buddha, for example, with new signs saying: ‘Destroy the old world! Establish a new world!’ Boris Johnson’s government isn’t keen on statue removal, but it is offering a compromise.
On the letters page of the Sunday Times last month, the presidents of the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association were among the signatories to a letter boldly headlined ‘History must not be politicised’. They were incensed by a rumour that government funding might be cut for the Colonial Countryside project, which looks at
