Nick Cohen

The phrase ‘existential crisis’ is thrown around too easily. But it is hard to find a better description of the state of the Labour party, whose members and supporters overwhelmingly oppose Brexit but whose leader and advisors cling to the old Communist party line that the EU is a ‘capitalist club’. Previously solid followers of

Modern politicians are like drug dealers intent on keeping their clients’ hooked. They sell fixes to their core voters: upping the strength and deepening the addiction. The punters know at some level they are being played. But a temporary high is better than no high, and infinitely preferable to the sweats and shakes the cold

Boris Johnson seems the opposite of Theresa May. The worst thing she ever did was run through a wheat field. The worst thing he ever did remains open to debate. But dark suspicious prompted Charles Moore, whom older readers will remember as a defender of family values, to ask: ‘Does it matter if our future

Rather rashly, Boris Johnson published The Churchill factor: How one man made history in 2015. It was without historical merit, or intellectual insight, but Johnson did not intend readers to learn about Churchill. The biography was not a Churchill biography but a Johnson campaign biography, where we were invited to see our  hero as Winston

The remain campaign’s political dilemma looks insoluble. Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic – gloom is my default state –  but it is certainly formidable because it requires remainers to simultaneously support and oppose Jeremy Corbyn. I can make the people who spell it out sound silly. I shouldn’t because some of the brightest and

Protestors on the anti-Brexit marches have sensed an eerie absence. ‘What is it?’ I thought back in March as I stood on a soapbox to address an audience so jammed by the weight of numbers on Park Lane that it could not escape. Then it hit me. ‘What the hell have they done with the

When people challenge my opinions I shrug, said Vladimir Nabokov. When people challenge my facts, I reach for my dictionary. Brendan O’Neill, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Living Marxism, now of Spiked, has had me reaching for mine. He accuses me of lying, a charge which might send a less liberal journalist than

Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pretends to stand for the traditional values of old England: Parliamentary sovereignty, patriotism and decency. However little the uninitiated thought of Farage, they would expect his candidates to condemn the IRA murdering children in Warrington and to take a strong line against child pornography. Not so. Or rather, not always. Claire Fox (top

Who will fight the British far right? The centre right, the left, the liberals? The European elections are giving Nigel Farage the chance to push for a catastrophic Brexit, and build a formidable and ugly nationalist movement. Yet allegedly serious politicians, who have a duty to oppose him, forget the national interest and their own

One could almost look on Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn and see a story of frustrated love. They could be happy, the soppy observer might think. If only they could get some time on their own, and unburden their hearts, they would find they were in perfect agreement. Alas, their inability to be honest with each

Dogs might not bark because, as Sherlock Holmes observed, there’s no reason to bark when they see their master. Alternatively, dogs might not bark when fear reduces them to whimpers. Which is it for the British centre right? Is it friends with the far right or frightened of it? Look around and notice what isn’t

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in

Chaos theory’s assertion that tiny changes can have dramatic effects is being vindicated with a vengeance in Westminster. If not quite as paltry as a butterfly flapping its wing in the Amazonian rain forest, the creation of the Independent Group seemed a small event. Eight Labour and three Tory MPs joined. Eleven in total. Just

To say that the May administration is ‘the worst government anyone can remember’ is to abuse the English language. It isn’t a government but a collection of factions so far apart I am surprised they can stay in the same cabinet. On the backbenches the European Research Group operates as a separate English nationalist party.

I don’t believe in turning George Orwell’s writing into Holy Scripture – he would have hated the reverence as much as anything else. But if the Brexit right is going to crow and quote his dislike of the communist-influenced left intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s it should read the rest of his work first.