Nigel Jones

Nigel Jones is a historian and journalist

Dick Taverne was the last social democrat 

From our UK edition

Lord Dick Taverne, a one-time Labour Minister turned Lib Dem peer, has died at the great age of 97 – and with him has passed the once leading force of social democracy in British politics. A Charterhouse and Balliol College Oxford educated intellectua, Taverne was a barrister who entered Parliament as Labour MP for Lincoln

Banning Israeli football fans from Villa Park is a disgrace

From our UK edition

The message could not be clearer: Israeli football fans are not welcome in Birmingham. I am no lover of football, but that doesn’t stop me feeling outraged and sickened by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being told not to attend their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month. The seats at Villa Park that had

Real British values

From our UK edition

An upper-middle-class former banker friend recently attended a Reform UK selection meeting for council candidates in a decaying southern coastal town. Although he is a man of the world who once worked on oil rigs and in a shoe shop, my banker friend professed himself ‘shocked’ by the standards of dress and deportment of the

Shouldn’t Greenwich’s Royal Naval College be used for something better?

From our UK edition

Britain is to get a new ‘super university’, an enormous centre of higher learning that will, from the next academic year, under a single vice-chancellor, educate some 50,000 students. Under the cumbersome name the ‘London and South East Universities Group’, the new university is a merger of the existing University of Greenwich and the cash-strapped

Britain’s problem? We’re too nice

From our UK edition

Studying our national character and current malaise has convinced me that the root cause of Britain’s problems is that we are too nice. Compared with our nearest European neighbours, let alone with most other countries in the world, being British automatically confers a series of characteristics not generally shared elsewhere. For a start we are

Bring on the driverless Tube

From our UK edition

London’s entire underground tube system – apart from the Elizabeth Line – is being paralysed for almost a week by a rolling series of strikes called by the RMT union to which the Tube drivers belong. The Tube is not due to return to ‘normal’ until 8 a.m. on Friday. The disruption is the first all-out

Reform needs ex-Labour people too

From our UK edition

Back in July I wrote in these pages that if too many Tories joined Reform, Nigel Farage’s party would risk looking like a rescue raft for rats leaving the sinking Conservative ship. Since then, the trend for repentant or redundant Tories to desert their old party – so comprehensively rejected by the voters – and

The Stuarts were our worst monarchs

From our UK edition

This year marked the 400th anniversary of the death of King James I of England (James VI in Scotland), the first monarch of the generally disastrous Stuart dynasty. By no means forgotten by historians, the anniversary was marked by no fewer than three heavyweight biographies, and headlines devoted to the King in the Times and

The rats that predicted our future

From our UK edition

Next month is the 30th anniversary of the death of the American ethologist John B. Calhoun. In the early 1960s, he created an series of experiments to discover the causes of social dysfunction. His most famous work involved a so-called ‘rat utopia’ in which rodents were provided comfortable living quarters with unlimited food, water and