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You only realise how depressing it has become to live in Keir Starmer’s Britain when you land in Cape Town towards the end of an interminable northern winter. Your mood immediately lifts – and it’s not only because of the warm ocean air or the diamond sky above Table Mountain. There is a contented buzz
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Keir Starmer used to be our MP and I have always had a soft spot for the blinking dafty ever since I wrote to him at the height of the antisemitic triumphalism of the Corbyn era. I warned him of the strength of feeling in our corner of north London, and suggested he be careful if
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Lloyds Bank has been running a new advertising campaign which updates its long-standing black horse corporate branding. The horses no longer thunder along a beach, but interact with people who we assume are actual or potential customers. The soothing payoff slogan goes: ‘Lloyds Bank. By your side.’ The latest episode features a girl who slightly
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A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no
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It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole
From our UK edition
It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole
From our UK edition
A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no
From our UK edition
So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela that it is useful, finally, to be able to read about him and the privations of his prison years in his own contemporaneous, understated prose. At more than 600 pages including annotations, The Prison Letters
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This article originally appeared in the Spectator in March. It is being reposted on Coffee House after the former Prime Minister was pictured letting his hair down at a festival It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard
From our UK edition
It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard last week that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of
From our UK edition
South African democracy has not, on the whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the Rainbow Nation, liberal Afrikaners persuaded themselves that all would turn out well in the end. But in their hearts, they sensed it would go wrong. And so it has. At the time of writing, President
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Zac Goldsmith has spent much of the past few weeks telling us that the London mayoral vote ‘will be very close’. But it wasn’t, in the end: he lost by a fairly large margin. Some political campaigns are failures; others are simply tragedies, and Zac Goldsmith’s falls into the latter category. As I found out when I spent
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Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I
From our UK edition
Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I
From our UK edition
Peter Popham is commendably quick off the blocks with this excellent account of the run-up to last November’s Burmese general election, in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept the board. At the time of writing this review, Suu is taking four ministries, including foreign affairs. So she will do what she
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Every working day before I start pounding the keyboard of my ridiculously flashy 27-inch iMac, I perform a little ritual. I straighten the fountain pens I keep on my desk, and make sure they are fully inked. Though I always have an eye for my next acquisition, I currently have just six pens, which are fuelled
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Hollywood tends to treat Richard Nixon as an oafish B-movie villain, so it is ambitious and original of Harry Shearer to try to convince a British audience of the very feminine side of the 37th American president. As a veteran comedy actor and the ‘voice’ of several of the Simpsons cartoon characters — including Mr
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Two or three mornings a week I walk our four-year-old down to his Catholic primary school in Camden Town. As we pass an expensive though rather bad private school, we have to squeeze our way through the mayhem of north Londoners decanting their pampered progeny from their double-parked 4x4s. I can’t say I like the