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At 6am Eastern Time in the USA on November 5 last year – election day – something strange started happening. Google’s search engine began to register this question: “Did Joe Biden drop out?”. It soon became the number one enquiry on Google, peaking at midnight Eastern Time, after the voting booths closed on the West Coast. The next morning, as the results began to show that Donald Trump had beaten Kamala Harris to the Presidency, the same question was number one on Google Sea

Strange times.  It is an accepted quirk of British politics and the media that August is the “silly season”.  Ludicrous stories that cannot possibly be true suddenly capture the headlines; politicians come out with most bizarre statements; items of no real significance suddenly dominate for days on end.  Then the schools reopen, the airports are jammed with returning holidaymakers, forty-mile traffic holdups appear on the A303 past Stonehenge; and all returns to normal. 

Are the Tories going anywhere at all, or are they, as some have suggested, a spent force? This seemed to be the question at the heart of the South West Conservative Policy Forum (CPF) conference in Exeter, which I attended last weekend. As a more-or-less lifelong Tory voter, I have several confessions to make. First, I only joined the party in 2018, when it became clear that the hopes pinned on Theresa May to make an acceptable Brexit deal were running out and a leadership ra

The obituaries being written about Western liberal democracy might be a touch premature but, while it is certainly not on its deathbed, there are unmistakable signs that it is a bit short of breath at the moment. Similarly, although comparisons with the erosion of Western liberal democracy in the 1930s are a little facile, there is some truth in the old saying that, while history does not repeat itself, it does tend to rhyme.

In a year which has seen clampdowns on online posts in the UK following the Southport riots and endless examples of police overreach on ‘hate incidents’, and in a week in which hundreds have been arrested for demonstrating in support of Palestine Action, recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the government, questions of how free we are, or indeed should be, under a democratic system spring to mind.