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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

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.

As a boy at school in the 1950s I once had to speak in a debate on “A woman’s place is in the home”.  My own mother had been a housewife all her married life and my five siblings and I enjoyed the fact that she was always there for when we came home from school or from whatever we had been doing. Perhaps because of that I had been nominated by the teacher to speak in favour of the motion.  Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable with the idea.  I had been struck by a quote from Ge

So, Sadiq Khan is now a knight of the realm. Could anyone please tell me quite what Sir Sadiq has done to earn this knighthood? He is the first mayor of London* to have been so honoured, yet, under his watch, our capital city seems not so much to have flourished as to have become a rather diminished version of its former self.  Crime has risen, homelessness has increased, and in common with so many other British cities mainstream business, retail in particular...