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Oh, how we Brits are enjoying France’s political travails! The UK’s mainstream media, reliably francophobe when it comes to politics, economic policy and business, have revelled in the inability of President Emmanuel Macron to keep his prime ministers for longer than a few months. They have welcomed his attempts to reform the French economy but mock the French people’s unwillingness to accept the consequences - working longer hours, retiring later, and taking smaller pensions

“Very flat, Norfolk” Noel Coward wrote in Private Lives (though I prefer the legend that he said it to the Queen Mother after she referred to a Royal weekend at Sandringham).  Norfolk certainly has that reputation; flat and remote with big skies.  North Norfolk, where your correspondent generally deploys his quill pen, is not flat; it is rolling, and wooded, and really rather mysterious and beautiful.  Move east from here though and there is a definite feeling that the land i

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