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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...

... to buy a fat pig, Home again, home again, jiggety jig” is one of the more ancient English nursery rhymes, dating at least from the time of Elizabeth I. Unlike many of those old songs it does not have a hidden meaning – unless our readers know otherwise – such as “Ring-a-ring of roses” which is about the 1665 plague year; we sneeze and all fall down because we are dead!