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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.

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

Possibly the 20th June was not the cleverest day to choose to fly directly over the crow- fly-line between Tel Aviv and Isfahan; so our Airbus 380 pilot from Dubai wisely turned due west across the Empty Quarter, over the Red Sea and into Egypt before heading north for Zurich. On the plane were at least 200 Chinese tourists, each group led (normally) by a small lady armed with a wooden stick and a coloured flag. On arrival in Zurich the sheep and goats were separated: the Swi

At last, some good news for California.  The Golden State, which for so long seemed the ultimate in seaside, wealthy, laidback living, has been through some bad times recently.  Increasing and painful poverty, failing services, devastating fires in the beautiful Pacific-side suburbs, the flight of some of the great tech companies and their enormously wealthy employees to Texas and the south.  But finally good news to report:  Kamala Harris will not be running for Governor in

On 28 December each year Western Christian communities  around the world mark the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the horrific events recounted in the Gospel of St Mathew (Ch 2 vv 16-17) when, having learned of the birth of Jesus Christ,  Herod the Great, King of Judea (modern day Israel/Palestine) ordered the killing of all babies under the age of two years in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. Herod had been told of the prophecy that from among these childre

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...