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The press pack are camping on the White House lawn. No really, at the moment they are, as the Donald has knocked down the east Wing of the White House to build his BEAUTIFUL ballroom (try knocking down the east wing of Buckingham Palace or the Elysee. Some things are easier in Washington.) But the media are happy to be out in the November damp of Washington DC in the hope of getting some juicy quotes and explosive photographs of the 47th President exploding in rage over polit

Some people will fly from London to LA for a Taylor Swift concert; others will fly across the planet to follow their sports hero or favourite team but as a tree-hugger I am always keen to travel to look at a tree I have never seen before, particularly when it is new to science...

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

Words have always intrigued me. I amused my English teacher, the wonderful Jack Roberts, by weaving new words into school essays: perfunctory, desultory and mendacious were early examples. Not an easy task. I was hoping to impress and also showing off. Mr Roberts was perhaps more amused than impressed by my clumsy efforts, though I also got a hint of encouragement...

by Eric Boa   The concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) gained worldwide attention and a lot of gentle mocking when first mooted in...

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.