It looks as if Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is a “moderniser” after all, having apparently been influenced less by Machiavelli than by Martin Scorsese. Whatever the truth of the gruesome “bone saw” rumours, it’s a moral certainty that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was…
This article was originally published on politcs.co.uk on October 5th, 2018. According to the 1987 film The Lost Boys, a vampire may only enter your home if you invite them in. Two august institutions nearly failed that test recently, when the Guardian‘s offices in London…
In the 1962 film The Music Man, con artist Harold Hill dupes and fleeces River City, Iowa, using only his charm and wit. Jeremy Corbyn has managed to do the same to the Labour Party with neither. Corbyn’s total mastery of the party is clear…
It’s easy to laugh at the pathetic cover story offered by Russian heavies Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov for why they were in Salisbury at exactly the same time a former Russian spy was being poisoned with a deadly nerve agent. In Britain, their interview…
The ongoing fracas over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party – currently swirling around its efforts to redefine the disease – continues to have a definite element of the surreal. While column inches and Twitter threads are devoted to ever-more sophisticated discussions about anti-Semitism’s Left-wing and…
This article was originally published on politcs.co.uk on February 14th, 2018. The main point of interest in the Telegraph‘s recent attack on philanthropist George Soros is not whether its authors are antisemitic, but what it tells us about the growth of the paranoid style in…
This article was originally published in Progress magazine on November 29th, 2017. It is a sign of our shallow times that despite the ubiquity of the word ‘populism’ over the last two years, so little attention has been paid to the movement which gave it…
This article was originally published on politics.co.uk on November 20th, 2017. When Alex Salmond was interviewed about his new show on RT UK by Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow last week, he accidentally flagged up a sinister reality about his latest venture. “It’s edited…
This essay was originally published in Little Atoms on January 20th, 2017. As the nation’s political leaders jostled for position after the Brexit vote in the EU referendum, a popular hot take among lazy journalists was to say how it was all “just like Game…
Interview with author Thomas Frank, originally published in Open Democracy on July 27th, 2016. Now that the Republican Party has chosen a coiffured gargoyle as its nominee for president, the panicked eyes of the world turn to the Democrats, who have just selected Hillary Clinton…