One of my greatest professional shames – and goodness me is that a competitive list – is quite how little I know about Wales. I don’t mean the country itself, exactly, although no doubt I’m fairly ignorant on that score too. What I mean is that, despite the fact I’ve been writing about politics and public policy for quite a few years now, I have very little sense of how things are going west of Offa’s Dyke. Embarrassed as I am, though, I don’t think it’s entirely my fault. Much of what I do know about politics and public policy is gleaned from spending a lot of time reading newspapers, and even more on political Twitter. On neither have events in Wales ...

To British voters, the cost-of-living crisis is king. Nothing else matters much, and it will likely stay that way until the crisis is solved or until after the next election – whichever comes first. This simple fact has rendered all attempts by the government and other parties to refocus public anxieties – be it on migration, Northern Ireland, the Budget – as little more than muted distractions. This is why Labour still leads the country by 20 points, despite the public’s uneasiness with the Labour brand and Keir Starmer, and despite their own preferences for strict border controls. New polling from YouGov for the Stop the Squeeze coalition, which tries to provide answers for the cost-of-living crisis, lays those anxieties bare. ...

It was suggested this week that a group of Tory MPs will propose council tax discounts as the way to break through Britain’s Nimby problem. The Conservative Growth Group, a faction largely formed from Liz Truss’s backers, is expected to announce an initiative of discounts in areas that allow development, as a sop to those who would otherwise block homes. Yet the plan seems to show the same sort of muddled thinking that led to Truss’s premiership imploding. The proposal is a typical bit of economically liberal Tory thinking. Truss and her allies believe incentives matter, and that tax incentives are the ones that governments can use to encourage the sort of behaviour they want. Offer people a cut, they figure, ...

I’ve always felt just a little bit sorry for William Hague. One of the most impressive Tories of his generation, he won his party’s leadership aged just 36, at a time when every holder of that post who’d come before him had gone on to be prime minister. He must have thought he was a shoo-in, the 21st century’s answer to Pitt the Younger. Unfortunately for Hague, though, he got the job in 1997, after Labour had won a 179-seat majority. Nobody could see the rising star, who’d go on to be one of the few senior ministers to escape the current government with his reputation intact. All they could see was a young fogey, spouting cringey comments about how much ...

One of the most futile but satisfying things I have ever done is to block Taylor Swift on Twitter. I could have muted her, or muted her name, but it didn’t feel like enough. The singer may have 94.1 million followers, but she had to know that she had at least one enemy. It wasn’t even because of anything she’d done; I was just sick to the back teeth of everyone I knew loving her music, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. If left in a vacuum, I would have been entirely indifferent to Swift. The internet was what turned me into a hater. I’ve been thinking about that process a lot recently, and about the act of not really caring about ...

Of course Donald Trump’s return to Twitter was a post of his scowling mug shot. The former president hasn’t tweeted in more than two years, having been banned from the site for his role in the 6 January riots – a decision that Elon Musk reversed once he bought the platform in November 2022. Yet Trump, ever the showman, took his time, waiting for the right moment to tweet. That moment came on 24 August after he had surrendered to authorities in Georgia on charges of plotting to overturn the state's 2020 election results. Once Trump had paid his bail bond of $200,000 he was released from the Fulton County Jail until the trial, taking with him the perfect branding tool ...

Murray Foote is, in my experience, a good man to have on your side. When I was a young, out-of-my-depth political editor at the Daily Record, lacking both the aptitude for and much interest in digging up exclusives, he was an understanding and constructive news editor. When we played five-a-side football, it was always preferable to be in his team – opponents would bounce off his solid Dundonian frame, plus he had a left foot like a bolt gun. Over the years, Foote held some of the biggest jobs in Scottish journalism, editing both the Daily Record and its sister the Sunday Mail, from which he emerged with his reputation enhanced – no easy feat in an era of falling circulations ...

It’s the vogue to say, contrary to received wisdom, that single people are happier than those in relationships. It is suggested that single women in particular might be better off without men. I increasingly come across people who say relationships just aren’t for them. People write in the Guardian and the New York Times to declare they don’t want a long-term partner. The Reddit thread “ForeverAlone” has 183,000 members. It demands “No incel speak” from users, but as the thread’s name suggests, it's full of people who don’t even date in the first place. This trend is borne out by the British census’s statistics on marriage (the best proxy we have for relationships): 63.8 per cent of men and 54.2 per cent ...