This morning (27 January), at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in the exciting and future-facing city of London, Jeremy Hunt gave a landmark speech to mark three months as Chancellor of the Exchequer. “Declinism about Britain was wrong in the past,” he proclaimed to the assembled masses, “and it is wrong today. Some of the gloom is based on statistics that do not reflect the whole picture.” Where in that picture a decade of flatlining wages and decline in living standards fits, Hunt didn’t say, but the overriding message was clear: we should all stop talking Britain down. This country has an exciting future ahead. Meanwhile, news broke that someone in the department which Hunt oversees had come up with a brilliant money-saving ...

Almost a third of people eligible for cervical screening in England haven’t attended their latest smear test – around 4.6 million people. It’s the lowest level in a decade, despite years of campaigns urging people to book an appointment. This week, during Cervical Cancer Prevention Week, the NHS and other organisations are urging those who haven’t done so to take up the invitation for a test. Public awareness campaigns tend to highlight how these screenings are “just a few minutes of being uncomfortable”. “It didn’t hurt,” reads a tweet from NHS England. While this will be the experience for many, these patronising campaigns often fail to acknowledge pain as a valid reason that stops people from attending appointments. Whether it’s because of ...

One of the more extraordinary literary successes in France last year was a debut novel called Le Mage du Kremlin (“The Wizard of the Kremlin”) by the political scientist Giuliano da Empoli. The book takes the form of a confessional by Vadim Baranov, a character who based on the real-life figure of Vladislav Surkov, who was a key adviser to Vladimir Putin and his chief head of communications. Surkov was relieved of these roles in 2020 on Putin’s orders, but his influence and ideology lingers on in the Putin administration. In the novel Surkov/Baranov takes us on a guided tour of the secret workings of the Kremlin, revealing the thinking and methods that have guided Russia’s actions in recent conflicts, ...

Who is Pope Francis? His pontificate will be ten years old in March, yet he continues to shock people within the Catholic Church and beyond it. Francis's interview with AP yesterday (25 January), which covered controversial questions such as the treatment of LGBT+ people and relations with communist China, only adds to the impression that the pontiff is, to quote Winston Churchill, "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". Conservative critics claim that, in seeking to modernise the Church and liberate the faithful from the constricting shackles of tradition, he is a Marxist in league with liberals. Yet liberal commentators accuse him of not going far enough in the fight against conservatives, who reduce religion to a single world-view. ...

As headlines across the world are solemnly noting, the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight – suggesting the planet is closer to its end than it has ever been in the last eight decades. When you’re talking about the future, 90 seconds isn’t a very long time. If that’s all you’ve got left of your four-minute warning, it doesn’t really feel like there’s any time remaining to avert the catastrophe. Instead, we are firmly in hug-your-loved-ones and/or send-one-last-vicious-text-to-your-enemies territory. This should make any sane person wonder what on earth the Doomsday Clock – first conceived as a measure of how close the world was to nuclear war, now broadened to a wider range of existential threats – is actually for. It’s ...

Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher, former social mobility tsar and professional provocateur, has made headlines (once again) for saying that "woke" attacks on the privileged will destroy elite private schools. Birbalsingh, who resembles a character from Dickens's Hard Times (“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts”) and who, interestingly, has never worked in a private school, writes in an essay for The State of Independence, a book on private schools, that these "bastions of traditionalism" have become "sitting ducks for the movement of woke". I despise the word "woke". It’s an easy insult, both loaded and meaningless, and it tells you far more about the person making it than it does the person being accused. This headline- and hashtag-friendly monosyllable has become ...

Today is a good day for Ukraine, Germany and Europe: Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has agreed not only to approve the export of Leopard 2 battle tanks by other European states to Ukraine but also to send at least a company (14) of Germany’s own Leopards. What makes this yet better is that the US will now also send its own Abrams tanks – which was not planned until Scholz made it a condition for Germany’s change of position. Along with other recent pledges, including the Challenger 2 tanks offered by Britain, it means a sizeable and multinational consignment for Kyiv. It would be churlish not to acknowledge that this is a happier outcome, reached more quickly, than I ...

Protests in France have shown the danger of governments tackling pension provision head on, but ignoring the issue is just as risky. It’s a looming crisis with few easy answers. Almost every Western nation faces the same problem. State pensions have been paid out of current tax incomes, with today’s workers funding the living of today’s retirees. But this bargain will break down as the demographic ratios between them change. Declining birth rates and rising life expectancy is increasingly expected to skew. By the 2040s in Britain, the ratio of over 65s to workers will increase: the Office for National Statistics has estimated the proportion of over 65s in the population will be 24 per cent by then. Maintaining pensions at current ...