You know something has gone wrong when Jacob Rees-Mogg is suddenly the voice of pragmatic eco-conscious reason. Britain is facing an energy crisis this winter. This morning virtually all the front pages are leading with dire warnings from the National Grid that the country could face blackouts in a few months if the weather gets too cold and the supply shortage in Europe means we can’t import gas. Admittedly this is very much a worst-case scenario, but for the first time since the 1970s there is a real chance of households being cut off, for up to three hours at a time. You might expect the government to have something to say about how we can avert this catastrophe. Energy rationing is ...

I’m not going to start this article by saying that everyone is bisexual. That would be absurd (some people are pansexual). I’m increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is no such thing as “straight”. For more and more people, “straight” and “gay” are labels for the extreme ends of a spectrum that we’re all on, and each of us is capable of moving up and down that spectrum at different times in our lives. Sexuality, like gender, is rarely a binary. It isn’t uncommon for people living in same-sex institutions such as boarding schools and prisons to have sexual encounters with one another, and in which they form relationships – and then never revisit those urges again after they ...

In 2010, when I was chief economist in the Cabinet Office, I wrote a note to David Cameron suggesting that his manifesto pledge to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” was not compatible with sustained economic growth. He didn’t want to listen. But after a few years, during which Theresa May did her best to prevent students and skilled workers from outside the EU (as well as those who had the poor judgement to marry a British citizen) moving here, with precisely the damaging results that I had predicted, the government quietly reversed course. Indeed, the new post-Brexit migration system is a lot more pro-growth than many of us had expected, to the point where May’s adviser Nick ...

If you exit the Tube at Tottenham Court Road station in central London this week and look up, you might come face to face with a serial killer. On the side of the Outernet building, on a giant LED screen, Jeffrey Dahmer – as portrayed by the actor Evan Peters in the current Netflix series about his crimes – looms over the street, impossible to look away from, 100 times larger than life-sized. His portrait is coloured with a warm lustre, set between metallic gold panels. Dahmer – who murdered and dismembered 17 men between 1978 and 1991 – has, quite literally, been exalted: raised high over the city in a gilded frame like a god. This absurdly distasteful piece of ...

To attack inheritance tax is to – wittingly or otherwise – defend the principle of unearned wealth passing through the generations. Such an attack prevents any move towards equality in either opportunity or outcome. So for the City minister Andrew Griffith to refer to it as the one tax he would “most like to see eliminated” should be a horrifying statement that is tantamount to political suicide. We have been hoodwinked to oppose one of the perilously few functional wealth taxes that exist in the UK. There are many arguments against the tax, of course. It’s just that all of them are bogus. The biggest fear of inheritance tax is that it will leave the recently widowed partner of the deceased homeless. ...

Martin Luther King famously had a dream, that his four little children would one day be judged, not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. Few of us have dreams, in either the conscious or unconscious sense, which can claim to even approach that level. I suppose I could describe my irritational hope that the government commits to building both the Northern Powerhouse Railway and the eastern leg of HS2 as a dream; but the more honest statement would be “I have a dream, that one day I have to retake my A-levels, and nobody bothered to warn me.” (That one’s surprisingly common.) Suella Braverman’s dream struggles to rise even to that level. “I would ...

While the news is currently focused on Elon Musk saying that he will buy Twitter after all, this isn’t the only reason the richest man in the world has been making headlines this week. “Ukraine-Russia Peace”, mused Musk, 51, on Twitter on Monday, before rattling off a list of policy proposals that Russian state media outlets fawned over for days, including handing Crimea to Russia, imposing "neutrality" on Ukraine and a “redo” of Putin’s sham secession referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories. There was a poll asking whether users agreed with his ridiculous plans. The reaction from Ukrainians was swift and brutal, and appears to have blindsided the hapless billionaire. Even Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, weighed in with his own poll asking ...

This is the moment that Liz Truss has craved. After decades during which soggy statism has held sway, she has finally arrived to unchain Britannia. It took only a few weeks for ideology to collide with reality. The abolition of the 45p tax rate self-destructed upon arrival. The Bank of England was forced to intervene to save the government from its own recklessness. In polls voters have fled from the Conservative Party as if it were a new coronavirus. But the definition of an ideologue is someone who maintains their faith in defiance of reality. In her first party conference speech as Conservative leader, Truss reaffirmed her faith. For too long, she declared, the UK had been held back by an “anti-growth ...