Queen Elizabeth II was such a private person that she eschewed all public display of affection with Prince Philip for the entirety of their 70-year marriage. She was once filmed reuniting with a three-year-old Prince Charles after a tour abroad by shaking the toddler’s hand. If there’s one thing that unites the endless – endless! – tributes that have been published since the late monarch’s death last Thursday it’s reverence for her stoicism, her quintessentially British stiff upper lip. While Charles’s romantic life has been regularly reported on by tabloid newspapers, the Queen was admired for her ability to maintain an air of mystery, to be "serene, controlled". Her supposedly self-deprecating humour was revealed only to her private secretaries and ...

The sheer size of Liz Truss’s first major economic policy decision is extraordinary. Even after a few years in which we have all grown used to exceptional figures attached to government initiatives, the promise to fix domestic energy prices until 2024 is superlative: expected to cost £150bn, it is a far larger spending commitment than the £70bn allocated to the pandemic furlough scheme. In theory the policy shelves the issue of household energy prices until the next election by pledging support over the next two years. But the scheme, despite its immense size, is riddled with holes. The typical household energy bill is still set to rise by £600 from 1 October – far less than the £1,500 increase threatened by ...

In recent years conversations about “Britishness” and colonialism’s legacy have taken on an uncomfortable pitch. Books on the overwhelmingly negative aspects of empire and debates around reparations have entered popular discourse; statues have been knocked down; textbooks are being changed. For many people, Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle, whose mother is African-American, represented how far Britain had come with regards to race, but that sentiment rapidly faded as Markle struggled to assimilate into the royal family and her relationship with much of the British media grew more fractious. Awkward questions continued to be raised: after all, the monarchy invested in the slave trade; its leader is still the head of state of 14 Commonwealth nations from the Bahamas to Tuvalu. Yet with Elizabeth II ...

There are many disturbing aspects to contemporary conservative Christianity but one of the most troubling is the phenomenon of ersatz martyrdom. In an age when people are still genuinely persecuted and even killed because of their faith, there are Christians in the UK and North America who claim oppression from places of comfort and privilege. Their suffering is minimal and, sometimes, one wonders if it is something they embrace.  That’s surely the case with Enoch Burke, an Irish evangelical who is currently in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. Burke, his supporters and various irresponsible newspaper headlines claim he is in prison because as a teacher he refuses to use a transgender student’s gender-neutral pronoun. Actually, Burke was suspended from his school on full ...

Schools may have declined in the last decade, but data about schools has improved. These days, the stats of SATs readily reveal not just how well 11-year-olds did in their primary school exams but how far they have come: how much progress they have made since reception and how well they cope with special education needs or social disadvantage. Or, this year, how they didn’t cope. For the first time since Michael Gove introduced his much-hated "fronted adverbial" SATs in 2012, a generation of school children has been shown to have done substantially worse than the one before them. Within that, the gap between the progress of well-off and disadvantaged families has widened catastrophically to its biggest in ten years.      It’s tempting to blame the whole thing on ...

Liz Truss’s new cabinet has more people of colour than any previous one. With Kwasi Kwarteng as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Suella Braverman as the Home Secretary and James Cleverly as the Foreign Secretary, Britain is for the first time led by a government in which none of the major offices of state is held by a white man. This development has prompted an inevitable celebration from people on the right – who seem to believe it provides proof that, contrary to liberal orthodoxy, the Conservatives do better for people of colour and women. The suggestion is that the opportunities handed out to Tory MPs reflect the situations of people across the country. For many on the left, the “diverse” cabinet ...

The hustings are over and the UK has a new Prime Minister. Liz Truss says getting the economy growing again is a top priority, but who benefits from that is of secondary importance: Truss argued in a BBC interview the day before she was elected that looking at economic policy “through the lens of distribution is wrong”.  In part her comment could be seen as a riposte to those, generally on the left, who argue that it’s the "going for growth thing" that’s wrong – and that we should just be aiming for a fairer distribution of what we’ve already got. However, central to understanding how to build a better Britain in the 2020s is recognising how it got into its ...

It was a scene so dystopian that Black Mirror viewers would have shivered. On the morning of Monday 5 September, This Morning’s Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby were cheerfully standing in front of their “Spin to win” wheel, a regular competition in which viewers are offered the chance of winning cash and other prizes. But instead of a new car or a holiday, one of the prizes on offer was simply having your energy bills paid. “So we’ve got ‘we’ll pay your energy bills’, we've got a £1,000...” said Phil, cheerfully describing two of the winning options on the wheel, pointing out that energy bills would be paid for just four months. As viewers at home wondered whether this hard limit ...