A few weeks ago I arrived at a meeting 15 minutes early. By the time my host arrived, a few minutes after the time our table was booked for, I was half way through a cup of coffee. “It looks like you’ve been here a while,” he said, frowning. “Yes,” I explained apologetically. “I suffer from chronic punctuality. It’s been a problem for years.” “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he said. But my friend, who admitted he doesn’t worry if he’s running a few minutes behind, didn’t understand what I have been through; the hours and days and weeks someone like me has wasted circling blocks, hunting for benches to perch on, standing awkwardly on street corners, looking ...

I’m lucky enough to have that rare thing in London: a flat I like. The ceilings are high, the windows are big and there’s a nice tree I can see from my skylight while I work. It’s a place that I’ve been in for nearly two years, where I’ve had people over, moaned about the tiny dishwasher, stuck stuff on the walls. In short, it’s somewhere I feel at home. Lulled into this false sense of security over a flat I’d got for below market rate, I was cruelly reminded on Monday that it’s not my home.  A dispassionate email from the letting company told me that my landlord was selling the house, and would we mind terribly getting gone months ...

This has been a big week for politics on both sides of the Atlantic. On Monday Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, narrowly escaped with his political life after 148 members of his own party voted to oust him as leader in a confidence vote. Then today, 9 June, the House Select Committee to investigate the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capitol in Washington DC will begin its six-part public hearings aiming to tie Donald Trump, the former president, to a plot to overturn the 2020 US presidential election result.  The US Congressional hearings and the UK vote have a similar objective: to hold elected officials responsible for their actions. No leader is expected to be perfect, but some behaviours are ...

As interest groups go, people aged 18 to 20 don't have politicians quaking in their boots. They don’t vote very much and they don’t vote as a bloc. So people aged 18 to 20 who smoke are a total irrelevance, politically speaking – smokers in general do not vote on the basis of smokers’ rights. Smokers are a dwindling minority – around 14 per cent of the adult population in the UK – and they increasingly come from poor and marginalised backgrounds. The fewer there are, the easier it is for politicians to kick them around. Removing the right of 18- to 20-year-olds to buy tobacco is therefore unlikely to generate much pushback from the people who will be directly affected, ...

When the Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel retweeted an off-colour, offensively misogynistic joke last Friday (3 June) he set off a firestorm of criticism, inside and outside the newsroom. Weigel swiftly un-tweeted the offending post and apologised, but it was too late. On Monday he was suspended without pay for a month. It’s hard to look at Weigel’s suspension and not see it as fundamentally a case of a company throwing one staffer under the bus in an attempt to squash an unpleasant story. The Post's reaction shouldn't be seen as an example of "cancel culture" or "the woke mob". Weigel was not suspended because socially liberal Twitter users have disproportionate power but because the newspaper, owned by Jeff Bezos, is ...

Boris Johnson responded to the damning confidence vote on Monday night (6 June) in the only way he knows how: by lying. He claimed that the 211-148 vote was “convincing and decisive”, and that it ended the debate about his leadership, when he knew full well that it signalled the polar opposite.  So did all those cabinet ministers who so slavishly and pathetically perjured themselves by parroting No 10’s line (thus Johnson corrupts all around him). So did the endlessly sycophantic Daily Mail, whose front-page headline (“Boris Vows: I’ll Bash On”) was a travesty. The headline in the paper’s Scottish edition (“Boris Clings On – But At What Cost?”) was rather more honest. Every dog in the street knows the result was catastrophic ...

What will be the first thing the world thinks of when it looks back at the first couple of decades of the 21st century? September 11, wars in Iraq, the Middle East and Ukraine; Covid, the advent of social media giants like Twitter and TikTok. Whatever you choose, it’s evident this generation lacks the same social and cultural revolutions that rocked those that came before. The optimism of the Sixties, rebellion of the Seventies, excess of the Eighties and hedonism of the Nineties have been replaced with boredom – green juices over pints, the "clean girl" aesthetic over party dresses, literary characters so dull your eyes flicker closed while reading – thanks to constant economic turmoil and a puritanical approach ...

I haven’t checked the news today but, in what I’m pretty sure must be the most important development in politics right now, at the end of last week the prominent Brexiteer, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere – otherwise known as Daniel Hannan – wrote a column for the Telegraph. In it, he argued that ministers are missing the opportunities presented by Brexit to deregulate the economy (a pretty damning attack on anyone who happens to be Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities right now). Instead of making the most of such opportunities, readers may be surprised to learn that the Tories are “pursuing semi-socialist economic policies which... condemn us to long-term poverty”. This, of course, is mostly the usual liberal Leave nonsense. ...