“It is with a very heavy heart,” then prime minister Boris Johnson told a press conference one Saturday four years ago, “I must tell you we cannot continue with Christmas as planned.” With the festive season just days away, and much of the country about to start moving about, Covid restrictions were to tighten again. But the new restrictions would not come into force until midnight. That gave everyone nearly eight hours to get out of dodge before they’d technically be breaking the rules. And so many did, bringing forward travel plans, piling onto trains which were very possibly plague-ridden. Within three hours, tickets on many train lines had sold out, and health secretary Matt Hancock was calling those opting to travel ...

The literary world is in uproar because the Booker Prize has its newest celebrity judge. It’s Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, who appears to be a genuinely enthusiastic fiction reader. She voted in this year’s New York Times poll to pick the best books of the 21st century (The Bee Sting, The Corrections, The Goldfinch) and owns a publishing imprint specialising in “sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking and discussion-driven stories.” This self-conscious turn from TV frivolity to the world of serious ideas is fun and campy: as Susan Sontag said, "camp sees everything in question marks… it is the furthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre." Parker has gone from playing the role of a sex ...

The appointment of Peter Mandelson – former cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and former EU trade commissioner – as ambassador to the US has divided opinion. Supporters commend him as an experienced heavyweight. While sceptics question his judgement (he called Donald Trump “a bully” in 2018) and his advocacy for closer ties with China (at odds with the position of the Trump administration). There are countless reasons to believe that he is not the right person for the job – not least when candidates with an established relationship with the new American right were eschewed for a politician with considerable baggage. It is, however, exceedingly rare that a diplomat’s character itself would damage a relationship between allies. Trump ...

The “Waspi women” – a group of campaigners who have since 2015 argued for compensation for money they lost as a result of changes to the state pension age – were defeated this week. On Tuesday (17 December) the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, announced that the government would not be paying them any compensation, in spite of a recommendation from the parliamentary ombudsman that they should receive up to £2,950 each. For a government with almost no fiscal headroom and a desperate need to fix ailing public services, the £10.5bn cost of offering such compensation was simply unaffordable. The decision has been met with furious denunciations of betrayal and broken promises. But the real villains here are the people ...

If you’re a journalist with a healthy sense of self-importance, you’ll love September 5. This dad-friendly and Oscar-tipped new thriller about the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis makes a bunch of burly American sports reporters into heroes. “I know it may not feel like it but you did a hell of a job today,” the head of ABC Sport (Peter Sarsgaard in serial-killer specs) reassures his rookie producer. The producer blinks back at him in quite reasonable disbelief. The crisis he’s been reporting has just ended in a shoot-out: 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and one West German police officer are dead. But not to worry – the plucky fellas at ABC did one hell of a job catching it all on ...

Britons’ favourite ideology is environmentalism. That’s according to an illuminating poll published by YouGov last week (it was the preferred choice of 64 per cent). This isn’t reflective of a nation of Just Stop Oil sympathisers but one in which David Attenborough is a secular saint and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has 1.2 million members. Nevertheless, in a country of environmentalists, you might expect the Greens to be thriving (concern about climate change exceeds 50 per cent in every seat). True, at the general election, they enjoyed their best-ever result. The party won four MPs and finished second to Labour in 39 seats. It also now has more than 800 councillors (and stands to make major gains in next year’s ...

One evening in late August 2018, Northamptonshire County Council took the unprecedented decision to abolish itself. The council was drowning in debt and had been forced to take an axe to local services. Earlier that year it had become the first local authority in two decades to declare itself bankrupt. On the recommendation of Max Caller, the government’s chief council fixer who had been called in to conduct a review of the struggling authority, the only way to overcome Northamptonshire’s issues was to rip it all up and start from scratch. In 2021, Northamptonshire’s existing county council and seven districts ceased operating and were replaced by two new unitary authorities.Before this, Northamptonshire was run via a two-tier system, whereby larger ...

Ireland was the last country in the European Union to host an Israeli embassy. It is now, nearly 30 years later, the first to have one closed down. Ireland – self-appointed standard-bearer of the peaceniks – joins Iraq, Somalia, North Korea et al in having no Israeli diplomatic representation. Israel had repeatedly criticised Ireland for its reflexively anti-Israel disposition. When the Irish government announced on 11 December it would intervene in calling for the International Court of Justice to expand its definition of genocide (to incorporate Israeli action in the Gaza War), the Rubicon was crossed. Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar explained that “Ireland’s extreme anti-Israel policy” had become overwhelming, that the “anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against ...