It’s a fascinating contrast that just as the Conservative Party has elected its second leader in a row from an ethnic minority background – one who identifies as “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant” – quite a few of its bright young things are becoming very interested in Enoch Powell. Across Twitter, blogs like J’Accuse and Pimlico Journal, and the pubs of South London, a new generation of neo-Powellites are sprouting with alacrity. Appalled by the last 14 years, wedded to a cask strength combination of immigration restrictionism and free-market economics, they are disillusioned by a Conservative Party they consider decadent, useless, and intellectually bankrupt. A few right-wing bloggers are not representative of all young Tories. But Kemi Badenoch’s ...

This week I wrote a letter that, until recently, I couldn’t have imagined I would have the need or the nerve to write. It was to the Archbishop of Canterbury telling him that I agree with those who feel he should resign. The context was the Makin Report into the abuse perpetrated by the barrister John Smyth (who had long been associated with the Church of England) and the Church’s response, which confirmed that Justin Welby was in possession of information in 2013 that, had he acted on it differently, would have led to the prevention of many cases of subsequent abuse. Welby was interviewed by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News on Thursday 7 November, the day the report was published, ...

If history, as we are fond of saying, appears first as tragedy, then the reaction to the second coming of Donald Trump appeared more as tedious redux than farce. As in 2016, there were tears, viral meltdowns and the decrying of an out-of-touch liberal establishment: “I’m interpreting tonight’s results as the revenge of the regular old working-class American who has been crushed, insulted and condescended to,” Scott Jennings told an early-morning CCN audience. But had this crack-up not already happened before, and had a corresponding journey to understand this revolt against the elites not already taken place? The year of 2016 still works as a sort of folk rupture in the memory of the West, Brexit and Trump forming a concatenation ...

Who still remembers the riots which swept through English towns in August? At the time Keir Starmer described them as far right thuggery. Law and order was quickly restored. No more was said and Westminster confined them to the past. And then two weeks ago on 29 October, Axel Rudakunaba, accused of the murder of the three small girls in Southport on 29 July which precipitated the riots, was charged with possessing terrorist material and producing ricin. In contrast to today’s political amnesia, the Conservative Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw ordered an inquiry under Lord Scarman into the 1981 Brixton riots. The rioters were mostly young and black, and had been subjected to intolerable levels of police racism.  Scarman’s report was published seven months later in November. It detailed the ...

In every conversation I had with Trump supporters at his rallies during the election, one impulse kept surfacing: drain the swamp. It was a powerful feeling that government was broken, that the economy was not delivering the goods, that mainstream politics had failed – and that working people had been left behind. In their eyes, the “swamp” is Washington itself, seen as an interest group of its own, a self-regarding, self-sustaining elite of apparatchiks, divorced from reality, scratching each other’s backs. That was the rationale for voting for an insurgent like Trump. An outsider. A maverick. A straight talker. Someone who breaks the rules and might in turn break the logjam. A businessman offering anything but business as usual. It is why ...

The national symbol of Azerbaijan is a flame. It has come to be known as the “land of fire” owing to the abundant oil and gas resources in the adjacent Caspian Sea. This nickname is apt. 90 per cent of Azerbaijan’s exports are of fossil fuels; it remains one of the top ten most oil and gas dependent economies in the world. On 11 November, tens of thousands of delegates will descend upon the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, for Cop29. They will be greeted by the city’s imposing Flame Towers – a collection of three skyscrapers which faintly curve upwards and, when lit up a night, supposedly emulate the glow and flicker of a flame. Azerbaijan’s genesis as a petrostate dates back to ...

Rivals, the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s raunchy 1988 novel about regional television production in the Cotswolds, begins aboard Concorde. High above the Atlantic, travelling at twice the speed of sound, the recovering showjumper and Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) – who is, that description notwithstanding, the romantic hero – joins the mile high club with a gossip columnist who bears an unnerving resemblance to Cherie Blair. You couldn’t start a story like that today: the plane on which it takes place no longer exists. The result of a multi-billion pound Anglo-French research project, Concorde could fly at up to 1,350 miles per hour, travelling from London or Paris to New York or Washington in just three and a half ...

One of the most troubling statistics from the UK economy is this: in the year to June of this year, customers of Nationwide, the UK’s largest building society, spent £51.8m on pets and £37.1m on childcare. As a nation, Britain appears to spend more looking after the children of other species than it does on its own offspring. The roughly £10bn a year the British public spends on dogs is ten times what the government spends tackling homelessness. Pets are also over-represented in how people think the country should be run, as evidenced on Bonfire Night earlier this week by the delivery to Downing Street of a petition, containing more than a million signatures, requesting “an urgent review of firework regulations” that includes “restricting private ...