The New Conservative

Stewart Slater

Justice

A Question of Justice

It has been about 15 years since I last saw my children. A prolonged separation (undertaken for what I perceived to be the greater good) led the court to conclude that too much water had flowed under the bridge and later, by the time they were re-located after a move overseas, age meant the legal […]

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Trump and Zelensky

Lonely At The Top 

It’s a hard job being the world’s only hyperpower. You can’t just down tools after a heavy day of hegemoning and slope off to the pub for a good old moan with your colleagues. Not only does no-one really understand what it’s like, but you never get any down-time – there’s always something going on

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Oxford University

Clever But Unwise

The Columnists’ Paradox is that the more one writes, the less one need be read. We all have our relatively fixed biases and a reasonably finite store of stories and references, and it does not take too long (longer than my own writing “career” to date though, obviously…) for those to become sufficiently well-known to

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Balkan Troubles

Sitting on the Cauldron

“I don’t pay any attention to Elon Musk” opined the politician turned talking head, adopting the de haut en bas tones of Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. He is, of course, only a politician turned talking head because he lost his seat at the election, which leads to the perhaps surprising implication that the views

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January

January Reflections

Regular readers may remember my struggle a year ago to get an A.I. to produce an image for Christmas. Being every bit as male, cheap and lazy in 2024 as I was in 2023, and having the additional justification that it would be an interesting check on the improvement in our soon-to-be silicon overlords, I

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Boris Johnson

Britannia Rules The Waives 

The part of Boris Johnson’s autobiography which most immediately captured the public imagination was his confession that, in the midst of the pandemic, with fears that the E.U. was hoarding vaccines belonging to Britain, he considered ordering the army to cross the Channel to seize them. Pearls were clutched and sage pundits argued that here

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Keir Starmer

Keir Canute

“I stand here also as a black man” the Foreign Secretary portentously informed the United Nations. While sitting down. “I am a woman” was the overwhelming message of the Chancellor’s glossy video celebrating her position as the nation’s first female Second Lord (Lady?) of the Treasury. Their answer to the late Col. John Boyd’s famous

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Reflections

Reflections

My thoughts as we begin another month: One of the greatest feats of self-control any of us pull off is when the words “I told you so” cross our synapses but not our lips. This is Labour’s problem with “Clothesgate”. Look at any word cloud about the Prime Minister and after “Boring”, the next most

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