The New Conservative

Stewart Slater

Mount Rushmore

A Question of Confidence 

“I think this is probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house, “ JFK told his dinner guests one night. Those present would probably have agreed – there were 49 Nobel Prize winners in attendance. The President, however, did not, for he finished his sentence with the words, “apart from those times

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Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch rapping

Rap Battle Politics  

“Absolutely brutal” was the GBNews verdict on Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions. Long seen as the Voice of Farage, the channel has been showing some ankle to the Tories recently, their leader appearing on it so frequently they should probably start paying her. To be fair, she does seem to

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Old writing desk

The Stories We Don’t Tell

When did you become you? It’s hard to tell really. Is there even a “you” for you to have become? Your bloodstream is full of oxygen you have just breathed, your muscles are currently using the protein you recently consumed to build or repair muscle. The “stuff” that makes you up today is not exactly

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The emperor's new clothes

The Chancellor’s New Clothes

There is a pleasing synchronicity that Oxford announced its word of the year is “rage-bait”. After a weekend of splenetic fury over the Chancellor’s statements in the run-up to the Budget, which have been revealed to be, if not lies exactly, then certainly economical with the actualité. One might expect her opponents at the Daily

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Christmas dinner

Rules and Rituals

In our over-credentialled times, we have come to expect that an “expert” will have some sort of formal qualification. A medical expert on TV will, we assume, be a doctor. A financial expert will have jumped through the regulatory hoops required by the government of their jurisdiction. What, however, of the lady I saw the

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David Lammy

We Could Be Heroes 

We are all, it is said, the heroes of our own lives. The world is merely the stage which allows us to strut our stuff. Other people serve as extras to reflect glory on the main character; events, the fuel with which we cement our heroic status. But heroes are competent. Tom Cruise did not

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Rachel Reeves

Public Service

For something which knows so much about me, Facebook seems to know very little about me. It knows where I went to university, but deluges me with posts from the alumni associations of different institutions, some of which I would not have deigned to go to, some of which did not deign to allow me

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