The New Conservative

Stewart Slater

The fatal dance

The Fatal Dance 

The Parties did not, as someone once put it, send their best. Lower tier cabinet and shadow cabinet members turned up, along with the Lib Dem Deputy Leader. To the Greens and Reform, the event did not even merit an MP. But if the audience at Channel 4’s Local Election Debate (more of a Q&A […]

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The Vatican

My Will Be Done 

“You have no idea how much money it costs to keep the Mahatma in poverty.” It was not long after Pope Francis’ death had been announced that this saying from one of Gandhi’s followers came to my mind, the cumulative effect of countless mentions of his humble lifestyle combining to give his simplicity an almost

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Library

April Reflections

Modelled on Jay Nordlinger’s “Impromptus” in National Review, I’ve written another ‘Reflections’ piece which is a series of paragraphs on various ideas: Early in my career, my boss gave me some of his funds to run. Not, to be clear, out of laziness but because, as he pointed out, no-one knew whether I would be

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Rachel Reeves

The Terrible Trilemma 

Giddy is not a word one would naturally associate with Rachel Reeves. She gives every impression of having been the sort of girl who dedicated many happy hours to re-arranging her pencil case. But giddy she appeared last week, announcing the opening of a new theme park in the international tourist hotspot of Bedford. Gone

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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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