Catholicism defined the home, the school and the streets where the new MP grew up. It moulded the view that this former altar boy would take into Downing Street.by Patrick Maguire in The Times, 17 June 2026 Years ago, a younger, upwardly mobile version of Andy Burnham liked to explain himself to interviewers with a…
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Assisted dying bill is shoddy and riddled with defects
Resurrecting it in the hope that it can evade necessary scrutiny is unconscionable.The Times View, Tuesday 16 June 2026. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome, consider the return of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. That the proposed legislation faced almost 1,300 amendments…
I Grieve for the Israel I Once Admired So Much
Antisemitism is real. But we cannot be blackmailed into silence about Binyamin Netanyahu’s excesses Max Hastings in The Times, 27 May Walking alone in the fields I sometimes exclaim loudly, obliging me to assure the dogs that I am not getting at them. Dismay is instead prompted by a memory of some folly in my…
The lapsed Catholic
Welcome to Portrait Of: our new satirical series lampooning the stereotypes of high society and beyond (The Spectator) Dominic, known since his teens as Dom, enjoys telling people that he’s Catholic, or a ‘left-footer’ as he sometimes modestly describes himself. He feels it a distinction that gives him a bit of mystique in the financial…
Jack Scarisbrick RIP
Academic and biographer of Henry VIII who led a reappraisal of the English Reformation and went on to form the anti-abortion charity Life, dies aged 97 Wednesday 20 May 2026, 5.00pm, The Times Jack Scarisbrick had overturned 400 years of Protestant “Whig” history with some success, so reversing the recently enacted Abortion Bill might have…
Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again
Bill McKibben in THE GUARDIAN, Sunday 26 Apr 2026 On the same way that America’s shambolic war on Iran has turned Donald Trump into the most effective EV salesman the world has ever seen, so his attempts to defend said war have produced another unlikely outcome: the rise of a genuine and global theological debate.…
Don’t Keep Mum – Write That Condolence Letter
Edward Lucas in The Times23 April 2026 On Monday morning she was sitting in bed drinking whisky, reading The Times and fuming about Trump. On Tuesday she was drifting, and on Wednesday afternoon she took the last breath of her 97th year, with my sister and me holding her hand and head. As I began…
Trump is too deranged to continue in office
Matthew Parris in THE TIMESMonday April 20 2026, To say someone has lost his mind can carry a range of meanings. Accusations of mental instability may be merely a kind of insult, bandied around cheaply in politics, and not a serious diagnosis. But when I say the president of the United States is insane I…
An Unjust War
There are very good grounds for saying that the joint attack on Iran by the United States and Israel was reckless, illegal and immoral. The only possible justification – that if successful, it would make the world a better place – depends on a chain of possibilities that are highly implausible. From the Editor, The…
The stealth philanthropy of buying a Range Rover
by Rory Sutherland in The Spectator Even though Christmas is over, I’ve been thinking about the season just gone. There is a tradition of complaining about its commercialisation, portraying Christmas as a grotesque manifestation of consumer excess. But it’s strange to use our seasonal extravagance to attack consumer culture. That’s almost diametrically wrong. What Christmas…