When I first met David Cameron, when he was contesting the leadership of the Conservative Party, I was immediately convinced he would win. David Davis may have since become a heroic civil liberties champion but then, if you remember, he was somewhat prehistoric, with his neglected wife and his busty blonde sidekicks in their "Double D" shirts. Cameron was easy, personable, modern. He didn't have any polices, but hey, let's [...]

"We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day," sang that well-known lover of children, Michael Jackson. Children making a brighter day? Not in this country, it seems. Where are these magical children who come with a promise, not a threat? They certainly haven't featured in the headlines of the past few years, unless they have gone missing. Nor in the endless [...]

There was a time when almost everyone said that Tony Blair would be a very hard act to follow. They were wrong. Gordon Brown - not flash, just Gordon - has begun the second act of new Labour like the seasoned pro he is. Following the consummate actor-politician style of Blair meant that Brown has been allowed to represent himself as the real thing. Confused as we now are about [...]

What does that Richard Dawkins really know about “the enemies of reason”? Has he met my friends? I sat watching his programme with two mates. One is a professor but still has at least ten extrasensory perceptions a day; the other is Scandinavian and was brought up by theosophists. Say no more.

We kept arguing as I was defending Dawkins, but he is so smug and fundamentalist it's a chore. [...]

Taken from The New Statesman 18 December 1987

Twenty years ago, at the height of Thatcherism, the miniskirt made a comeback. Suzanne Moore, who is now a contributing editor to the New Statesman, argued that in the 1980s miniskirts – long associated with sex and the 1960s – had come to symbolise a woman’s right to say “no”. They had also become a staple for power-dressing women and a way [...]

Where you end up depends on where you start. The mantra of the Blair decade should have been education, education, education, but ended surely as location, location, location. People droned on about property and got agitated about the precise location of those pesky weapons of mass destruction. Location matters. In terms of social mobility it still does. You may be able to fly anywhere in Europe for a tenner, but [...]

As you would expect, I am sitting in a shrine to Diana. There are loads where I live. They are called Turkish restaurants, and nearly all of them have portraits of Our Lady of the Landmines among snaps of the caves of Cappadocia. Suddenly my eldest daughter erupts. I must explain that she is fairly placid and a student, so this is unusual. True, she marched against the war, but [...]

John Harris could not wait, aged 15, to pledge his formal allegiance to "parliamentary socialism": the Labour Party. By the time he got to college, after years as an adolescent activist, he was restricting himself "to the kind of political activity that involved righteously shouting at my friends in the pub". In his heart, though (and what a heart he has), he is still Labour. He believes in the quaint [...]

I couldn't help but judge this book by its cover. Partly because its title is appropriated from Will Hutton's bestseller, partly because its publicity material boasts: "The face of the hooded boys on the cover of this book says something about modern Britain." Let's look closely at the faces of those two boys. Yep, they look slightly surly - as teenage boys do. And what does this reveal about modern [...]

Reading this book made me very nervous. Sure, I was familiar with the caricature of the neoconservatives as a bunch of Jewish hawks intent on permanent war, but it was the idea that I might actually be one that got to me. After all, the person considered to be the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, once defined a neoconservative as a liberal who "has been mugged by reality". What liberal [...]