Australia’s culture of compliance has a sting in its tail. Captain Phillip arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788 with about 1350 souls who had survived their remarkable voyage. He brought with him 7 horses, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, 6 rabbits, and 7 cattle, and enough grain to sustain the colony until the first harvest. […]

After a fortnight of freedom, how’s it going in the Land of the newly Free? As a half-Dane, the news that Denmark was planning, from the beginning of this month, to scrap all its ‘NPIs’ (Non-Pharmaceutic Interventions – do keep up!) and to declare Covid 19 to be no longer a ‘socially critical disease’ was […]

Or ‘treatments’ of dubious efficacy, cooked up in undue haste, and given a leave pass by panic-struck regulators? It has always seemed to me a bit dodgy that the purveyors of the so-called vaccines that have been foisted upon us were allowed to enter use in double-quick time, breaching time-honoured protocols for preclinical safety testing. […]

Must we keep seeing the bad money drive out the good? Winston Churchill famously said that ‘democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.’ He was clear-eyed about the shortcomings of democracy, but equally critical of the flaws in other systems, which he found to be […]

My UK correspondent Christine Battle has written persuasively about the ironies attending the dire straits in which that country’s Prime Minister finds himself. Yes, the conduct that has occurred in his house is reprehensible, and should have painful consequences for all concerned. Just what those consequences should be, however, remains a matter for contentious debate. […]

Christine Battle reflects on Partygate, and finds something to thank it for. Personally, I’ve got nothing but the warmest of feelings for the Number 10 official who decided, in the middle of England’s lockdown in May 2020, to arrange a wine-and-cheese get-together in the garden of our Prime Minister’s home in Downing Street. And then […]

“The Wisest Fool in Christendom” was the memorable tag given by the diarist John Evelyn to James the 6th of Scotland, the 1st of England, to describe a complex personality, by turns perspicacious and obtuse; learned and ignorant. I think that Evelyn may have meant that he was a king who possessed much sophisticated learning, […]

As the Omigod variant continues its march through our populations, ‘vaccinated’ or unvaccinated alike, conferring the blessing of natural immunity upon all but a very unlucky, very few, it’s perhaps time to talk about the Covid deniers. No, I’m not talking about those of us who, from the start, had this ‘pandemic’ pegged as a […]

The Monarchy Watching yet another of the indefatigable Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys, I was reminded that one of the unheralded benefits of the orgy of ecstatic confected panic with which the bien pensant elites have preoccupied themselves over the last two years has been the way it has displaced – and given us a […]

The guffaws which have greeted Tony Blair’s knighthood have largely centred around his decision to join the USA in going to war with Iraq. As befits a true Harrumpfer, my own objections to the man arise from practically everything about his career except his decision to invade Iraq, and I suspect that history may judge […]