Sam Leith

It’s possible, though not popular, to feel a bat-squeak of sympathy for Sir Keir Starmer on a human level these days. It can’t be much fun being him. It’s also possible, though not popular, to hold in your head at the same time the ideas that a) he’s...

It's possible, though not popular, to feel a bat-squeak of sympathy for Sir Keir Starmer on a human level these days. It can't be much fun being him.

“Why don’t you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham? Give him a chance, sort of thing?” This seemed, on the face of it, an admirably charitable and fair-minded suggestion. Amid the projectile-...

“Why don't you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham?

Grade: B+ Why do elephants paint their balls red? So they can hide in cherry trees, of course.

The EES border check debacle is the EU at its worst - Sam Leith

Among my many unpopular and unpatriotic opinions is that, in most of the ways that matter, the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks won.

I wrote in this space not long ago, in the context of Nicola Sturgeon , about how incuriosity can, when taken to extremes, be a sort of superpower.

You could think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle would contain all the people who have read Homer’s Odyssey (it would contain a much, much smaller circle of people who have read it in the original Greek). The other circle would contain all the...

You could think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle would contain all the people who have read Homer's Odyssey (it would contain a much, much smaller