Simon Jenkins's Blog

The former PM’s leaked visit to the White House is concerning. This scheme is an outrage that no other Arab – or western – state could back

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Tony Blair’s leaked presence at the recent White House discussion of Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” plan is either good news or outrageous. Good news if he used his influence with Trump to termin...

By eschewing living in Buckingham Palace and suggesting ‘the firm’ be heavily scaled back, the prince has a survival plan that might work

This was a good week to bury bad news. But why bury good news? No banner headline announced that the Prince of Wales is to move house. He is to go from Adelaide Cottage in Windsor Home Park to the nearby Forest Lodge.

That was not the real news. “Sources” said the switch was the outcome of Prince William’s “brutal” past year, in which both his wife and his fathe...

Student debt increasing, graduate salaries dropping, high-skilled jobs thin on the ground – higher education in the UK is a mess

A Chinese economist once asked me to explain British universities. “Why do you take your young,” he said, “at their most creative age, lock them in a monastery for three years and make them drunk?” Each August I recall this question when hundreds of thousands of British teenagers scramble to enter university. They must perform utterly archaic feats of memory in their ex...

Angela Rayner’s proposed reforms are ill-conceived and fail to address the system’s inherent unfairness

At last a Labour government has found itself a wealth tax – or thinks it has. Its proposed adjustment to council tax in England is crude and possibly cruel, and does nothing to help with Rachel Reeves’s “missing £40bn”. It is designed merely to shift money from rich regions to poor ones, and thus correct an imbalance in Britain’s regional wealth. As such it is overdue and welcome.

British budget...

The US president promotes classical architecture and loathes ‘ugly’ wind turbines. Keir Starmer would dismiss him as a nimby, but on this Trump has a point

Trigger warning. Some readers may find this disturbing. Not everything Donald Trump says is mad and a lie. Not all of it is about money. Some of it is even worth saying. When he came to office, one of Trump’s first actions was extraordinary. He directed his fire at what he saw as the ugliness of American architecture. He demanded that at least...

The PM promised to prioritise oracy, but has failed to do so. Set against tests and exams, it is seen as a luxury: in fact it is essential

The greatest failing of Britain’s schools is to teach children to read, write and count, but not to speak. They teach what technology can increasingly do for them, but not what it cannot. A regular complaint of today’s employers is that applicants for jobs lack social skills or work ethic.

Pupils are rarely taught how to present themselves, handle arguments or...

Even after Tony Blair’s bungled war, UK leaders still yearned to dominate the world stage. With the lifting of the superinjunction, we can all see where that has led

What odds on a public inquiry into the Afghan superinjunction? Gold-plated, judge-led, three years of fun and games, that is how British politics normally kicks an embarrassment into the long grass. And what odds on who will get off scot free – Tony Blair?

The more we pick away at the stages of this fiasco, the more from the start one...

Of course the climate crisis must be confronted, but history, tranquility and beauty must also count for something

Nowhere does landscape marry passion quite so much as in Yorkshire’s Wuthering Heights. The tempestuous Pennine contours and tumbling streams perfectly frame Emily Brontë’s turbulent romance. Wild storms and dark gullies echo the cries of Heathcliff, Cathy and sexual jealousy. From moorland peaks to the historic Brontë village of Haworth below, the scene is unspoilt.

I cannot think of...

The Tory leader should have supported Labour’s welfare bill – but such responsible behaviour would have defied the norms of British politics

They roared, they wept, they cheered. The audience gasped and the markets plunged. The critics loved it. Foreigners are famously envious of British politics played as fun.

I always thought it cruel to attack a person in tears. Tell that to the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch. Her savaging of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, at prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on We...

With hawks on one side and doves on the other, we ignore the obvious fact that engagement is the best defence against conflict

‘Toadying”, “slavish”, “cringe-worthy” were the words hurled at Nato’s Mark Rutte for the praise he heaped on Donald Trump. But words cost nothing. Keir Starmer went further. He dug into his pocket and $1.3bn for just 12 aeroplanes. He promised never to use them, or put any bombs in them, without orders from Washington. He might as well have enrolled in the Uni...