Articles by James Monteith

Conservative activists are out campaigning for the local elections. In a few weeks, they may well be campaigning for the European elections. One Conservative MP recently admitted privately that these activists faced an impossible task: how, he wondered, could the party expect them to sell ‘this pile of shit’ on the doorstep. It is a very good question. I found … [Read on]

Decent people of all faiths and political persuasions will have been appalled at the carnage at a mosque in New Zealand, where a lone gunman and confessed Nazi-sympathiser opened fire on worshippers. Subsequent media analysis has inevitably focused on the activities of far-right extremists and white supremacists, whose targets in recent years have included Muslims, Jews, and teenagers at a … [Read on]

Many will regret the passing of that great comic actor Windsor Davies, whose depiction of Battery Sergeant Major Williams in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum made us laugh till our sides ached. We laughed all-the-more because the character, based on one of Davies’ own sergeant majors during his National Service, was so true to life – as indeed were the … [Read on]

Fraser Nelson’s Christmas message in the Telegraph the other day (‘Despite the Brexit warnings, Britain has never been a better place to live’) showcased everything that is wrong with the modern Conservative party. The good news, we learn, is that Britain is the best place in the world to do business, foreign investment is flooding in, immigrants are being welcomed … [Read on]

Let us open our borders to those ‘who will contribute’. Let us welcome ‘the brightest and the best’. Let us open our doors to ‘the best talent from across the world’. We need an immigration system that meets ‘the needs of our economy’. This is the true meaning of Brexit. No longer will we discriminate against non-EU citizens who might … [Read on]

We should never underestimate the public service value of the BBC’s ‘Question Time’. Last night it excelled itself. The black performance poet George Mpanga, who was on the panel, castigated a young white man in the audience for outrageously suggesting that the UK was one of the ‘least racist societies across Europe’, because he had only recently been stopped and … [Read on]

The flies are rounding on Boris. None of the cabinet herd would dare match themselves against him on their own – they don’t have the guts, but they can take him down in a coordinated ambush, cowering behind Mrs May’s wretched discredited Chequers plan. Few of them believe in it, but she’s not for changing, and so they dutifully fall … [Read on]