Peter Burden

The new Leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, 56 year-old Edwin Poots, in being elected to the post, has overcome what for others might have been an insurmountable obstruction in his campaign. He was saved, though, by a bizarre but generally held view that a personal belief, however irrational,...

It can be deeply inspiring to watch another man deliberately place his own head on the block over a matter of principle, especially when that principle is of vital importance to our national identity.             Two years ago, Peter Oborne, a conservative journalist who had consistently advocated support for Brexit...

Tucked in a mental pocket, scrawled on a scrap of ethereal paper lodged in my half consciousness, I have a list of 8 records chosen for a fantasy date with Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs. This list, like those of thousands of other no-hopers, changes frequently, depending on the...

In the world we inhabit, what used to be called ‘myths’, once long in the growing, have morphed into swiftly manufactured ‘conspiracy theories’, and in the same way that religious myths can engender unquestioning belief in non-facts, so these invented conspiracies can influence followers of a political idea. This phenomenon...

There are still people living in western democracies who are puzzled by the large numbers of white people who came out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Sherlock Holmes might have said to his baffled colleague, ‘It’s evolutionary, my dear Watson.’ I haven’t yet seen Mr Trump...