KEVIN FEATHERSTONE


ARCHIVE
04.12.2023 / 21:16

With many British voters seeing Rishi Sunak as a weak personality, he is determined to present them with a new persona. Last week, we saw the fallout. 


10.11.2023 / 08:43

Democracy is under threat across the world. Fewer people today live in democracies than did two decades ago. Opposition to democracy, and to capitalism, has grown as populists launch “culture wars” – cruelly exploiting migrants and minorities – and appeal to the socially and economically excluded.


23.09.2023 / 11:22

Democracies thrive on opposition – it is their distinctive characteristic. Forty years ago, a senior British minister, days before an election, commented that he thought landslide majorities were a bad thing because, on the whole, they did not produce “successful governments.”



31.10.2022 / 22:26

After a period of uncertainty and speculation as to his whereabouts, Oscar Wilde responded to journalists’ questions by declaring, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Those convinced that current international threats and instability presage the decline of the West warrant a similar response.


15.07.2022 / 16:00

Boris Johnson was a political phenomenon. Narcissistic. Opportunistic. A natural rebel and a divisive figure. A populist. No other British leader in recent times has been so frequently identified simply by his first name. In the end, his political career finished rather like it had begun.


26.08.2020 / 16:35

Who in the West knows what to do about Recep Tayyip Erdogan? He’s no longer who we hoped he was. He challenges what we stand for – our norms and values – and what we thought were our shared strategic interests. 


04.04.2020 / 18:03

The responses to crises come in two phases. First, governments respond in predictable ways, consistent with how they have acted before. But then crises have a longer-lasting power, and that is to shift our thinking about what governments should do.




30.01.2019 / 16:04

The British political system is in crisis – its most serious since the Second World War. One of the biggest and most complex questions of all was put to the people in the Brexit referendum in 2016 as a simple yes/no question, with no means to establish what “no” actually meant.


17.08.2018 / 18:40

Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s chief “Brexit” negotiator, visited Athens last Friday to give the government an update on progress.