We wanted to tell you about our plans for the next phase of UnHerd and invite you to become a member.

We’ve had an incredible few years — our audience has grown enormously, and we have become one of the UK media’s standout success stories. With our brilliant team of editors and contributors, we’ve vigorously challenged “herd mentality” without sacrificing quality or thoughtfulness.

We’ve been lucky to have strong start-up backing, but if we want to become a long-term feature of the media landscape, we must become financially sustainable. So, we are launching a paid membership scheme — £1 a week, with a 25% reduction to 75p a week if you sign up in the next fortnight. ...  Continue reading

The reputation of yet another public servant bit the dust this week. James Moore, some sort of higher-up within NHS Wales, committed the ultimate sin – a high crime for which the destruction of one’s career is the only appropriate sentence.

His transgression? Upsetting some people on social media. And, these days, nobody in public life can, having crossed such a line, expect to survive the inevitable fall-out.

In a post on his personal Facebook account, Moore complained about the ‘zealotry’ of Welsh nationalists and likened the treatment of those in the principality who do not speak the native tongue to that of black people in apartheid South Africa. It was a clumsy comparison for sure. Stupid even. ...  Continue reading

May I be the first to wish A Merry March 4th to you and your kin.

What is ‘March 4th’? Well, think of it as the Cinco de Mayo of the clinically certifiable.

In 1933, in his famous first hundred days, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the 14th Amendment to reduce the period that an outgoing President would spend as a lame duck. Prior to that, rather than late-January, incoming presidents would be inaugurated on 4 March.

Hence why many of Q’s bitter-enders have seized upon the date as the next Big One, where Trump loyalists inside the government will rise up, and overthrow the Bidenista regime. ...  Continue reading

Jonathan Sumption was once the epitome of the Establishment — a brilliant barrister who represented the Government in the Hutton enquiry, Supreme Court Justice, supporter of the Remain campaign and esteemed historian of the Hundred Years’ War. But then Covid happened.

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun. ...  Continue reading

When we first went into a lockdown just under a year ago I remember lots of people saying that this would lead to a baby boom in nine months because people would be locked up inside together and “nudge nudge”. And I remember thinking — really? I don’t know about anyone else, but spending my day reading about a fatal respiratory disease, with one daily outing to queue outside the supermarket like some bedraggled Soviet babushka, doesn’t strike me as a classic aphrodisiac.

And, as with a thousand Covid takes, it has indeed perished, with the pandemic leading to a huge baby bust in the United States. ...  Continue reading

Her Majesty’s Treasury is opening a “northern campus” — an effort to get long-term economic decision-making out of London. 

As expected, the location has been confirmed as Darlington, on the banks of Tees. The choice is significant for several reasons. First of all, it’s in the North East (just about) — but also a stone’s throw from North Yorkshire. In fact, it’s just across the river from the Chancellor’s own constituency of Richmond. Teesside International Airport is close by, which commuting civil servants and visiting ministers will find convenient. Darlington is also handy for Barnard Castle — the well-known beauty spot and eye-testing centre. ...  Continue reading

Today’s breach between Fidesz and the European People’s Party (EPP), Europe’s alliance of moderate conservatives, is dramatic. Rather than see his MEPs ignominiously expelled from EPP’s parliamentary delegation, Viktor Orbán made good on his threat to leave the group. Today Fidesz’s Families Minister announced in an open letter that the party’s MEPs were resigning their EPP membership.

The split is the logical outcome of Orbán’s flouting of EPP party discipline by campaigning alongside leaders of rival (far-) Right parties from other EU states ahead of May 2019’s EP elections and his public denigration of Weber — then EPP’s candidate for Commission President. Shortly after, in September 2019, he antagonised the group further by saying at a meeting of the ‘post-fascist’ Fratelli d’Italia party in Rome that he stood ‘a little to the Right’ of its leader Giorgia Meloni. ...  Continue reading

The Rwandan president Paul Kagame is a master at playing Westerners for adulation and aid money. As I wrote here last week, he has successfully suckered in a long line of leading politicians and other prominent people to pay homage to his reign and pump money into his regime’s pocket.

His latest promoter is media owner Baron Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, who has recast the gangly dictator as an environmental hero in an interview run in The Independent and the Evening Standard. “We’re trying to move away from our ugly history, to give people hope,” says Kagame, under a headline hailing the president’s “intent to make conservation his country’s next battle”. ...  Continue reading