Martin Ivens

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice says she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen gives the smart politician’s reply: “I daresay you haven't had much practice. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Rishi Sunak, the UK’s pragmatic new prime minister,…

Joseph told Pharaoh to use his seven years of plenty to prepare for the lean times to come. In Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper danced away the summer while the industrious ant prepared for a harsh winter. Western leaders don’t lack for good advice from the classics, but clearly they don’t always…

In the words of Noel Coward’s chirpy song of doom, “there are bad times just around the corner” for Boris Johnson. The prime minister ends the week as walking wounded, having narrowly survived a no-confidence vote on his Conservative party leadership on Monday. If such a test was long in the…

When the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and television audiences across the world celebrate Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee this weekend, one telling secret of her popularity is likely to be overlooked. As her most authoritative recent biographer, Robert Hardman puts it, “the Queen genuinely…

When the global elite meets at the Swiss resort of Davos this week, for a spring gathering of the World Economic Forum (WEF), war will have forced its way to the top of the agenda. The pandemic has shrunk the annual jamboree of the great and the wealthy. Absent will be Russian oligarchs who hung…

Boris Johnson’s leadership may have become a laughingstock thanks to “Partygate” breaches of lockdown rules at Downing Street, but the UK is being taken more seriously in one part of Europe than it has been for years — Ukraine. Today, the most clear-eyed response to Russia’s propaganda offensive…

All tenants of 10 Downing Street know that British politics is driven by combat each Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions. Faced with a crisis, leaders must display strength and conviction to friend and foe alike. Betray weakness and they are doomed. In the scandal over illicit parties during…

Tory MPs describe Boris Johnson as forever slipping from the clutches of his political enemies just when they think they have him cornered. The UK prime minister will require all his fabled survival skills after the Liberal Democratic Party overturned a large Conservative majority to secure a by…

On Tuesday the Royal Standard flag representing the Queen was lowered for the last time in almost 400 years over Barbados, the Caribbean island that is now a republic with a president as head of state. At the handover ceremony declaring Barbados’s constitutional independence, Prince Charles gave a…