Column / Investigation: Peter Oborne’s Diary

In the days when I wrote racing columns for the Sporting Life Weekender and the Sunday Express, I kept by my desk a well-thumbed copy of Lord Rothschild’s royal commission report on gambling.

The Spectator boasts that its summer party is the “most sought-after social ticket of the Westminster summer season, bringing together the most senior politicians, journalists, and political aides, alongside the crème de la crème of the arts and media world”.

Years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Peter Carington over lunch at his home in Buckinghamshire. He was 93 years old and the last surviving member of Winston Churchill’s post-war Government.

Obituaries of the economic historian Robert Skidelsky, who died in April, have praised his monumental three-volume life of John Maynard Keynes. But none paid much attention to a rather more original and important book that Skidelsky wrote as a struggling graduate at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Suetonius, who served as personal secretary to Emperor Hadrian, enjoyed privileged access to the imperial archive when he researched The Lives of the Caesars.

Three months remain before the United States celebrates a historic milestone: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It is a simple matter to identify the moment when it went wrong for Keir Starmer.

The collapse of mass party membership and the long assault on trade unions have left both the Conservatives and Labour hopelessly dependent on donor cash.

It is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that the United Kingdom is complicit in two ongoing genocides: Sudan as well as Gaza

Rather than challenge a morally corrupt system, Keir Starmer has chosen to become part of it

It is exactly 50 years since I went up to university to read history. Almost everything I was taught has turned out to be wrong.

Now here we are playing cricket in the south west – Morgan McSweeney territory. The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff is less well-known here than his father, Tim, a Cork-based accountant whose firm makes a fortune housing asylum seekers.

Before Donald Trump launched his illegal attack on Iran, Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, popped up on the Today programme to prod him into action.

Last month in Sarajevo, I asked a guide to take me to the street corner where Gavrilo Princip (pictured) ignited the First World War by shooting dead Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie.

Twenty years ago, the political philosopher David Marquand wrote his far-sighted tract Decline of the Public. Reading it today is uncanny because it predicted with such clarity and understated intellectual power the course of British politics over the last two decades.

You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to know that the Trump presidency would lead to calamity. All you needed to do was read his speeches and study his record. It was all there – including the catastrophic tariffs. Yet, Britain’s most famous newspapers, along with two former prime ministers, hailed him as world saviour.