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Even green campaigners fear they are damaging the planet, consuming land that could be left to nature The actress Tracy Ward objects to her ex-husband the Duke of Beaufort building a 2,000-acre solar farm in Gloucestershire: “Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites,” she says. “Be careful what the climate change […]

The World Health Organisation is gearing up to persuade the world’s governments to sign a new pandemic treaty in May. Though called an “accord” so as not to frighten us democrats who still like that old-fashioned thing called accountability, it is a significant power grab by this unelected body. Never waste a good crisis, as […]

The current investigation isn’t doing its job. We need a faster, cheaper rival to actually get to the truth. In his excellent 2014 book Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed begins with the story of an airline pilot, Martin Bromiley, whose wife died because of mistakes made by anaesthetists during a routine operation. He set out […]

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshall, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs […]

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the […]

This book on Covid’s origins is limited to criticisms deemed acceptable to Beijing. At 1.30am on 31st December 2019, an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait […]

The jabs undoubtedly saved lives, but overblown claims sadly damaged the reputation of vaccination. Vaccination is one mankind’s most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of human lives. New vaccines against malaria and melanoma promise great […]

The more I think about it the more enraged it makes me. Back in late November, senior Tory minister Michael Gove was slapped down by the UK Covid inquiry’s head counsel, Hugo Keith, for raising the issue of where the virus originated. ‘There is a significant body of judgement that believes that the virus itself was […]

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a […]

Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were banned from the first Armistice Day parade in Whitehall by a bossy admiral on the grounds that they were pirates who targeted civilians. In response they adopted skull-and-crossbones badges and arranged their own celebrations on […]