From my weekly column for London’s Evening Standard We are going to need three billion trees over the next 30 years, according to the Committee on Climate Change, to put the country back on a carbon-neutral path. That’s 90 million a year, and a return of about a fifth of…

From my weekly column for London’s Evening Standard £350 million: that’s how much Westminster council is about to spend on a revamp of Oxford Street. Pedestrianisation — pah! There will be a postage-stamp square of walk-only area around the heaving mess that is Oxford Circus Tube station. But in that…

From weekly column for London’s Evening Standard After seven years of the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange emerged, like a mythical hermit, bearded and ranting, to be dragged into a police van, charged and rapidly found guilty of jumping bail. Where are the people who supported him in 2012 and stumped…

From my weekly column for London’s Evening Standard To those of you just getting to grips with our parliamentary jargon, wait until we get to the European Parliament elections. A quick guide: Alde is not a keenly priced supermarket (it’s an alliance of liberals and democrats in Europe); terrible things…

From my weekly column for London’s Evening Standard Theresa May was definitely wrong when she said this nation was “bored of Brexit”. Quite the opposite. We are obsessed. Diners are checking Twitter all the way through dinner and giving the latest updates to the tables beside them. …

What does it mean to be a citizen? This is the question posed by a group of British people in the Netherlands, who have brought a case to argue that they can retain their EUcitizenship — who knew we even had this? — after we Brexit. The Amsterdam district court…

They say that when your shoe-shiner is giving you share tips it is time to sell out of the stock market. What conclusions can one draw then, when a young fogey in a checked waistcoat is sitting in a London gentleman’s club extolling the virtues of Bitcoin? Such a man…

Christ’s right hand is raised to bless the person who looks at it. Who now will hang Salvator Mundi in his or her palace and stand in front of the Christ to receive that blessing? Up until this week, it was Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertiliser salesman whose recent years…

Written before a Twitter employee pulled the plug on Trump’s account for 11 minutes — the two are caught in a dance of death I occasionally wonder which will go first, Twitter or President Trump. The two have been an accidental marriage made in hell: a short punchy messaging service…