Daniel Finkelstein

Should you cut off a dog’s tail in one go? Or in slices? Thirty years ago, when I was running the Social Market Foundation think tank, we held a debate on liber

When Rishi Sunak stands up tomorrow to provide his latest economic statement to the Commons, he will have read all the stories about the cost of living squeeze.

In the 300 years since the office was created there have been 55 prime ministers. And not one of them has fallen in the way Boris Johnson did. Yet a sense that the Conservative Party has been involved in — no, that is too passive and neutral — has been responsible for a historic disaster seems compl

In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Golgafrinchans hatch a plan to get rid of the useless people in their population. Not the thinkers and

I think Brexit was a serious mistake. But I don’t think it was stupid. I’ve never thought that. I only wish I felt the same way about the government’s plans fo

It’s not even entirely obvious that the primrose was really Benjamin Disraeli’s favourite flower. At some point he’d clearly told Queen Victoria that it was.

In 2004 a social researcher interviewed Rosa Keane and her husband Henry. How, they were asked, had they met? It had been decades earlier but, fortunately, they

Daniel Finkelstein: The Windsor framework demonstrates just what can be achieved when serious and disciplined people are in charge.

In 1962, Boris Slovin, a Latvian electrician working at a railway station, was given an American book by a co-worker. Could he translate it, asked the friend. Slovin couldn’t, but his lawyer wife

Ed Davey is, by all accounts, a nice and caring person. He is a person of integrity, an honourable man. And he believes strongly in the politics he espouses. In many ways he is admirable. And for all