John Harris

With Christmas approaching, it’s time to sort out the winners and losers in the battle for the year’s best celeb autobiography. Will it be David Jason or Amanda Holden? Or could Mo Farah clinch the top slot?
Like “modernised” Conservatism, digital cameras and rock music made by people under 50, the Christmas celebrity memoir may be breathing its last. In 2012, a year that brought us books by such titans as Cheryl Cole,…

The debate so far shows there’s potential for at least one part of these islands to reject the consensus and seek something better
To borrow a phrase from a politician he loathes, Alex Salmond feels the hand of history on his shoulder. On Tuesday, his SNP government will launch its white paper on Scottish independence – to hear some people talk, the most significant political document in his country’s history since 1320’s…

The former Tory prime minister has a point: privately educated men dominate the Conservative party in a way unseen since the 1950s
Every era produces politicians who seem to sum up the spirit of their age – and in our own case, the most perfect example might be the Tory cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt.
Having been the accident-prone culture secretary, he is now in charge of the NHS, and facing the first stirrings of…

The figures show clearly that selective schools entrench inequality rather than help the poor. They should all be scrapped
What can we do about the seizing-up of social mobility, the yawning attainment gap between rich and poor, and all the other aspects of inequality about which politicians and commentators affect to fret? If you have never adequately understood the effects of post-Thatcher capitalism on inequality and always mistrusted the idea of comprehensive education, the…

Travel chaos is the least of our problems. An industry that once embodied national pride has been sold for other states to benefit
By the time you read this article, the UK will probably be in the grip of that recurrent national malady known as travel chaos. At the time of writing, in addition to warnings about the perils of driving, trains were being cancelled en masse, while would-be travellers were instructed to follow…