The Critic Show

In the first episode of Starling on Sport, Boris is joined by Jack Davey to look ahead to this year’s Tour de France and ask whether anyone can realistically stop Tadej Pogačar. They discuss Pogačar’s astonishing season, and the threat posed by Jonas Vingegaard, as well as turning an eye onto the emergence of French prodigy Paul Seixas. Boris and Jack also explore the tactics, team dynamics and br...

This week on The Critic Show , Lord David Frost joins Tom and Graham Stewart to mark ten years since Brexit and ask what really went wrong, and ask what might be on the cards next. Frost challenges the familiar claim that voters were misled in 2016, arguing instead that Brexit was always about Britain’s right to govern itself from Westminster rather than Brussels. Frost warns that unless the Right...

This week on The Critic Show, Henry and Chris are joined by James Crouch, Head of Public Affairs at Opinium, to discuss Britain’s strange new economic settlement: not quite capitalism, not quite socialism, but a system increasingly built around caps, freezes and government guarantees. Drawing on Opinium’s research into public attitudes, they explore why voters now instinctively reach for price con...

This week, Critic wine writer Henry Jeffreys talks to Olivia Manet from Corney & Barrow about the latest Critic Wine Club selection: three summer wines chosen for freshness, value and drinkability. Olivia explains how she got into the wine trade, Corney & Barrow’s long history, and why great wine does not always have to mean grand cru prices. Henry and Olivia taste a mountain-fresh Pinot G...

In this episode of The Critic Show, Tom Jones is joined by Sam Butler, vice chairman of the Future of Hunting campaign, to discuss Labour’s proposed ban on trail hunting and what Butler sees as a wider assault on the countryside. They look back at the 2004 Hunting Act, the creation of trail hunting, and the argument that a new ban would do little for animal welfare while threatening thousands of h...

This week on The Critic Show , Tom Jones and Chris Bayliss are joined by Charles Cornish-Dale to discuss modern masculinity, the rise of the “alpha male”, and the cultural influence of Andrew Tate. Are declining testosterone levels something to be concerned about? What does this mean for our politics? In our medicated society, the contraceptive pill and SSRIs are ever more common — but what are th...

This week on The Critic Show , Chris Bayliss and Tom Jones are joined by William Clouston, leader of the SDP, to discuss his paper From an Entitlement State to an Investment State . Britain has moved from a state that invests in its future to one increasingly dominated by pensions, welfare and benefits. Since the 1970s, public spending has shifted dramatically: investment in infrastructure has fal...

This week on The Critic Show , Tom Jones and Chris Bayliss are joined by historian and columnist Dominic Green to discuss his latest piece for The Critic , exploring the conflict between empire and republic. Dominic argues that it is better to see the United States not as a settled European-style nation state, but as a perpetually evolving republic whose moments of upheaval, from Andrew Jackson to...

This week, Chris and Tom are joined by Dr Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri, the historian of political ideas, political conflict and the decline of the Royal Navy. Comparing the Navy of decades past with the Navy we have today, one must ask: how did civil servants, bureaucrats and government bring about its decline? This inevitably leads to the question of the efficacy of the civil service, whether we h...

Tom and Henry are joined this week by pollster and strategist Scarlett Maguire, who explains the Wild West of British political polling. Like the soothsayers of old, politicians use polling in all sorts of mysterious ways, making claims that may not always stack up with reality. This is how they can claim momentum even when their parties remain unpopular. In unrelated matters, they also discuss Ke...

May marks the beginning of summer, and this month Tom, Henry and Graham are here to talk you through May’s edition of The Critic , leading with the question of whether Britain has any vision left. After months of headlines and mistakes, it is hard to understand where the Government might go next, or what it actually wants. Does it want to rejoin the EU, or is this simply a visionless pitch from a...

This week on The Critic Show, Henry Hill and Chris Bayliss are joined by the Reverend Marcus Walker to discuss the erosion of intergenerational responsibility. From defence and infrastructure to fiscal policy, the Government just keeps getting it wrong, repeatedly prioritising electoral gain over the health and wealth of the country. The question is whether this trend is a recent development or a...

This week on The Critic Show , Chris Bayliss and Henry Hill are joined by the Anglican priest, historian and ethicist Nigel Biggar. They discuss the debate around the Church of England’s push towards reparations, and how initiatives like Project Spire and the historical link to Queen Anne’s Bounty have played a role in where we have ended up today. Many of the assumptions behind reparations, such...

This week on The Critic Show, Chris Bayliss and Tom Jones are joined by David Spencer as they examine the state of DEI in British policing. The story goes back to the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent Macpherson Report and, while serious failures were exposed, nothing was actually done to change anything. Later reforms, particularly since 2010, accelerated the drive toward diversity ta...

This month’s Wine Club finds Henry Jeffreys joined by Tom Innes of Fingal Rock, a Burgundy specialist and a merchant with a gift for finding serious yet affordable wines. Before the bottles are opened, Tom talks Henry through his unusual route into wine, from an abandoned legal career to a shop in Monmouth, and from there to decades of legwork among small Burgundian growers. This month, there’s a...

This week on The Critic Show , Chris and Tom are joined by Jack Davey as they turn to the politics of Spain, exploring the rise of Pedro Sánchez and what his success could mean for centre-left leaders like Keir Starmer. With separatist movements, particularly the Catalans, decisively occupying the middle ground, they examine how Sánchez built a governing strategy based on consolidating anti-right...

As another Easter draws near, so does a new issue of The Critic . Tom, Chris and Graham take listeners through some of their favourite picks from the April edition. Chris unpacks his latest article on green energy, asking why electricity remains expensive if renewables are meant to be cheap. There is widespread misunderstanding of how the national grid actually functions and, as a result, serious...

This week on The Critic Show , Chris and Tom discuss the article “The Left Is Intellectually Exhausted” , which argues that so-called progressives have failed to keep up with the times. At a moment when Britain is widely described as broken, the left should be politically ascendant. Instead, they argue, it has struggled to offer any serious analysis of how government and the state have drifted int...

This week on The Critic Show, Tom and Chris discuss the numbers behind Britain’s welfare state. Around 53 per cent of adults are net recipients of the state, yet most people who fall into that category would never describe themselves as being on benefits. Universal Credit, tax credits, disability payments, housing support: the money adds up, yet who is actually on benefits, and how much it all cos...

This week, Tom and Chris explore the rise of sectarianism in British politics, specifically, the role of Biraderi networks and the extended family structures that shape political behaviour of immigrant populations in Britain today. In urban constituencies where traditional civic associations are weak, Britain’s individualistic political culture offers little institutional counterweight, and, as a...

This week, Tom is joined by Poppy Coburn to look at the Conservative Party’s identity crisis and ask whether this is more than another bad election cycle. Whilst the top of the party is seemingly happy under the Badenoch regime, the grassroots have been hollowed out. The councillors, donors and activists, the footsoldiers of any election campaign are drifting away. As local associations wither and...

Chris Bayliss speaks to Fleur Meston about the slow break-up of the British left, and the end of the Labour party’s gauche-domination from Bloomsbury to Sedgefield. In the 21st century, this challenge mostly comes from the socialist ecologists of the Green Party. The Greens have evolved from their 1970s roots as a niche protest vehicle into something more electorally serious, drawing in voters une...

In this Critic Show special, Adam Wren discusses the Open Justice Project, which works with survivors who want their stories told, and the public inquiry into one of the most serious institutional failures in modern Britain: the grooming gangs scandal. The conversation centres on a system that too often appears underfunded, diffused and structurally incapable of taking responsibility. It’s a story...

This week, Tom and Chris look at foreign policy, and the widening gulf between Britain’s ambitions and its means. Defence spending is constantly under strain, artillery stockpiles are dangerously low, and Europe still relies heavily on Washington for its security. What happens if America’s defence commitments start to get transactional, particularly under Donald Trump? If a major war broke out tom...

This month’s Wine Club has Henry Jeffreys in notably good company, Tom Harrow, better known as the WineChap , in town for Burgundy Week and armed with a trio of Italians that cheerfully make the case for looking south rather than east. While the merchants of St James’s are earnestly pouring tiny glasses of rain-thinned Pinot Noir and murmuring about yields, here we are with bottles that feel glori...