Nick Cohen

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Full name: Nick Cohen

Area of interest: Politics and Society

Journals/Organisation: The Observer | Evening Standard | New Statesman

Email: nick@nickcohen.net | http://nickcohen.net/about-nick-cohen

Personal website: http://www.nickcohen.net

Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nickcohen

Blog: Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Representation: AP Watt

Networks:

Biography:

Contents

About:

Education: Hertford College, Oxford: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)

Career: Birmingham Post and Mail; The Independent: reporter; New Statesman: columnist - until June 2007

Current position/role: The Observer: columnist; London Evening Standard: columnist

  • also writes/has written for: writes occasional pieces for many other publications, including occasional pieces for New Humanist and Democratiya

Other roles/Main role: author

Other interests:

Disclosures:

Viewpoints/Insight:

Broadcast media:

Video: Regular appearances

Controversy/Criticism:

Awards/Honours:

Scoops:

Other:

Books & Debate:

Nick Cohen Waiting for the Etonians.jpg

Latest work: Waiting for the Etonians: reporting from the sickbed of liberal England OCLC 267161634, 2009 (listen to radio interview on Resonance FM)

Speaking/Appearances:

Debate:

The Observer:

Column name:

Remit/Info: Politics and Society

Section:

Role: Columnist

Pen-name:

Email:

Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nickcohen

Commissioning editor:

Day published: Sunday

Regularity: Weekly

Column format:

Average length:

Articles:

Evening Standard:

Column name:

Remit/Info: Politics and Society

Section:

Role: Columnist

Pen-name:

Email:

Website: Standard.co / Nick Cohen

Commissioning editor:

Day published: Wednesday

Regularity: Weekly

Column format:

Average length:

Articles: 2009

  • Obama makes rhetoric cool for school - To understand why this week's government proposals to teach children to speak properly matter, think back to the US election - 28th April 2009
  • Cripes! The Mayor is backing a Leftie plot - You used to be able rely on the upper-class wing of the English Tory party to denounce “the nanny state” at every opportunity — and always to respect private property - 21st April 2009
  • Maybe this wasn’t another police cock-up - Like a hungry machine, political debate in Britain needs an endless supply of raw material. Just before Easter the arrest of 10 Pakistani “terror suspects” provided the fuel that kept the engines turning. Our student visa restrictions on Pakistanis were lax, came the cry. Our borders were too open. Our universities were hotbeds of Islamo-fascism - 14th April 2009
  • The Met is still out of control - sort it, Boris - In 25 years as a journalist, I have never come across a scandal like the Metropolitan Police ­losing £30 million of Londoners' money in the Icelandic banking collapse - 7th April 2009
  • Keeping your job beats bonding with baby - Like a juggernaut heading towards a wall, the quangocracy ploughs on. Yesterday the clumsily named Equality and Human Rights Commission put its foot down on the accelerator and declared that fathers should have the right to take four months' parental leave - 31st April 2009
  • Retro chic never looked so comforting - It's a brave writer who makes optimistic predictions in this climate, but there is a hint that, unlike the stock and housing markets, the antiques market may not be collapsing. In recessions, the old no longer seems boring but tried and tested. Antiques - especially brown furniture - look reassuringly familiar - 24th March 2009
  • Quirky London beats Big Apple glitz - Like an underground newspaper in a repressive state, copies of the New Yorker are being passed around by shocked London sophisticates. At first glance, it is hard to understand why they should be transfixed by the review of Fiamma, a Manhattan restaurant, by one Nick Paumgarten - 10th March 2009
  • Just beware the great middle-class revolt - While he was writing The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles came up with the line "the middle class is the only true revolutionary class in English history". For most of my life, it has been anything but. Terrified by Seventies union militancy, the middle class made a bargain. They did not mind the rich getting richer, as long as they could make money too. The banking collapse has broken that deal. For the first time in a generation, the middle class is directing its fury at the rich - 24th February 2009
  • The whistleblowers’ lesson to us all - To varying degrees we all join a cult when we go to work. Even if we do not have to worship our bosses, we habitually wear an eager, smiley face and applaud their ideas as strategies of genius - 17th February 2009
  • How my friends fell for the MMR panic - I have seen many middle-class manias in my time but none has matched the dangerous frenzy caused by the false accusation that the MMR vaccination causes autism - 10th February 2009
  • Goodbye Polish nannies, we’ll miss you - Let's be honest, and admit the real reason why Gordon Brown's slogan “British jobs for British workers” has drawn such tutting from the London middle class - 3rd February 2009
  • Give me affluenza over poverty any day - About the most wrong-headed book produced in the Brown bubble was Affluenza by Oliver James, an Old Etonian psychologist and media don - 27th January 2009
  • Put a salary cap on the council bosses - I met the chief executive of Islington council just before Christmas and immediately took to him. He was a commonsensical northerner who talked about the urgent need for the Government to allow councils to keep the construction industry in business by building social housing - 20th January 2009
  • Where I live, social mobility is a dead duck - If Labour is serious about improving social mobility in the professions, I will take its new equality champion, Alan Milburn, up the road from my Islington home to Canonbury Primary School to show him how bad London has got - 13th January 2009
  • Give up detox - it's bad for your health - New Year's resolutions normally involve a renunciation of pleasure. You may give up smoking, as I have done with an iron will every year since 1986... - 6th January 2009

Articles: 2008

  • We don't need your petulance, Mr Quick - The best definition of a bully is of a man who "can give it but can't take it". As well as describing the intimidation, it includes the necessary elements of rank hypocrisy and unwarranted self-pity. Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick of the Met can certainly give it... - 23rd December 2008
  • Let the BBC beware of the wrath of suburbia - The hash Newsnight made of covering the effects of the recession in suburbia shows more tellingly than the Ross affair the depth of the trouble the BBC is in - 19th November 2008
  • A free speech crusade we should all be proud to join - Saudi bankers and Russian oligarchs love London, and not only for its chichi boutiques - 12th November 2008
  • Latte-slurping liberals may come to regret the class divide - One of the best things to hope for from Barack Obama's election is that by proving racism is on the decline it will allow liberals to concentrate on the real cause of disadvantage in modern societies: class - 5th November 2008
  • Be a pit bull, Boris - grab London any cash on offer - Londoners already look back at the peak of the bubble as if remembering a dream world - 29th October 2008
  • The iPod generation has the most to lose in a global recession - 22nd October 2008
  • It's payback time for the City's greedy freeloaders - 15th October 2008
  • We’re all blabbing about our money now - The spread of fear in London has not followed the pattern of the classic horror movie. There was no slow build-up of tension, no gradual realisation... - 8th October 2008
  • Can London profit if the US reins in the bankers? - I was at the Conservative Party Conference when Boris Johnson did what no other politician on the planet would dare do and defended City bonuses - 1st October 2008
  • De Menezes – the Left’s new excuse to beat up the police - Often it is hard to feel happy about the state of this country but the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes ought to make us proud - 24th September 2008
  • Damien, the shark and a tale for our uneasy times - As it was, the doormen stopped the little boy getting into Sotheby's, so no one shouted “But the emperor has no clothes!” as giddy buyers bid more... - 17th September 2008
  • We don't want to see the truth about radical Islam - Britain isn't America, and journalists can't ask jurors what went through their minds in the jury room - 10th September 2008
  • Slump or not, young people still cannot afford a home - Employment is falling, inflation rising, the pound collapsing, business confidence evaporating, the unions striking and banks busting - 3rd September 2008
  • This attack on football clubs is just class envy - chief constables said yesterday that they wanted to charge football clubs the full cost of policing games - 13th August 2008
  • What's the point of a test that doesn't test anyone? - Sats grades have become meaningless. First, we had the shambles of the marking. In true New Labour fashion, ministers gave the job to ETS, a cut-price US company - 6th August 2008
  • So, let the punishment fit the crime of passion - Let me see if I can get Harriet Harman's proposed reforms to the murder laws straight. She wants to make it harder for men to get away with murdering women, but easier for women to get away with murdering men - 30th July 2008
  • Our new man in town to fight political correctness - Anthony Browne, Boris Johnson's new policy director - I first met Anthony Browne, Boris Johnson's new policy director, in the newsroom of The Observer in 2002. He had a square jaw, square glasses and square shoulders. I assumed he was a placid and conventional man who went home every night to cocoa and the crossword - 23rd July 2008
  • Mosley's trial by tabloid is the price of free speech - When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran in 1980, Henry Kissinger looked at the two ghoulish combatants and said: "It's a pity they can't both lose." - 9th July 2008
  • If we don't get tough on knives, the young will - Never have I seen my working-class neighbours as angry as they are about the motiveless murder of Ben Kinsella. Everyone knows the family. Everyone knows that he was a good boy who never went looking for trouble - 2nd July 2008
  • Please don't be a coward, Mr Mandela: speak out now - On Friday evening, a warm glow of self-satisfaction will spread through Hyde Park as tens of thousands join Nelson Mandela in celebrating his 90th birthday - 25th June 2008
  • Green spies and taxmen who make us see red - The British are a stoic people, not given to hanging civil servants from lampposts. We barely raised a murmur at the billions Whitehall wasted on the passport, NHS, Serps, probation, prisons and courts computerisation programmes - 18th June 2008
  • No, Nadine - these perks just look like a scam to us - With Ann Widdecombe heading to retirement, I feared that the long line of occasionally brave and often batty Tory battleaxes looked to be at an end - 11th June 2008
  • Wossy can't save the BBC from being a turn-off - He may be paid £6 million a year but I can't bring myself to join the chorus of complaint about Jonathan Ross: he strikes me as a natural broadcaster. On the other hand, the spiteful face of Graham Norton (£5 million) reminds me of the type of boy who egged on bullies at school. He is the best reason I know for reaching for the remote - 4th June 2008
  • Never mind 'chicken chic', the Good Life is about hard times - Planting your own vegetables in small London gardens is a near pointless gesture - you need an allotment to produce enough to cut your shopping bill significantly - and keeping six chickens won't turn you into an agri-business. But at least you're not just sitting there passively while the recession builds - 28th May 2008
  • Stop telling us not to worry about knife crime - For the past few months, people in authority have been telling us not to let the murders of Steven Bigby and Jimmy Mizen stop us from realising that London is a safer, happier city - 21st May 2008
  • We can't go on living the good life on a credit card - A junior trader walks into a City bank and gets into the lift with his boss, the last person any employee wants to be stuck in a lift with. "What's the latest news from the bank?" he asks - 14th May 2008
  • Forget these Londoners and the BNP reaps the harvest - They are well-scrubbed and media-trained. They have learned to avoid quoting Hitler and giving Nazi salutes. Should we worry that they have won a seat on the London Assembly, winning more than 130,000 votes? - 7th May 2008
  • I've got more faith in Mystic Meg than in our pollsters - Boris is ahead by a mile. No, it's neck and neck. Livingstone can do it. Don't be ridiculous. The Lib-Dems are in freefall. Wait a minute, they're bouncing back - 30th April 2008
  • Bad times for bankers - I'm trying hard not to laugh - Schadenfreude is an apt reaction to the news that Deutsche Bank is going to purge the expenses of its lavishly paid financiers. The credit crunch is hitting hard, and they will no longer be able to lunch without restraint. In future, a line manager must approve bills higher than £52 per person - 23rd April 2008
  • Organic food, Fairtrade coffee - and a line of coke - The London media world of Natasha Collins and Mark Speight is mine to an extent and I know its codes and taboos. For instance, the apparently simple act of eating out at a restaurant is a minefield. The meat has to be free range, to lessen the suffering of animals, the vegetables organic, to lessen the suffering of wild flowers, and the coffee Fairtrade, to lessen the suffering of peasant farmers - 16th April 2008
  • Balls is firing blanks in the class war over our schools - The Labour tribe has many prejudices against the privileged but not the one that would help Britain most. It should have an aversion to Left-wing public school boys and never allow them to run the state education system - 9th April 2008
  • Boris talks up crime - but London's no Gotham City - After taking a good look at London, any outsider might reasonably expect the contest for Mayor to be dominated by weighty and urgent debates. The candidates would argue about the exorbitant cost of housing, he might imagine. Perhaps they would wonder how a city that can't manage to operate a baggage-handling system will cope with the Olympic Games. But surely they wouldn't waste their time bickering about a crime problem which, aside from a handful of high-profile teenage gang killings, appears under control - 2nd April 2008
  • Southern discomfort is looming for Labour - Everyone has an easy explanation for the coming disaster for Labour in London and the wider South. The party will be hammered because it has taxed the middle classes too hard and wasted too much of their money - 26th March 2008
  • More tax on drink - you'll drive us all to Calais, Darling - Smokers warned you, when you cheered on Labour as it forced us out of pubs: "First they come for the smokers, then they'll come for the drinkers." - 12th March 2008
  • You just don't get the point of the Proms, Mrs Hodge - Margaret Hodge berates the Last Night of the Proms for being exclusive. She is right. The Proms exclude the majority of the English who have no time for classical music - 5th March 2008
  • A U-turn on casinos? I wouldn't put money on it - On the A1, a couple of hundred yards from the Emirates Stadium, is the new Leisure World amusement arcade. The local reaction gives you a taste of how the public will receive New Labour's planned casinos - 27th February 2008
  • Ken has no right to take the black vote for granted - On paper, there is no organisation in London as admirable as Operation Black Vote. Founded to encourage black Britons to become equal citizens, it not only strives to increase turnout but also encourages black people to become magistrates, councillors and MPs - 20th February 2008
  • Law and order can't be left to a man with a Mosquito - If you are young and hanging about with your friends, the sight of you may inspire a shopkeeper or security guard to switch on a Mosquito. A low, fast rhythmic beat will thump out with a high-pitched, almost metallic jangle rolling along in the background. It is audible only to those under 20; by all accounts, the young hate it - 13th February 2008
  • When will it dawn on MPs how bad they look to us - No names, no clues - but I know the mole who dug out how Derek Conway MP diverted hundreds of pounds of public money to his wife and sons - 6th February 2008
  • My dilemma: Ken is past it and Boris hasn't a clue - The Mayoral election is meant to make politics exciting, not insufferable. But how is any intelligent Londoner meant to cast their vote? - 30th January 2008
  • Why no fury over London post office closures? - For an urban country, Britain is still obsessed with the countryside to a disproportionate and in my view dangerous degree. Where once politicians wasted 700 hours of parliamentary time discussing whether to impose an unenforceable ban on fox-hunting - far more than they spent on such trivialities as the second Iraq war and the banking crisis - now they argue about the closure of rural post offices - 23rd January 2008
  • Don't blame private sector for the crisis in our schools - Occasionally, I get into a row with a member of the great and the good, and if the temperature rises and I need a putdown fast, the first that leaps to mind is "public school berk" - 16th January 2008
  • You can do it, Boris - just wow us with your true grit - Unlike many in the political class, I think it's possible that 2008 could see London get its first Tory Mayor. There are grandiose reasons for thinking this - the great shift in British politics of the past two years has been the collapse of the Labour vote in the south. And there are boring, anoraky reasons too - people are more likely to turn out if they live in the outer-London suburbs where Tory support is concentrated - 9th January 2008
  • Bendy buses aren't fair to London's fare-payers - Much of my Christmas holiday seems to have been spent travelling on bendy buses, and every time I boarded a 38 or 73 I was treated as at best an irredeemable eccentric and at worst a probable psychopath. Whenever I swiped my Oyster Card, I was met by the uncomprehending stares of the freeloaders all around me - 2nd January 2008

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