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Philip Stephens

Contributing editor

Philip Stephens is a contributing editor. He was also previously associate editor, director of the editorial board and chief political commentator. He writes on global and British affairs.
  • Tuesday, 21 May, 2024
    UK foreign policy
    Starmer must recognise that great nations need not be great powers

    Realism is not defeatism — Britain has plenty to offer when it concentrates its resources

    Four men in military fatigues stand outside in a winter landscape
  • Saturday, 23 March, 2024
    Ireland
    Ireland’s politics is transformed, with or without Varadkar

    The old rules were rewritten by the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 and the global financial crash

    A man in a suit waves at crowds of people outside a historic building
  • Friday, 2 February, 2024
    Northern Ireland
    Northern Ireland revisits the success of ‘constructive ambiguity’

    Politics in the province cannot be forced into straight lines — this week’s deal follows the lessons of its history

    Two men in suits holds documents titled ‘Safeguarding the union’
  • Tuesday, 26 December, 2023
    Northern Ireland
    What unionists could learn from Ireland’s nationalists

    They should give up abstentionism and try persuasion instead

    Democratic Unionist party leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson answers questions alongside party colleagues Gavin Robinson and Emma Little-Pengelly at a press conference following discussions at Hillsborough Castle in Belfast
  • Friday, 20 October, 2023
    Israel-Hamas war
    The Israel-Hamas war has held up a mirror to European powerlessness

    EU governments could once claim to be players in the Middle East — no longer

    Olaf Scholz , the German chancellor, in Tel Aviv this week
  • Thursday, 17 August, 2023
    Brexit
    The EU is doing more — lots more

    Contrary to some expectations, the forces of change in Europe have been centripetal rather than centrifugal

  • Monday, 14 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics — the architects of nationalism

    An intricate account brings out the contrasts and commonalities in the lives of John Dillon and Charles Stewart Parnell

  • Sunday, 6 August, 2023
    UK privatisation
    What Britain can learn from its polluted waterways

    The legacy of privatisation reaches way beyond the water industry. Now, a rebalancing of market and state is needed

    Aerial view of outfall into the River Thames from a Thames Water sewage works
  • Thursday, 27 July, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Didn’t You Use to Be Chris Mullin? — genteel gardens and gentle polemics

    The fourth volume of the former Labour politician’s diaries skilfully weaves the personal with the political

    Chris Mullin
  • Monday, 8 May, 2023
    UK general election
    The path to UK election victory still lies through the middle ground

    Recent history demonstrates the need for Sunak’s Conservatives to rediscover moderation in time for polling day

    Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher presenting the Conservative party manifesto for the general election
  • Monday, 27 February, 2023
    ObituaryBernard Ingham
    Bernard Ingham, No 10 press secretary

    Official spokesman and staunch loyalist of prime minister Margaret Thatcher

    Bernard Ingham was a plain speaker — careless of high Tory political politesse
  • Saturday, 11 February, 2023
    UK foreign policy
    Sunak’s global search for friends and influence

    The prime minister must refurbish damaged relations with Britain’s allies — including opponents in the Brexit wrangles

    A depiction of Rishi Sunak proffering a handshake, where his hand is overly large and overlayed with a union jack
  • Wednesday, 25 January, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    How America picks its battles

    Isolationist superpower or still ‘the world’s policeman’? Two books explore the competing impulses in US politics

  • Thursday, 29 December, 2022
    Brexit
    Keir Starmer’s caution fits Europe’s political reality

    The UK’s record means Labour’s leader is right not to seek a fast track back to the EU

    Keir Starmer standing at a podium
  • Thursday, 8 December, 2022
    Northern Ireland
    Neuralgia clashes with exceptionalism in Northern Ireland

    Unionist intransigence over the Irish Sea border rests on insecurity

    Black and white photo from 1922 showing armed troops guarding barricades in Belfast to prevent further rioting
  • Friday, 16 September, 2022
    FT Books Essay
    Do ‘great men’ shape the course of world history?

    Ian Kershaw’s essays explore whether 20th-century leaders seized power through sheer force of personality or were mere opportunists

    Margaret Thatcher meets Mikhail Gorbachev at Heathrow airport, April 5 1989
  • Thursday, 8 September, 2022
    Queen Elizabeth II
    A monarch who spoke for her kingdom

    As political leaders came and went, the Queen held the nation together

    Queen Elizabeth II travels towards the Houses of Parliament before addressing the state opening of parliament in 2016
  • Monday, 1 August, 2022
    Brexit
    After Brexit the Tories still cannot escape EU red tape

    The uncomfortable truth is that Britain is now a rule-taker, not a rule-maker

    Montage of images of Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and the EU flag
  • Wednesday, 13 July, 2022
    Conservative party UK
    Conservatives must rediscover their instinctive pragmatism

    Ideological obsessions with Brexit and low tax are dragging the leadership hopefuls away from successful traditions

    Rishi Sunak speaking at the launch of his campaign to be Conservative party leader and prime minister, at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London this week
  • Friday, 13 May, 2022
    Ireland
    Dublin can no longer treat Irish unity as a distant aspiration

    Sinn Féin’s victory in Northern Ireland changes the political dynamic

  • Wednesday, 30 March, 2022
    Brexit
    Becoming ‘normal’ again is going to be hard for Britain

    The country’s friends hope the dismal state of its politics is a temporary condition that will pass

    Ellie Foreman-Peck illustration for Philip Stephens’ column ‘Becoming ‘normal’ again is going to be hard for Britain’
  • Wednesday, 23 February, 2022
    FT Books Essay
    An Irish future — and the weight of history

    Three new books examine the violently fraught ties between England and its island neighbour and the prospects of unification

  • Thursday, 30 September, 2021
    Geopolitics
    The west is the author of its own weakness

    China presents a threat to the liberal global order but the bigger danger lies in the discrediting of democracy

    Efi Chalikopoulou illustration of Philip Stephens column ‘The west is the author of its own weakness’
  • Thursday, 23 September, 2021
    Geopolitics
    The French are right about the Americans

    Washington has always been careless of its allies in the pursuit of the US national interest

    US President Joe Biden, right, speaks with French President Emmanuel Macron
  • Thursday, 16 September, 2021
    Boris Johnson
    What Joe Biden should tell Boris Johnson about Northern Ireland

    The US president could be a candid friend to the UK and urge the prime minister to honour his post-Brexit Irish trade deal

    Boris Johnson and Joe Biden in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, after their meeting ahead of the G7 Summit
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