Our best articles of 2024

Our end-of-year coverage gets underway today , with this typically brilliant piece by Lionel Shriver on whether wokeness really is in the rear-view mirror.

Here’s a roundup of some of my favourite spiked pieces of 2024 , in no particular order, and with some glaring, unforgivable, but totally unintentional, omissions.

The UK election might have been a snoozefest, but the US election was anything but.

We were thrilled to publish historian Robert Tombs ’s essay reflecting on the last Tory rout of 1906 .

We also published a lot of sharp cultural criticism this year .

Neil Davenport on the crucial importance of the pub, Hugo Timms on why smoking is becoming cool again, Ian Acheson on how terrorist Usman Khan slipped through the state’s net.

Christopher Snowdon on Lucy Letby trutherism, Patrick West on how politics was colonised by bores, Andrew Orlowski on why AI keeps getting dumber.

Michael Collins on the awfulness of Sadiq Khan .