Will the last liberty-minded journalist to leave Britain please turn out the lights?

The news that Harry Cole, political editor of The Sun, is moving to Washington DC, where he will be the paper’s editor-at-large, is becoming a trend.

A few months ago Kate Andrews, formerly economics editor at The Spectator, announced her move to Washington.

Andrews, who is now deputy editor of The Spectator World, the global edition of the magazine, had previously written several articles critical of smoking bans.

They include ‘How the Tories gave up on liberty’ (a cover story in February 2023) and, in January this year, ‘Smoking bans: the fallback legacy for failed leaders’.

Funnily enough, one of Kate’s colleagues in Washington is none other than Kara Kennedy who wrote ‘An ode to smoking’, an article that won the Welsh born writer a coveted (!) Forest award in 2023.

Based briefly in New York, Kara then moved to Washington, got married, had a baby, and is now The Spectator World’s ‘royal correspondent’.

And there’s more. A few weeks ago Katy Balls (above) was political editor of The Spectator and a colleague of Kate Andrews. Today she too is in America, working as Washington editor and columnist for The Times and Sunday Times.

(I’ve just read her piece in today’s paper - About last night: my Washington party debut - and very informative and entertaining it is too!)

By coincidence, all four journalists have at various times been guests at Forest events such as The Freedom Dinner and Smoke on the Water, or they have participated in one of our other events, always entering the spirit of the evening with a fun, open, enquiring mind.

And very soon every one of them will have left these isles.

To paraphrase The Sun on the eve of the 1992 general election, ‘Will the last liberty-minded journalist to leave Britain please turn out the lights?’.

Above: Katy Balls, now Washington editor of The Times and Sunday Times, at a Forest Freedom Dinner; below: Kara Kennedy discussing ‘Prohibition and the Infantilisation of Britain’ at another Forest event in March 2023