When I became Comment Editor of The Times, I used to tell our columnists that it wasn’t enough for readers to learn what the writer thought. They also had to be convinced that it mattered.
This was partly about the evidence they produced to support their argument of course. But it was also about giving readers a sense of who the writers are, where they come from, what their values are.
So I suppose I should start this collection in the same way, with columns that give you a sense of my outlook. Not everything, of course, but some important things.