Nick Cohen

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Not to be confused with Nik Cohn.

Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen
Cohen in 2010
Born
Nicholas Cohen

1961 (age 62–63)
Stockport, Cheshire, England
OccupationJournalist
Children1

Nicholas Cohen (born 1961)[1] is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He was a columnist for The Observer and is a blogger for The Spectator. Following accusations of sexual harassment,[2][3] he left The Observer in 2022 and began publishing on the Substack platform.

Personal life[edit]

Cohen was born in Stockport, and raised in Manchester.[4] His father was Jewish.[5] He was educated at Altrincham Grammar School for Boys and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).

Cohen lives in Islington with his wife and their son.[6] He is an atheist but says he is becoming "more Jewish".[5] He is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.[7]

Career[edit]

Cohen began his career at the Sutton Coldfield News, before moving to the Birmingham Post, later becoming a contributor to The Independent and The Observer in 1996.

Cohen was a columnist for The Observer and a regular contributor to The Spectator. He has also written for Time, the Independent on Sunday, the London Review of Books, the London Evening Standard, the New Statesman and The New European. He has written for the magazine Private Eye under the pseudonym "Ratbiter".[8][9]

In August 2022, Press Gazette reported that Cohen's regular Observer column had been "paused", pending an investigation by the newspaper's publisher, Guardian News and Media (GNM). The Gazette also reported that allegations against Cohen had been made public by the barrister Jolyon Maugham, and that a direct complaint had been made by the journalist Lucy Siegle, which she accused GNM of mishandling.[10] Writing in The New European, Siegle detailed her alleged sexual harassment by Cohen in the Observer offices some years before, along with her experience of making a complaint in 2018, stating that GNM executives failed to offer a formal investigation.[2]

Cohen's last column for The Observer was published in July 2022.[11] In December 2022, he began publishing on Substack.[12] In January 2023, the Press Gazette reported that he had resigned from The Observer on "health grounds".[13] In May 2023, Jane Bradley reported in The New York Times that in addition to Siegle's accusations, several other women had come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against Cohen, and that the British media had failed to cover the story.[3][14][15] Furthermore, Bradley revealed that Madison Marriage of the Financial Times actually had the story earlier, but was stopped from making it public by FT editor Roula Khalaf.[16]

Views[edit]

Foreign policy[edit]

In the early 2000s, Cohen was a critic of the government of Israel and described Zionism as "colonialism".[17][18]

Cohen was for many years a critic of Tony Blair's foreign policy.[19][20] He began modifying his views after 2001, advocating support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[21][22] and becoming a critic of the Stop the War Coalition.[23] In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto,[24] which proposed what it termed "a new political alignment", in which the left would take a stronger, stance in favour of military intervention and against what the signatories deemed to be anti-American attitudes. Cohen supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya to oust former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[25] In 2012, he called for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War.[26]

Domestic[edit]

In a 2006 press release, the Muslim Council of Britain suggested Cohen and four other journalists were "part of a circle of pernicious Islamophobic commentators".[27]

In August 2014, Cohen was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.[28]

In 2014, he spoke out against the UK Independence Party and its leader, Nigel Farage, in The Observer, for which he received the Commentator Award by the European Press Prize a year later.[29][30]

Other[edit]

Cohen criticised Ecuador for granting political asylum to Julian Assange and called Ecuador a "petro-socialist authoritarian state".[31] He has also been critical of the CANZUK agreement, calling it "an Anglo-Saxon Narnia".[32] He has criticised halal and kosher slaughter and believes they should be illegal.[33]

Works[edit]

He has written five books: Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous[34] (1999), a collection of his journalism; Pretty Straight Guys[35] (2003), a highly critical account of the New Labour project; What's Left?[36] (2007), a critique of the contemporary liberal left, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize;[37][38] Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England[39] (2009); and You Can't Read this Book (2012),[40] which deals with censorship.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Cohen, Nick (2000). Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous. Verso Books. ISBN 1-85984-288-7
  • Cohen, Nick (2003). Pretty Straight Guys. Faber and Faber: paperback edition. ISBN 0-571-22004-5
  • Cohen, Nick (2007). What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. Fourth Estate. ISBN 0-00-722969-0
  • Cohen, Nick (2009). Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England. Fourth Estate. ISBN 0-00-730892-2
  • Cohen, Nick (2012). You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Fourth Estate. ISBN 978-0007308903

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Nick Cohen". Presseurop. Archived from the original on 15 December 2019. Retrieved 13 January 2013.
  2. ^ a b Lucy Siegle (4 August 2022). "If The Guardian can behave like this, how much impact has #MeToo really had?". The New European.
  3. ^ a b Bradley, Jane (30 May 2023). "A British Reporter Had a Big #MeToo Scoop. Her Editor Killed It". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 June 2023.
  4. ^ Nick Cohen Waiting for the Etonians, p. 23.
  5. ^ a b Nick Cohen (12 February 2009). "Hatred is turning me into a Jew". The Jewish Chronicle. London.
  6. ^ "Law without Order", New Statesman 2004, 'Waiting for the Etonians' p. 99.
  7. ^ "National Secular Society Honorary Associates". National Secular Society. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  8. ^ Doctor Manhattan [@DoctorManhatt14] (12 December 2019). "Ratbiter is Nick Cohen, who has had, for the last few years, what might charitably described as a hypothetical relationship with reality" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  9. ^ "Tony Greenstein on the Neocon Warmongering of Nick Cohen, Private Eye's 'Ratbiter'". WordPress. 20 March 2019.
  10. ^ Dominic Ponsford and Charlotte Tobit (2 August 2022). "Nick Cohen's Observer column on pause whilst he co-operates with investigation". Press Gazette.
  11. ^ "Nick Cohen | The Guardian". the Guardian. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  12. ^ Cohen, Nick. "Writing from London by Nick Cohen". nickcohen.substack.com. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  13. ^ Ponsford, Dominic (27 January 2023). "Nick Cohen resigns from The Observer on 'health grounds'". Press Gazette. Retrieved 28 January 2023.
  14. ^ France, Anthony (1 June 2023). "Guardian bosses under fire over sexual harassment claims against Nick Cohen". Evening Standard. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  15. ^ Evans, Rebekah (2 June 2023). "Nick Cohen, Phillip Schofield and British media's own #MeToo reckoning". The Week UK. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  16. ^ Lothian-McLean, Moya (1 June 2023). "Britain's Journalists Protect No One But Themselves". Novara Media. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  17. ^ Cohen, Nick (20 November 2000). "The Holocaust as show business". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 17 October 2019. Retrieved 17 October 2019. To the successors of the 'Zionism is fascism' crowd of the Seventies (it isn't, incidentally, it's colonialism), the Holocaust and reaction sit comfortably together.
  18. ^ Cohen, Nick (2003). Pretty Straight Guys. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-22004-5.
  19. ^ Cohen, Nick (19 May 2021). "Sincerely ducking the hard questions". The Critic Magazine. Retrieved 2 June 2023. Nor did Tony Blair's enemies in the 1990s — I know because I was one of them.
  20. ^ "I Was Tony Blair's Lapdog: Interview with Nick Cohen - Black Flag | libcom.org". libcom.org. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  21. ^ Cohen, Nick (14 January 2003). "The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  22. ^ Cohen, Nick (16 February 2003). "The Left isn't listening". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  23. ^ Nick Cohen (7 April 2003). "Strange bedfellows". New Statesman. London.
  24. ^ "The Euston Manifesto". eustonmanifesto.org. 11 September 2001. Retrieved 6 April 2012.
  25. ^ Cohen, Nick (13 March 2011). "EU support for Arab rebels is shamefully late". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  26. ^ Cohen, Nick (1 January 2012). "The west has a duty to intervene in Syria". The Observer. London. ISSN 0029-7712.
  27. ^ "Martin Bright's C4 Documentary: Part of a Campaign to Divide and Rule". Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) Archive. 13 July 2006.
  28. ^ "Celebrities' open letter to Scotland – full text and list of signatories". The Guardian. London. 7 August 2014. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
  29. ^ Gilley, Matthew (13 April 2015). "Observer's Nick Cohen among the €10,000 winners of European Press Prize". Press Gazette. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  30. ^ "The Cowardice of Nigel Farage". European Press Prize. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  31. ^ Cohen, Nick (6 September 2015). "Oppressive states such as Ecuador crush the web's power". The Guardian.
  32. ^ Cohen, Nick (29 August 2020). "What hiring a failed Australian prime minister tells us about corrupt Britain". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
  33. ^ Cohen, Nick. "God's own chosen meat". New Statesman.
  34. ^ Cohen, Nick (2000). Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous – Nick Cohen – Google Books. Verso. ISBN 9781859842881. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  35. ^ Cohen, Nick (2004). Pretty Straight Guys. Faber & Faber, Limited. ISBN 9780571220045. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  36. ^ Cohen, Nick (2007). What's Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way. Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780007229703. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  37. ^ "2008 Book Prize Short List", The Orwell Prize Archived 23 September 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
  38. ^ "Biography" Archived 6 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine, nickcohen.net.
  39. ^ Cohen, Nick. "Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England by Nick Cohen". Harpercollins.com.au. Archived from the original on 30 December 2012. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  40. ^ "You Can't Read This Book : Nick Cohen". HarperCollins. Archived from the original on 2 September 2012. Retrieved 28 September 2012.

External links[edit]

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