Richard Dawkins has commented on the column I wrote yesterday about Charles Windsor's desire to beocme our President without an election. Check it out - I agree with every word.

By Johann Hari

If you want a sense of how the election of Barack Obama is being seen across the world in this post-coital period, one little anecdote for me says it all. I spent yesterday trawling the shops in here in London for Stars and Stripes to decorate my apartment for my Presidential election party - and across the city they were all sold out. One shopkeeper in the East End told me: "For the past eight years we've done a big trade in American flags because people buy them to burn them. This is the first time I can remember people buying them because they actually want to wave them."

By Johann Hari

If Britain was the 51st state, we would be way out there in the blue. A YouGov poll this summer found just 14 % of us would pull their lever for John McCain - putting us beyond even San Francisco in our allergy to red-state Republicanism. Obama, by contrast, would face a landslide on the white cliffs of Dover, with 49 % of us willing him to win. We're right. If McCain wins the White House, our stormy little island will have to endure four more years of barely-trimmed Bush: a collapsing economy, an unravelling climate, and growing jihadism.

To find out why, check out my article for the latest issue of Total Politics.

By Johann Hari

Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a weapon of mass destruction festering beneath your fingernails. In the past 10 years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax or plutonium or uranium. Its name is shit—and we are in the middle of a shit storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down, and one-quarter of humanity hasn't ever used a functioning toilet yet.

By Johann Hari

Imagine a remake of "The Odd Couple" in which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau happen to rule the world. That’s the premise of "The King and the Cowboy," a fascinating, contrary and flawed history by David Fromkin, the author of "A Peace to End All Peace" and several other books. Fromkin claims to have uncovered a "secret partnership" between a cowboy-president and a playboy-king who rose to power on opposite sides of the Atlantic in 1901 — and set aside their clashing personalities to put in place the alliances that shaped the 20th century.

To read my review of it for the New York Times, click here.

By Johann Hari

Just a few narcissistic updates that some of you might be interested in… You can hear me being interviewed about heroes on the RunRiot podcast here, and I doing two events soon that Indie readers might want to come along to.

By Johann Hari

I just took my grandmother to see 'Mamma Mia' – and, yes, it is my fourth viewing. So much for defying the gay stereotype. But this mad Abbathon is for me pure cinematic Prozac, combining so many of my favourite things: Abba, Meryl Streep, Greece, Julie Walters, a topless Dominic Cooper on a jet-ski… Ah, bliss.

By Johann Hari

Uch. The Spectator's political editor Fraser Nelson has joined Richard Littlejohn in calling the first credible black candidate for US President "uppity."

There are two possible explanations for this choice of word.

By Johann Hari

Yes he did.    It doesn't surprise me.

By Johann Hari

Uch. In response to my column yesterday - saying we should criticise all supernatural belief-systems, including Islam - a torrent of e-mailers and bloggers have predictably dubbed me an 'Islamophobe.' So this might be a good moment to rereun an article I wrote for Attitude magazine a few years ago in response to this despicable trumped-up charge:

Do you believe a religious leader who fights to save Section 28 and says gay people spread disease is a fulminating bigot?