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

Personal life

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Cohen was born in Stockport, and raised in Manchester.[3] His father was Jewish.[4] 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.[5] He is an atheist but says he is becoming "more Jewish".[4]

Career

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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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

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.[6] 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.[1]

Cohen's last column for The Observer was published in July 2022; in January 2023, he began publishing on Substack. That month, the Press Gazette reported that he left after "an investigation over a number of complaints about Cohen's behaviour in the office made by former female colleagues", but said he had resigned from The Observer on "health grounds".[7] In May 2023, Jane Bradley reported in The New York Times that in addition to Siegle, several other women had come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against Cohen, and that the British media had failed to cover the story.[2][8][9] 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.[10]

Views

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Domestic

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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.[11]

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.[12][13]

Foreign policy

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The Independent wrote that Cohen "one of a number of prominent left-leaning journalists whose support for the ousting of Saddam Hussein has led them into questioning pretty much everything that the liberal left has ever espoused ... (He) believes with passion that the one thing international leftists should stand against is totalitarianism, and (that) the left has always been at its most morally bankrupt at the times when it either simply omits to do this, or even more appallingly embraces totalitarian mindsets itself."[14]

The Isis Magazine said that Cohen "began his career as an avowed left-winger, but his support for the Iraq war set him at odds with the majority of the left wing. His ideology has, over the last decade, been defined by his opposition to what he feels to be the decline of the Western left: where before it espoused solidarity, now it is relativist and anti-internationalist."[15]

Cohen was for many years a critic of Tony Blair's foreign policy.[16][17] He began modifying his views after 2001, advocating support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[18][19] and becoming a critic of the Stop the War Coalition.[20] He supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya to oust former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[21] In 2012, he called for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War.[22]

In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto,[23][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.[24]

Works

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He has written five books: Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous (1999), a collection of his journalism; Pretty Straight Guys (2003), a highly critical account of the New Labour project; What's Left? (2007), a critique of the contemporary liberal left, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize;[25] Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009); and You Can't Read this Book (2012), which deals with censorship.[26]

  • 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

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  1. ^ a b Siegle, Lucy (4 August 2022). "If The Guardian can behave like this, how much impact has #MeToo really had?". The New European.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ Nick Cohen Waiting for the Etonians, p. 23.
  4. ^ a b Nick Cohen (12 February 2009). "Hatred is turning me into a Jew". The Jewish Chronicle. London.
  5. ^ "Law without Order", New Statesman 2004, 'Waiting for the Etonians' p. 99.
  6. ^ Dominic Ponsford and Charlotte Tobit (2 August 2022). "Nick Cohen's Observer column on pause whilst he co-operates with investigation". Press Gazette.
  7. ^ Ponsford, Dominic (27 January 2023). "Nick Cohen resigns from The Observer on 'health grounds'". Press Gazette. Retrieved 28 January 2023.
  8. ^ France, Anthony (1 June 2023). "Guardian bosses under fire over sexual harassment claims against Nick Cohen". Evening Standard. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  9. ^ Evans, Rebekah (2 June 2023). "Nick Cohen, Phillip Schofield and British media's own #MeToo reckoning". The Week UK. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  10. ^ Lothian-McLean, Moya (1 June 2023). "Britain's Journalists Protect No One But Themselves". Novara Media. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  11. ^ "Celebrities' open letter to Scotland – full text and list of signatories". The Guardian. London. 7 August 2014. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
  12. ^ Gilley, Matthew (13 April 2015). "Observer's Nick Cohen among the €10,000 winners of European Press Prize". Press Gazette. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  13. ^ "The Cowardice of Nigel Farage". European Press Prize. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  14. ^ What's Left, by Nick Cohen, Deborah Orr,Friday 02 February 2007 01:00 GMT, retrieved October 16, 2024
  15. ^ The Isis Magazine, “There’s a big hole where the left should be.” An interview with Nick Cohen by Peter Huhne, January 8, 2015, retrieved October 16, 2024
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ "I Was Tony Blair's Lapdog: Interview with Nick Cohen - Black Flag | libcom.org". libcom.org. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  18. ^ Cohen, Nick (14 January 2003). "The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  19. ^ Cohen, Nick (16 February 2003). "The Left isn't listening". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 28 September 2012.
  20. ^ Nick Cohen (7 April 2003). "Strange bedfellows". New Statesman. London.
  21. ^ Cohen, Nick (13 March 2011). "EU support for Arab rebels is shamefully late". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  22. ^ Cohen, Nick (1 January 2012). "The west has a duty to intervene in Syria". The Observer. London. ISSN 0029-7712.
  23. ^ "A prominent signee of 2006’s Euston Manifesto, which advocates ‘making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not’" - Joy Richardson, Nick Cohen, Observing Hatred In All Its Forms The List, retrieved October 19, 2024
  24. ^ a b "The Euston Manifesto". eustonmanifesto.org. 11 September 2001. Retrieved 6 April 2012.
  25. ^ "2008 Book Prize Short List", The Orwell Prize Archived 23 September 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
  26. ^ Kureishi, Hanif (27 January 2012). "You Can't Read This Book: Censorship In An Age Of Freedom, By Nick Cohen". The Independent. Retrieved 22 September 2024.
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