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.
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
Foreign policy
In the early 2000s, Cohen was a critic of the government of Israel and described Zionism as "colonialism".[17][18]
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]
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-SaxonNarnia".[32] He has criticised halal and kosher slaughter and believes they should be illegal.[33]
Works
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
Cohen, Nick (2000). Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous. Verso Books. ISBN1-85984-288-7
Cohen, Nick (2003). Pretty Straight Guys. Faber and Faber: paperback edition. ISBN0-571-22004-5
Cohen, Nick (2007). What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. Fourth Estate. ISBN0-00-722969-0
Cohen, Nick (2009). Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England. Fourth Estate. ISBN0-00-730892-2
^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.
^Cohen, Nick (2003). Pretty Straight Guys. Faber and Faber. ISBN0-571-22004-5.
^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.