Nick Cohen

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.

In 2014, he spoke out against the right-wing 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.

He began modifying his views after 2001, advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and becoming a critic of the Stop the War Coalition. In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto, 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. He supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya to oust former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In 2012, he called for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War.

In the early 2000s he was a critic of the Government of Israel, and described Zionism as 'colonialism'.

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; Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009) and You Can't Read this Book (2012), which deals with censorship.

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, where his first story was on 'a seemingly dreary new feature about zero tolerance of crime in the United States, which offered few opportunities to impress my new employers.' Cohen drew a reputation as the scourge of Tony Blair, who once stated that "if I listened to Nick Cohen I would never win an election", and of Andrew Adonis, who was at the time a Downing Street policy adviser, and said that "no one is better at getting under the Government's skin".

Nicholas Cohen (born 1961) is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He is a columnist for The Observer, a blogger for The Spectator and a writer for Standpoint magazine. Born in Stockport and raised in Manchester, Cohen studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University before entering journalism.