Letter from France
Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of…
Divine comedy
Patriots, by Peter Morgan, is a drama documentary about recent Russian history. And though it’s a topical show it’s not…
Barometer
Hot topic Last week’s Barometer detailed past UK temperature records. Those were broken by this week’s heatwave. On Monday a…
The high price of Tory failures
I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more…
Prime example
What the new PM could learn from Lee Kwan Yew
The final three
The leadership candidates on taxes, net zero and freedom of speech
Liz Truss is no Margaret Thatcher
The late Senator Lloyd Bentsen was 26 years older than the young Senator Dan Quayle when in 1988 they crossed…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. I was billeted for a party in Norfolk with a couple previously unknown to me. They were more than…
How to see off the grumps
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
Friction and fieldwork
To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
Trump’s revenge
Is he about to stage his comeback?
The fight for the future
To govern is to choose. So leadership contests for a party in government tend to come down to a key…
The Spectator’s Notes
Whitehall is telling ministers that this is a ‘caretaker’ government and so, by convention, cannot take decisions. This is not…
I won’t have another Covid jab
In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s…
Low life
Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the…
Diary
When I was a teenage Tory activist in the mid-1990s, I hoped one day I’d be part of a leadership…
What’s in my frunk?
Hello, and welcome to episode one of What’s in My Frunk?, the first in an occasional Spectator series of news…
The Everybody Inn
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
Letters
Procurement profligacy Sir: In response to Susan Hill’s query ‘Who allows the profligacy in NHS hospital procurement to continue?’ (‘Best…
Tudorbethan hell
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
Sack Heathrow’s boss? No, put him on the front line
Airports are on my mind, since I’ve just stepped off an on-time early-morning flight from East Midlands to Bergerac –…
The not-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
My brief career as a marijuana farmer
The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976,…
