The Spectator’s Notes
Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments…
Thatcher’s downfall has a lesson for Boris’s enemies
Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments…
The Spectator’s Notes
If anyone was suitable to be the Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, it was Lord Geidt. Self-effacing, professional, unself-righteous…
The Spectator’s Notes
Even before the ECHR injunction, the bishops had issued their anathema. All 25 of them in the House of Lords…
The Spectator’s Notes
It was reported gleefully that Boris Johnson was booed as he entered St Paul’s Cathedral for the Jubilee Thanksgiving service…
The Spectator’s Notes
Like many people who do not share his views, I have felt intermittent admiration for Peter Tatchell over the past…
The Spectator’s Notes
I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a…
The Spectator’s Notes
Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might…
The Spectator’s Notes
When I was a lobby journalist, I never went to the State Opening of Parliament. I much regret it, because…
The Spectator’s Notes
As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US…
The Spectator’s Notes
My friend, the novelist Alan Judd, emails with the right quotation for those who argue that Putin should be given…
The Spectator’s Notes
The end of the Cold War was used by the victors to unite Germany. To balance this, Europhiles created a…
The Spectator’s Notes
Now that events in Ukraine are restoring a sense of proportion about the difference between aggressive autocracies and free countries,…
The Spectator’s Notes
Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands 40 years ago. I had joined the Daily Telegraph as a reporter in 1979 and…
The Spectator’s Notes
Zakhar Prilepin is a well-known novelist in Russia and an ultra-nationalist warrior in Donbas. Once a member of the National…
The Spectator’s Notes
I remember my father telling me about Imre Nagy’s final broadcast before the Hungarian leader was taken by the Russians…
The Spectator’s Notes
I wish people would not say Vladimir Putin is mad. One understands him much better if one says he is…
The Spectator’s Notes
Much attention has been paid to how Vladimir Putin has learnt from western weakness over his earlier invasions, including into…
The Spectator’s Notes
We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war.…
The Spectator’s Notes
When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom…
The Spectator’s Notes
In a lecture I recently gave to mark the approaching 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, one of the questions…
The Spectator’s Notes
In answers to questions following his statement in the Commons on Monday, Boris Johnson let drop an interesting statistic. He…
The Spectator’s Notes
Justin Webb is normally one of the least self-righteous BBC presenters, but he was out-Maitlising rivals on the Today programme…
The Spectator’s Notes
In May 2020, in the wake of the Barnard Castle story, Emily Maitlis delivered her famous Newsnight address to the…
The Spectator’s Notes
According to the new Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Russians wish to ‘put at risk…
