Covid has killed off our civil liberties
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
The Covid hysteria is getting worse
Readers may recall a column last month that laid out powerful evidence for the proposition that the ethnic and racial…
The trouble with ‘taking back control’
I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country…
What really makes people fat
In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight…
Never has a virus been so oversold
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Open letters have become ransom notes
In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary…
Open letters have become ransom notes
The ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking…
We’re making a spectacle of shame
When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down…
Political pandering won’t prevent Covid deaths
When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a…
Marching against racism is too easy
When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction…
Marching against racism is too easy
When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction…
Is living without risk really living at all?
Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along…
This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one
Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame…
If this is a war, let’s fight it like one
Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt…
Real problems erase fake ones
Last week, a friend quoted a two-year-old email of mine: ‘I’m starting to root for a plague or world war…
The British have bought the lockdown hook, line and sinker
I am a type. I don’t like groups. I maintain few memberships. I question and resist authority, especially enforcement of…
The longer lockdown continues, the more imperilled we become
Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist…
Why Hachette were wrong to drop Woody Allen’s memoir
Even amid plague, economic apocalypse, and the cancellation of 2020, dumb stuff keeps happening. Besides, loads of us will now…
An open letter to the friend who dropped me after Question Time
I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie…
Cyclists have become an easy police target
Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a…
I won’t read American Dirt – but not because the author has the wrong skin colour
Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan)…
Is ‘Mini Mike’ a growing threat to Trump?
Should Bernie Sanders become the Democratic presidential nominee, expect the media to overuse these sprightly English expressions: ‘between a rock…
Is ‘Mini Mike’ a growing threat to Trump?
Should Bernie Sanders become the Democratic presidential nominee, expect the media to overuse these sprightly English expressions: ‘between a rock…
For cod’s sake, don’t sacrifice the fish
One of the more dispiriting experiences of the British supermarket is a visit to the fish counter. On a historically…
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