Patrick West

A remake of Cheers won’t work

5 October 2024 10:00 am

One of the most popular sitcoms of the 1980s, Cheers, is set to return to our television screens. The show…

The quest for diversity could finish off University Challenge

24 September 2024 3:00 pm

Universities today are well-known as places where progressive, hyper-liberal politics predominate. It’s only logical, therefore, that the cry for equality…

Starmer’s freebies and the truth about Labour’s double-standards

21 September 2024 11:54 pm

The Labour government’s u-turn on freebies, its disclosure last night that it will no longer accept donations for clothes, is…

McDonald’s did not make Kemi Badenoch working class

20 September 2024 12:34 am

Is it possible to change your class? Not just superficially – in moving up and down the hierarchy of social…

Robert Jenrick is wrong about the culture wars

3 September 2024 10:26 pm

To some people, the culture wars don’t matter. They are an irrelevance, an indulgence. A distraction from the material, bread-and-butter…

Labour’s puritanical attack on vaping

2 September 2024 1:05 am

On Times Radio this morning Lucy Powell, Leader of the House of Commons, said that she wanted the government to…

The culture wars are far from over 

27 August 2024 12:12 am

It’s only been a month since the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, declared that the ‘era of culture wars is…

We’ve forgotten how to say ‘no’

30 July 2024 11:23 pm

It has been widely observed that we live in a society marked by cancellation, censorship and cowardice in the face…

How to tell the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia

30 June 2024 4:00 pm

With England playing Slovakia in the Euros later today, there’s absolutely no excuse this time for Anglophones to confuse this…

Let’s take no lectures from Emma Thompson on the climate

24 June 2024 8:29 pm

The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that…

How a dead French poet helped the Allies to victory on D-Day

6 June 2024 3:30 pm

D Day, 6 June, 1944, saw put into action one of the most unlikely alliances in the history of warfare:…

Gary Lineker and the problem with celebrity boycotts

3 June 2024 3:26 am

One of the country’s most cherished footballers, and one of its most irritating right-on social media commentators, Gary Lineker, has…

Why we need the word ‘woke’

31 May 2024 9:50 pm

Has the word ‘woke’ become a lazy, all-too-common cliché? The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver thinks so. During an appearance at…

Why is it acceptable to mock the working class?

23 May 2024 12:18 am

You may laugh. You may have gasped in disbelief. But yes, it’s true, we now have a new socio-economic classification,…

The delusion of the pro-Palestinian campus protestors

8 May 2024 3:30 pm

Much has been made in recent weeks, and especially in recent days, about the degrees of ignorance often displayed by…

Did Stephen Fry join the Garrick by mistake?

3 May 2024 8:03 pm

The battle over sexism and equality at the Garrick Club continues to rumble on. It was revealed yesterday that several of its members, including Stephen Fry, Sting,…

Why the smoking ban exposes the ‘right side of history’ delusion

19 April 2024 4:00 pm

As a conservative non-smoker who in his youth was a libertarian twenty-a-day man, I can see both sides of the…

Why is the civil service being given lessons on ‘microaggressions’?

2 February 2024 12:35 am

Civil servants are being given lessons instructing them not to roll their eyes or look at their mobile phones while…

Why do the French struggle to speak English?

16 January 2024 4:00 am

Why are the French so bad at learning foreign languages? Yes, you read that right. This isn’t a lament as…

Is the business world sane again?

28 October 2023 4:36 am

There are signs that woke capitalism is on the way out. Unilever, purveyor of the most right-on brand of the…

The problem with the word ‘problematic’

9 July 2023 4:00 pm

There have been groans of derision following the proclamation by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterell, that the opening lines…

Trans ideology and the triumph of feelings over fact

2 June 2023 8:03 pm

Most people who have been following the controversy over Kathleen Stock’s speech at the Oxford Union, and who have been…

Let’s stop pretending the culture wars aren’t real

15 May 2023 6:55 pm

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they’re an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real,…

Can under-25s be trusted?

29 April 2023 2:10 am

The government’s proposal to overhaul and tighten betting laws, ostensibly to target problem gamblers, has understandably raised concerns about government…

Will eco-activists disrupt the London Marathon?

23 April 2023 3:08 am

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the…