Columns

Don’t write off literary fiction yet

22 March 2025 9:00 am

I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good…

The shape-shifting Labour party

22 March 2025 9:00 am

It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political…

Inside Team Kemi’s plan for power

22 March 2025 9:00 am

In elections, as in wine, lesser years can still produce good vintages. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown first won their…

Something is rotten in Stratford-upon-Avon

22 March 2025 9:00 am

Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta.…

The cat that tamed Dom

15 March 2025 9:00 am

I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke…

Why Nigel should listen to Rupert

15 March 2025 9:00 am

I was thinking lately of Robert Kilroy-Silk. For younger readers, and people who were never students or unemployed, a quick…

How to reform Reform

15 March 2025 9:00 am

In early June last year I had a reasonably agreeable meal with a bunch of Reform UK activists at a…

Starmer’s tribes are at war

15 March 2025 9:00 am

Labour MPs these days are experiencing whiplash. When in opposition, the party attacked the Tories’ proposed benefits cuts for ‘effectively…

Trump wants Putin to win

15 March 2025 9:00 am

It is meet, right and our bounden duty to begin any column about Ukraine with a vigorous expression of the…

The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine

8 March 2025 9:00 am

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right –…

Starmer is the unlikely hero of the hour. Can it last?

8 March 2025 9:00 am

When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed…

I’m a culture war addict

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’,…

The weakness of Donald Trump

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere…

The reformation of the Labour party

1 March 2025 9:00 am

The world order has shifted on its axis, having been given a peremptory boot by the US President. What is…

A trap for the right

1 March 2025 9:00 am

On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of…

What Europe gets wrong about the far right

1 March 2025 9:00 am

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them…

The engagement vs isolation debate returns

1 March 2025 9:00 am

British foreign policy has always oscillated between isolation and engagement. The division has shaped Conservative thinking over generations. The archetypal…

Who’d dare join the SAS now?

1 March 2025 9:00 am

We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for…

Starmer’s Scottish headache

22 February 2025 9:00 am

What does a party get after nearly two decades in office, collapsing public services, an internal civil war and a…

It’s time to scrap the asylum system

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t…

Keep Britain blasphemous

22 February 2025 9:00 am

In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK.…

J.D. Vance didn’t go far enough on Europe

22 February 2025 9:00 am

In January last year the European Union revealed that it had dreamed up a ‘secret plan’ to sabotage the economy…

Je suis Andrew Gwynne

15 February 2025 9:00 am

How do you like your members of parliament? Do you prefer them to be vacuous automatons devoid of wit, humour…

Would Margaret Thatcher have joined Reform?

15 February 2025 9:00 am

It is 50 years since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader and at this week’s shadow cabinet meeting, Lord Forsyth…

Pride in Britain? It’s history

15 February 2025 9:00 am

A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to…