Columns
Trump should ditch the faux concern for the people of Iran
Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers…
Keir Starmer has surrendered to Ed Miliband – and we are all paying the price
Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a…
The glaring flaw in Keir Starmer’s ‘cohesion plan’
On the way back home down Mile End Road, I stopped for a cup of tea in a nice-looking café.…
The latest Guardian attack on Nigel Farage is desperate stuff
Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard…
Can the special relationship survive Trump?
Since this calamitous Iran war began, there’s been endless talk in Britain about our ‘special relationship’ (often capitalised) with the…
David Lammy’s depraved new world
Beamish, the living history museum in County Durham, invites visitors to ‘step into the past’. It shows how people lived…
Has Reform peaked?
Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from…
Why is the ‘gay press’ so cowardly on Iran?
Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among…
Another interview goes awry…
Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took…
Could Labour lose London?
After Gorton and Denton, where next? The scale of the Green triumph in Manchester has sent shockwaves through Sir Keir…
Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?
The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran,…
If only Britain was as important as Iran thinks we are
I am becoming rather fond of Prime Minister Starmer’s major foreign policy announcements. In early January, after US forces swooped…
Is this Starmer’s finest hour?
A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She…
Screens in schools have been a catastrophic failure
About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and…
The homoeroticism of looksmaxxing
‘Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking?’ So asks Derek…
Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?
The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton…
Has it all gone wrong between Trump and Starmer?
‘The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,’ a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected…
My night at the Baftas
Sometimes things work out much better than one could have imagined, as if God, looking down, had decided that for…
The real reason I left Britain
This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re…
My Epstein confession
Is this Britain, 2026, or Spain, 1478? Our era begins to feel horribly like the latter. So, as the flames…
Don’t underestimate the ‘stop Farage’ alliance
So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls And made its coward vote and the streets resounded To the…
The thinking behind Nigel Farage’s shadow cabinet
There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?……
Britain’s right is falling into the same trap as the left
As I have suggested here before, there are few joys in life equal to that of watching the left fall…
What would Kenneth Williams make of our age?
Sunday marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Kenneth Williams. It’s tempting to try to imagine what he…
To understand pure stupidity, watch The News Agents
There have been numerous surveys over the years intended to prove that conservatives are more stupid than liberals and vice…
