Columnists
Go naked on the green mountain
The Japanese take a near-obsessive delight in washing, particularly in natural thermal baths
Brexit can strengthen the Union
There will be no chance of the United Kingdom making a success of Brexit if Scotland votes to break up…
The young oppress their future selves
Matt Ridley’s fine recent Times column was hardly the first to raise the alarm about the pseudo-Soviet intolerance of the…
Are we really half a trillion poorer? No, but we’re not pulling in investors like we used to
How did we mislay half a trillion pounds? Revised data from the Office for National Statistics has just reduced the…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Persecuted and Forgotten?’ is the name of the latest report by Aid to the Church in Need. Unfortunately, there is…
The bank that keeps poor nations poor
What is the point of the World Bank? You probably think of it, if at all, as a benign institution,…
That idiot Trump has got one thing right
I have been watching Donald Trump closely for more than a year and I have come to the considered opinion…
Calling Paddock a ‘lone wolf’ isn’t racist
It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting…
Why May must stay
As from the Manchester conference hall I watched Theresa May’s big moment falling apart, as I buried my head in…
Bombardier says more about aircraft makers’ dirty tricks than the future of UK-US trade
‘Bombardier exposes post-Brexit realities’ was the FT’s headline after the Trump administration imposed a 300 per cent tariff on sales…
The Spectator’s notes
The Catalan nationalists surely chose this October deliberately for their attempt, now faltering, at UDI. It is the centenary of…
The plots thicken
‘Worst week ever’ is one of those phrases that journalists are, perhaps, too quick to use. Alastair Campbell once quipped…
Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe
A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious…
Monarch was an airline from an earlier era – but were its owners to blame for its demise?
Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined…
If only the Tories understood economics
‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And…
The Conservatives admit they have a problem – but can they solve it?
For those who don’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, the Tory conference was half encouraging and half depressing.…
The media is paying too much homage to Catalonia
However much we try — and lots of us don’t — we fall for the power of the photo-image. So…
The Spectator’s Notes
However much we try — and lots of us don’t — we fall for the power of the photo-image. So…
Gentrification is far from our biggest problem
The late afternoon sun fell on the anomalous pine trees of Gillett Square, London N16, and on the wooden decking…
Uber was the ugly snowplough that cleared the path but its dominance is bound to fade
An Uber insider tells me not to write off the ride-hailing giant too soon, because it’s a very smart company…
At last! The subversion of Brexit has begun
The Brexit crowd are right to smell a rat. In any great national debate a columnist may feel tempted to…
The dwarves of death who control your TV
My own fault, I suppose, for turning on the television. Not an action I undertake very regularly these days, because…
The Spectator’s Notes
You can see why Theresa May said in Florence that the British wished the European Union well in its plans…
At this rate, we’ll have to rename New York
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier…
Accept this as the new normal? Never
Not long after the Parsons Green Tube bombing, another of those viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-terror cartoons started doing the rounds. It was…
