Columnists
A rate rise in November? After years of dithering, don’t bet on it
It is more than three years since Bank of England governor Mark Carney was accused by Labour MP and Treasury…
The Spectator’s notes
Sir David Norgrove, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), is an honourable man. When he publicly rebuked Boris…
Poor old Ron and Pen, just trying to help
Here’s the problem. An Asian bloke gets on to the Tube holding a bulging Lidl bag with wires sticking out…
Can anyone unite the Tory tribes?
One of the reasons that coalition governments are so unusual in Britain is that both main parties are coalitions themselves.…
An orchestrated race storm
A fascinating story has emerged from a north-western leftie quadrant of the United States: the sacking of British conductor Matthew…
The Spectator’s notes
Apologies for my absence from this column. My editors kindly let me get on with the final volume of my…
The City still leads the financial world but faces a fight on all fronts
Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the…
The African bush took me back to my boyhood
Entering the Bulawayo Club, you step out of the blinding African sunshine on that safe and friendly city’s wide streets,…
May’s exit strategy
Nearly all Tory MPs now agree Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister. She must get the party through…
Why English footballers are so useless
It is late in the evening. You’re in a bar. You’ve had quite a bit to drink but you are…
Ten years after the banking crisis began, the unfairness of its aftermath still stings
Arguably it was Robert Peston’s breathless reporting of trouble at Northern Rock on the evening of 13 September 2007 that…
The sinister power of family courts
It’s right that some children are taken into care. One case in point is that of Ayeeshia-Jayne Smith, the toddler…
Oh brave new gender-fluid world…
Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out…
May’s opponents are the mad and the bad
I first met Theresa May, or met her properly, way back in the last century. I’d been invited to speak…
Hurricane Harvey is bigger news than the bankers at Jackson Hole
In Houston last November I spent an evening at the city’s industrial-scale food bank, where I heard a presentation on…
Thanks to Diana, the royals are done for
We are approaching an important royal anniversary, which I trust will be marked with a display of the appropriate reverence…
The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker
Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green…
We’re losing the cat-and-mouse terror game
I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the…
The truth about Brexit? One professor’s guess is no better than another’s
Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to…
From ‘America first’ to ‘pragmatic realism’
So much for Donald J. Trump, ‘America first’ isolationist. Gone is the man who, as a civilian, repeatedly endorsed a…
Beware the back-cracker quacks of Harley Street
All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell…
Forget London’s ramshackle Garden Bridge: bring on Nine Elms-to-Pimlico instead
I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the…
The phoney Tory leadership war
When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a…
The hormone that makes you a liberal halfwit
People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn.…
In my other life, I’m a water engineer
Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with…
