Columnists
Where have all the grown-ups gone?
Last week 100,000 civil servants from 124 government departments went on strike. This fact prompts a number of questions, not…
The art of losing
There’s a new default conversation for Tory MPs at any Westminster drinks party: is this 1992 or 1997? Is the…
When fantasy meets reality
Once upon a time, a fox with a large bushy tail and a disingenuous smile changed his name from Reynard…
The magnetic clumping of the Met police
I have a puzzle for the Metropolitan police – a mystery that only they can solve. Why, if the Met…
America’s colour blindness
How many black cops does it take to commit a racist hate crime? The latest correct answer is ‘five’. That’s…
Unilever’s next boss won’t put purpose before profit
Does a change of chief executive at Unilever, the British-based shampoo-to-Marmite multinational, signal the demise of the fashion for corporate…
Biden’s docudrama
If Britain’s great flaw is the class system, America’s might be its obsession with classifying official information. There’s a reason…
Tory quislings in the culture war
Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ should be removed from the music streaming network…
After the war in Ukraine
I awoke in the small hours last week and began worrying about the Ukraine war. A friend had earlier taken…
Pride comes before a fall
Hockey is one of those games, like lacrosse, that alters as it crosses the Atlantic. In Britain, if a man…
You can’t say that!
The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist,…
The Davos divide
What self-respecting political leader would be seen in Davos? The World Economic Forum has become synonymous with sybaritic technocracy –…
A heroine for our mad times
When the mist lifts and we can see clearly the carnage caused by the trans madness, and we blink and…
Democrat deficit
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two…
What Boris Johnson should do next
If you were rich, foreign and globally mobile, would you choose to move to the UK? The trend, it turns…
Everything in Britain is broken
It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have…
The Spectator’s Notes
The Duke of Sussex says that he and his wife can never return to live in the United Kingdom. They…
The Tories need a dividing line
When Rishi Sunak addressed his cabinet this week, he tried to strike an optimistic note. Despite Labour’s commanding poll lead,…
The clippings and sweepings of Soviet history
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything…
