Columnists
The quiet dignity of Angela Rayner
In those gentle days before internet pornography there was a book you could buy which listed the precise moment in…
My revised economic forecast: this sucker could go down
Anecdotes and statistics should never be confused, but let’s do just that to build a composite picture of today’s UK…
EU: normal disservice resumes
In the past few months, relations between the UK and the EU have been the best they have been since…
America has betrayed its young
Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully…
Have I cured my arachnophobia?
I’ve been an arachnophobe my whole life. I can’t remember a time when videos of spiders, or even photos or…
Memo to Elon Musk: Tesla matters more for civilisation than Twitter
I spent Easter agonising over whether to throw the considerable weight of this column behind Elon Musk’s maverick $43 billion…
Reasons not to be cheerful
Mid-term unpopularity is a given in British politics. Veterans from the Thatcher era like to joke that a government that…
My phone call with God
Got slightly wrecked over the bank holiday weekend and had hoped to kind of glide through the early part of…
The Spectator’s Notes
My friend, the novelist Alan Judd, emails with the right quotation for those who argue that Putin should be given…
Being reasonable isn’t easy
Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held…
The rise of the wimps
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
There’s no shelter from this storm
I was walking last week from Canary Wharf tube station to my flat in east London – not far, little…
Brave new world
Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis…
Something doesn’t add up
More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time.…
The Spectator’s Notes
The end of the Cold War was used by the victors to unite Germany. To balance this, Europhiles created a…
Rishi Sunak’s political naivety
Before the war in Ukraine, ministers and Tory MPs believed a fixedpenalty notice for the Prime Minister would mean the…
Why Rishi shouldn’t quit
Perhaps I should stress from the get-go that I do not know Rishi Sunak. So far as I know, we’ve…
Who can put the toothpaste of inflation back in its tube?
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index rose 13 per cent last month to stand a third higher…
Converting opinion
I see that on the issue of gay conversion therapy, the Prime Minister has been floating around all over the…
How to lose elections
I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject…
The kids aren’t all right – and the grown-ups are to blame
I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every…
The changing face of No. 10
David Canzini has made quite an impression since he joined No. 10 as the Prime Minister’s deputy chief of staff…
The Spectator’s Notes
Now that events in Ukraine are restoring a sense of proportion about the difference between aggressive autocracies and free countries,…
Market mischief and bad politicsmean business is never dull
Enough of stagflation forecasts, each more frightening than the last. Enough – for now – of energy policy sermons, as…
Why Y-fronts show that recession risks are rising
Should you happen to spot me these days lurking outside a Calvin Klein boutique, notebook in hand, I assure you…
