Columnists
The Spectator’s Notes
When I was a lobby journalist, I never went to the State Opening of Parliament. I much regret it, because…
How to handle the next pandemic
There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally…
What gets lost amid silly scandals
I wonder if we will ever be able to resist fixing the suffix ‘gate’ to the end of any not-yet-sufficiently-salacious…
The losing game
When David Cameron was prime minister, the Tories flirted with the idea of a Queen’s Speech with no bills in…
The Spectator’s Notes
As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US…
Will Putin go nuclear?
A ghastly tragedy Ukraine may well be, but it is coming to the rescue of a number of British Conservative…
No, BP’s profit hasn’t boosted Starmer’s windfall-tax call
BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct…
How fact killed my belief in forensics
I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each…
Abortion is still one of the great moral issues
There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is…
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…
