Columnists
Does the doctor really need to see you now?
Only later, perhaps even a decade later, as the pandemic of 2020-22 shrinks in our rear-view mirror, may we be…
My conflicted loyalty to Newcastle United
The second thing I learned about football, after moving to London, is that you can never, ever switch your allegiance.…
My COP26 message: pay more dividends to save the planet
Climate emergency demands action, not rhetoric. So, on the eve of COP26, which UK news item promises to deliver the…
What this Budget tells us
The Budget and the spending review gave the clearest indication yet of what the post-Covid government might look like. During…
Who owns the language?
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of…
Could a truthful Clinton have saved the US?
What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because…
The Spectator’s Notes
When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war…
Brace for pain: Danny’s recession forecast might not be so wacko
Does the economist David Blanchflower — who I described as the Bank of England’s ‘resident wacko’ during his 2006-09 tenure…
The dangers of being trans-gressive
I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights…
The Spectator’s Notes
Rarely does a piece of journalism bring a tear to my normally cynical eye, but I did find this happening…
An idea whose time has come – at last
Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with…
The problem with ‘David’s law’
Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments,…
The ideology of madness
On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for…
The dangers of a Covid state of mind
Covid transformed the role of the state. During the pandemic, the government did things it would never normally even contemplate.…
The sultans of sulk
Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political…
Why we should all start hoarding cash and loo rolls
If there’s anyone in Britain who knows how to keep grocery shelves stacked, it’s former Tesco chief executive Sir Dave…
The pandemic has made cynics of us all
A report by MPs into the spread of the coronavirus has concluded that the government’s approach constituted one of this…
Israel has been spared Sally Rooney
I have not watched the BBC’s new period drama Ridley Road because I knew it would be impossible for the…
Blame it all on the middle-class drug users
We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when…
E-everything is heading your way
Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller…
Tory ministers, not business leaders, were drunk on cheap labour
‘Blame it all on business’ was the Tory strategists’ answer to petrol queues and the risk of a no-turkey Christmas…
Boris offers a hostage to fortune
Most prime ministers would be worried about supply chain shortages. But as became increasingly clear at the Tory party conference…
We should never have been in Afghanistan
Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In…
Business rates reform: for once, a useful Labour idea
A worthwhile policy proposal amid the Labour conference dogfight? Now there’s a surprise. But shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s scheme to…
Labour has gone back to 1983
One day quite soon someone at a petrol pump is going to get a tyre iron wrapped around their head.…
