Columnists
A moving experience from Paddington to Liverpool Street
It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense…
How far will house prices fall? Frankly, don’t ask me
‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of…
Bad songs for a good cause
Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during…
The Spectator’s Notes
Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might…
Boris’s fighting talk
Boris Johnson has never quite been able to decide whether he wants to be a great unifier or a great…
The dishonesty of our age
It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…
The madness of ‘emotional support animals’
Sometimes an event or a phenomenon is so perplexing and so terrible that it’s best not to deal with it…
Britain’s national character flaws
Before we start, let’s firmly establish my long-standing affection for the United Kingdom. Why, some of my best friends are…
Haldane would have been a smarter inflation fighter than Bailey
Would Andy Haldane, the economist who left the Bank of England to run the Royal Society of Arts, have made…
Auntie’s issues
At long last the state of Oregon has got around to installing tampon machines in the male lavatories of its…
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…
