Columnists
The good guys have lost
There was much rejoicing among Britain’s Islamists last week when the thinktank and campaigning organisation Quilliam announced that it was…
Spring at last – but who’d want to own a giant shopping mall?
Retail footfall will be the first measure of recovery this spring. Everywhere I look, from central London to small-town Yorkshire,…
Can Boris beat the vaccine passport rebels?
No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons.…
The Spectator’s Notes
On Grand National Day at Aintree this Saturday, the Rose Paterson Trust will be launched. This time last year, Rose…
Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?
In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s…
Was Deliveroo the most embarrassing flop in City history?
The market emphatically endorsed my negative opinion of the Deliveroo share offer, which bombed from its offer price of 390p…
The libertarian case for vaccine passports
In principle I’m in favour of vaccination passports, and don’t understand how — again in principle — anyone could be…
The dilemma of vaccination
We have a government which is basically libertarian in its instincts, despite its current affection for telling us what we…
Why will nobody publish my cartoons?
I am having very little success in getting my collection of cartoons of great religious founders published. Perhaps it is…
Enterprise and teamwork, not greed, delivered the vaccines
‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism — because of greed, my friends.’ So Boris Johnson…
The redemption of Flannery O’Connor
I have a thought for the students of Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland: this Easter, why not resurrect Flannery O’Connor?…
Normal life matters
I wonder exactly when we agreed that it is more of a priority to gather with strangers than to meet…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Interior silence’ is not a phrase I associate with Sarah Sands, until recently the editor of the BBC Today programme…
The double-decker in the room
‘If anybody can write an interesting column about buses, Matthew,’ the then comment editor on the Times told me decades…
The Spectator’s Notes
As the former editor of a Sunday newspaper, I know their front pages can be rather confected. There is sometimes…
Making the facts fit the narrative
Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s…
The chips are down for a new era of fractured trade
Just as the auto industry embraces the electric future I wrote about last month, it hits a new crisis: a…
Eight reasons to leave the UK
We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled…
Sturgeon fights on – but time is against her
A year ago this week Alex Salmond was acquitted on all 13 charges in his sexual assault trial. In normal…
This tangled tale of Greensill and Gupta may hide systemic dangers
Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away —…
The Spectator’s Notes
The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the…
The C of E’s new religion
With a heavy heart I must return once more to the subject of the Church of England. I recognise that…
The politicisation of Sarah Everard’s death
A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a…
Europe’s reckless caution
The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab…
How to kill the English language
Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the…
