Columnists
Nobody should be forced to shield
The best way (and with politicians sometimes the only way) to know whether people are aware they’ve made a mistake…
The Spectator’s Notes
Juan Carlos, ex-King of Spain, behaved foolishly in relation to money and sex, and so his decision to leave Spain…
The Catholic church’s cowardly betrayal
Of all the sad and surreal things to happen in the past few months, the Catholic church’s decision to abandon…
Can Boris avoid a winter lockdown?
As the government struggled on Saturday with the question of whether to impose a quarantine on those returning from Spain,…
The vulgarity of easy money: lessons from Malaysia’s mega-scandal
When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a…
The Spectator’s Notes
Although Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, is committed to openness, it is a struggle to get information out of…
Courting disaster
The case of Johnny Depp vs the Sun, heard over recent weeks at the High Court in London, certainly gives…
Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm
One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that…
Youthful mistakes
In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from…
Is it too late to jump on the gold bandwagon?
The price of gold has been rising since the earliest virus reports from China in December. Adherents regard it as…
The Spectator’s notes
I think Anne Applebaum is a friend of mine. I certainly hope so, since I have always admired her writing,…
Boris’s red wall problem
When Boris Johnson met with his cabinet in person for the first time in four months on Tuesday, his aim…
Open letters have become ransom notes
In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary…
Why should opinion matter more than science?
In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached…
The politics of mask-wearing
We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me.…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Just rejoice’, as Mrs Thatcher once said about something else. The government’s decision to debug our national security by getting…
Banning Huawei is right, but late – and bad for productivity
This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded…
The state of the Union
The greatest single danger to this government is the state of the Union. Prime ministers can survive many things, but…
My fears for my church have been realised
The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
The Spectator’s Notes
There are far more Chinese students in British universities than there are from the entire Commonwealth. Many universities have been…
No one loves a despot
Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last…
How the Spanish cover their faces, or don’t
We self-critical British should never forget that other nations are pretty crazy too. I write this from Andalusia, Spain; and…
Can the young avoid the Covid crash?
Coronavirus is deadlier for the old than the young. But for the young, it is economically devastating. A third of…
A bailout for the arts is good but reopening would have been better
The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a…
