Columnists
The importance of Gavin Williamson
When Boris Johnson tried to call a general election in September last year, everyone around him assumed that Jeremy Corbyn…
Oxford circus
If you’re looking for a sign of the academic times, you could do worse than consider the image, published in…
What really makes people fat
In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight…
The Spectator’s Notes
Amid all the puzzlement and recrimination about why the government got into this mess about A-level and GCSE results, one…
Ill-received pronunciation
Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…
At last, boardroom pay starts to swing away from blatant excess
At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries…
The Spectator’s notes
Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting…
There’s nothing ‘wild’ about elopement
I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…
The inflated currency of racism
Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get…
Kamala chameleon
Kamala Harris, the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, certainly looks the part. Barack Obama once called her ‘the best-looking attorney general…
Could the next Lib Dem leader help Labour?
When Dominic Cummings addressed government advisers recently, he said that he was so out of touch with day-to-day politics that…
How will we handle the next contagion?
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
BP, Amazon and airlines light different paths to survival
We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about…
Who cares about reality?
Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which…
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,…
